May, 26 2023, 01:38pm EDT
Patriotic Millionaires Slam Biden, GOP on Rollback of IRS Funding in Pending Debt Limit Deal
"This deal proves that the one thing the modern GOP cares about more than anything else is making sure rich people don’t have to pay taxes."
Yesterday, reports emerged that President Biden may agree to roll back $10 billion in IRS funding as part of a deal with Republicans to raise the debt limit.
In response, Morris Pearl, the Chair of the Patriotic Millionaires and a former managing director at BlackRock, Inc., released the following statement:
"A debt ceiling agreement that cuts IRS funding would be an embarrassing disgrace for both the GOP and President Biden.
House Republicans have been holding the global economy hostage because they claim that the federal debt is too big. But at the first opportunity, they are happy to scrap most of their cuts to limit the ability of the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats, a move that would actually increase the debt by $120 billion.
The mask is off. This deal proves that the one thing the modern GOP cares about more than anything else is making sure rich people don’t have to pay taxes.
But we can’t blame the GOP for the fact that President Biden put this on the table in the first place. As Biden himself said many times, the agency desperately needs these funds to crack down on wealthy tax cheats and ensure that rich people start paying what we rightfully owe the country in taxes.
Biden shouldn’t be negotiating with McCarthy and his cronies in the first place over paying for things that we’ve already bought in the budget that was approved last year – you cannot negotiate with economic terrorists. To give into their demands over IRS funding at the eleventh hour is simply beyond the pale.
There is still time, albeit not much, for Biden to come to his senses and back out of this disgraceful IRS rollback. Agreeing to IRS funding cuts as a bargaining chip in debt ceiling negotiations would be an enormous stain on Biden’s legacy. If he wants to protect his reputation and our country, he should refuse to budge an inch on the debt ceiling and use his constitutional authority under the 14th Amendment to bypass this entire manufactured crisis."
The Patriotic Millionaires is a group of high-net worth Americans who share a profound concern about the destabilizing level of inequality in America. Our work centers on the two things that matter most in a capitalist democracy: power and money. Our goal is to ensure that the country's political economy is structured to meet the needs of regular Americans, rather than just millionaires. We focus on three "first" principles: a highly progressive tax system, a livable minimum wage, and equal political representation for all citizens.
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77 House Dems Call for 'Full Assessment' of Israeli Compliance With US Law
Lawmakers told the Biden administration they are "deeply troubled by the continued level of civilian casualties and humanitarian suffering in Gaza."
Dec 13, 2024
As Israel continues to decimate the Gaza Strip with American weapons, 77 Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives this week demanded that the Biden administration "provide a full assessment of the status of Israel's compliance with all relevant U.S. policies and laws, including National Security Memorandum 20 (NSM-20) and Section 620I of the Foreign Assistance Act."
Reps. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), Madeleine Dean (D-Pa.), and Chrissy Houlahan (D-Pa.) spearheaded the Thursday letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, with less than six weeks left in President Joe Biden's term.
Since Biden issued NSM-20 in February, his administration has repeatedly accepted the Israel government's assurances about the use of U.S. weapons, despite reports from journalists and human rights groups about how they have helped Israeli forces slaughter at least 44,875 Palestinians and injure another 106,454 people in the besieged enclave over the past 14 months.
"Our concerns remain urgent and largely unresolved, including arbitrary restrictions on humanitarian aid and insufficient delivery routes."
House Democrats' letter begins by declaring support for "Israel's right to self-defense," denouncing the Hamas-led October 2023 attack, and endorsing the Biden administration's efforts "to broker a bilateral cease-fire that includes the release of hostages," noting the deal recently negotiated for the Israeli government and the Lebanese group Hezbollah.
"Further, we condemn the unprecedented Iranian attacks against Israel launched on April 13, 2024, and October 1, 2024," the letter states, declining to mention the Israeli actions that led to those responses. "We must continue to avoid a major regional conflict—and we welcome the concerted diplomatic efforts by the U.S. and our allies to prevent further escalation."
"We are also deeply troubled by the continued level of civilian casualties and humanitarian suffering in Gaza," the lawmakers wrote, citing the administration's October 13 letter imposing a 30-day deadline for Israel to improve humanitarian conditions in Palestinian territory. "That deadline has expired, and while some progress has been made, we believe the Israeli government has not yet fulfilled the requirements outlined in your letter."
Asked during a November 12 press conference if the Israeli government has met the administration's demands, State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said that "we have not made an assessment that they are in violation of U.S. law."
Shortly after that, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) forced votes on resolutions to block the sale of 120mm tank rounds, 120mm high-explosive mortar rounds, and Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs) to Israel, but they didn't pass.
Progressives and Democrats in Congress have been sounding the alarm about U.S. government complicity in Israel's armed assault and starvation campaign—which have led to an ongoing genocide case at the International Court of Justice—to varying degrees since October 2023, including with a May letter led by Crow and Rep. Chris Deluzio (D-Pa.) and signed by 85 others.
Citing that letter on Thursday, the 77 House Democrats wrote that "our concerns remain urgent and largely unresolved, including arbitrary restrictions on humanitarian aid and insufficient delivery routes, among others. As a result, Gaza's civilian population is facing dire famine."
"We believe further administrative action must be taken to ensure Israel upholds the assurances it provided in March 2024 to facilitate, and not directly or indirectly obstruct, U.S. humanitarian assistance," the letter concludes. "We remain committed to a negotiated solution that can bring an end to the fighting, free the remaining hostages, surge humanitarian aid, and lay the groundwork to rebuild Gaza with a legitimate Palestinian governing body. We thank you and the administration for its ongoing work to achieve those shared goals."
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IDF Gaza Bombing 'By Far the Most Intense, Destructive, and Fatal' Airwars Has Analyzed
"Save this for the next time you hear that the Israeli military does everything possible to avoid harming civilians, and that the level of civilian harm in Gaza is less than other comparable conflicts," said one advocate.
Dec 13, 2024
The world's foremost monitor of civilian harm caused by aerial bombardment published a report Thursday calling the first 25 days of Israel's ongoing U.S.-backed annihilation of Gaza the worst assault on noncombatants it has ever seen.
U.K.-based Airwars—which over its decadelong existence has meticulously and painstakingly documented civilian casualties in various campaigns of the U.S.-led so-called War on Terror, Russia's bombing of Ukraine and Syria, Turkish attacks on Syria and Iraq, and other conflicts—published a "patterns of harm analysis" examining the first few weeks of Israel's retaliatory assault on Gaza following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.
"By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign," Airwars said in a summary of the report. "It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented."
Key findings include:
- At least 5,139 civilians were killed in Gaza in 25 days in October 2023, nearly four times more civilians reported killed in a single month than in any conflict Airwars has documented since it was established in 2014;
- In October 2023 alone, Airwars documented at least 65 incidents in which a minimum of 20 civilians were killed in a particular incident, nearly triple the number of such high-fatality incidents that Airwars has documented within any comparable timeframe;
- Over the course of 25 days, Airwars recorded a minimum of 1,900 children killed by Israeli military action in Gaza, nearly seven times higher than even the most deadly month for children previously recorded by Airwars;
- Families were killed together in unprecedented numbers, and in their homes, with more than 9 out of 10 women and children killed in residential buildings; and
- On average, when civilians were killed alongside family members, at least 15 family members were killed—higher than any other conflict documented by Airwars.
"The international community has raised grave concern about Israeli military practice and the unprecedented scale of civilian harm," the report notes. "The United Nations has repeatedly warned that Israel is breaching international law and even United States President Joe Biden, a staunch ally of Israel, eventually labeled the military response 'over the top.' In January 2024, South Africa brought a claim of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice."
As of Friday, Gaza officials say that at least 44,875 Palestinians have been killed and 106,464 have been wounded in Gaza. At least 11,000 others are missing and believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings.
Throughout the new report, Airwars compares Israel's bombardment of Gaza to two other campaigns it has extensively analyzed, the battles for Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria during the U.S.-led coalition war against the so-called Islamic State. Airwars concluded that more Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli forces during the first 25 days of the Gaza campaign than were slain in Raqqa during the entire four-month period studied and the deadliest month in Mosul—combined.
The report also pushes back on claims that Israel "does everything possible to avoid harming civilians," and that "the level of civilian harm in Gaza is broadly consistent with, and even favorable to, other comparable conflicts in recent decades."
Save this for the next time you hear that the Israeli military does everything possible to avoid harming civilians, and that the level of civilian harm in Gaza is less that other comparable conflicts… gaza-patterns-harm.airwars.org
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— Huwaida Arraf (@huwaida.bsky.social) December 13, 2024 at 9:27 AM
"The manner in which Israel has conducted the war in Gaza may signal the development of a concerning new norm: a way of conducting air campaigns with a greater frequency of strikes, a greater intensity of damage, and a higher threshold of acceptance for civilian harm than ever seen before," the authors wrote.
Airwars leaves readers with the ominous prospect that, while it is "expecting the overall trends to remain, magnitudes of difference—where measures of civilian harm in Gaza outpace those from previously documented conflicts—are expected to grow."
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Tech Billionaires Get in Line to Support Trump Inauguration Fund
"President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Dec 13, 2024
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman became the latest tech titan to make an explicit overture to U.S. President-elect Donald Trump when he confirmed Friday that he intends to make a $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund.
The news comes after Meta confirmed Wednesday that it has donated $1 million to the fund, and it was reported Thursday that Amazon intends to make a $1 million donation. The Washington Postcharacterized Altman's move as "the latest attempt to gain favor from a leading technology executive in an industry that has long been a target of Trump's vitriol."
Altman said in a statement that was sent to multiple outlets that "President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead."
The donation from Meta follows a trip by Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg down to Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club to meet with the president-elect last month. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's executive chairman, is slated to head to Florida to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago next week, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Zuckerberg and Trump have not always been on the best of terms—Meta temporarily booted Trump from Instagram and Facebook following his comments regarding the January 6 insurrection, and Trump threatened Zuckerberg with lifetime incarceration if Trump perceived that Zuckerberg was interfering in the 2024 election—but Zuckerberg made entreaties to the then-candidate this past summer when he described Trump's response to his assassination attempt as "badass."
Zuckerberg and Meta refrained from donating to Trump's inauguration fund in 2017, and to President Joe Biden's inauguration fund in 2021, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In response to the news that Meta donated to Trump's inauguration fund this time, the watchdog group Public Citizen wrote: "Shocker! Another tech bro billionaire trying to buy his way into Trump's good graces. Zuckerberg donated $1 million to Trump's inaugural fund. $1 million to the man who threatened Zuckerberg with life in prison. Grow a spine."
Journalists Mehdi Hasan described the move as "bending both knees to Trump."
Bezos also chafed against Trump during his first presidency. Trump has repeatedly criticized The Washington Post, which is owned by Bezos, for its coverage of him. In legal proceedings, Amazon also accused Trump of swaying the bidding process when the Pentagon chose Microsoft over Amazon for a lucrative contract because of Trump's disdain for Bezos. However, in a move that was viewed as a signal to Trump, Bezos blocked the Post from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris just before last month's election.
Margaret O'Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who focuses on the high-tech economy, said during an interview with NPR the fact that support for Trump isn't happening quietly "is something new."
"It's just a recognition that there's not much to be gained in outspoken opposition, but perhaps there is something to be gained by being very clear about your support and hope that Trump does well," she said.
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