March, 31 2021, 12:00am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Olivia Alperstein, Media Manager, Institute for Policy Studies, olivia@ips-dc.org
Progressives Groups to Biden and Congress: Go Bolder, Go Faster
The American Rescue Plan is a powerful response to the immediate needs of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, to ensure a just and equitable recovery and to build the kind of economy that serves the people in it, we call on President Biden and Congress to draft and pass a Build Back Better package that meets the massive challenges facing our nation.
WASHINGTON
The American Rescue Plan is a powerful response to the immediate needs of the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, to ensure a just and equitable recovery and to build the kind of economy that serves the people in it, we call on President Biden and Congress to draft and pass a Build Back Better package that meets the massive challenges facing our nation.
We need bold legislation to fix our crumbling physical infrastructure and deeply inadequate care infrastructure, and address the long-term crises of poverty, climate change, and inequities rooted in systemic racism. The Build Back Better package must address pressing social challenges, ensure that there are high-quality jobs throughout the economy, and provide a better and fairer society. Low-wage workers, women, immigrants, and Black and Brown communities have been hardest hit by the pandemic. As the nation recovers, the benefits of this package must be targeted in such a way that it generates greater equity in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, immigration status, and zip code.
To achieve these goals, the Build Back Better package must be adequate in size and scope. A $3 trillion package is a step towards meeting our immediate physical infrastructure needs alone. But even addressing a robust subset of our pressing challenges would take substantially more. For example, to tackle the climate crisis; restructure the care economy; make college available to all; and modernize our unemployment insurance system would take a package two times as large. Meeting other crucial goals like advancing towards universal health care; monitoring the economic and public health of all the nation's people; creating a pathway to citizenship for essential workers and their families, young immigrants, and TPS holders; and ending poverty--to build a truly inclusive economy from the bottom up--would need an investment on the order of $10 trillion over the next 10 years, along with key changes in regulations and other rules governing economic life. These changes will not only help our nation recover but also lead to dignified jobs and long-term shared prosperity. Lawmakers can sustain these transformational changes into the future by ensuring that wealthy individuals and corporations pay their fair share in taxes and by reducing prescription drug prices.
The scale of legislation that we recommend is economically sound and procedurally achievable. These policies are overwhelmingly popular. Their enactment is simply a matter of political will.
Families and communities have waited long enough. Congress passed the American Rescue Plan Act within the first 50 days of the Biden Administration. We urge Congress and the Administration to bring the same ambition and urgency to this effort, with passage of a transformative Build Back Better bill before the August recess.
"The compounding crises our country faces--extreme poverty, emboldened white supremacy, and the climate crisis--demonstrate the need for President Biden and Congress to go bold and go fast," said Matt Hayward, Legislative Affairs Director at the Congressional Progressive Caucus Center. "The priorities that the President is laying out today begin the process of building back from this crisis, but don't go nearly far enough. Our families and communities need and deserve so much more, and they need it now."
"We can't remain stuck in the paradigms of the past--the challenges working families face today are too great," said Deepak Bhargava policy expert and professor at CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. "The Build Back Better package must be both big to meet the scale of the economic crisis we face, and equitable to redress the disproportionate harms of economic inequality on communities of color, immigrants and women."
"The boldness of what we are proposing is the only way to tackle the interconnected crises of climate, care, a crumbling infrastructure, and the desperate need for quality jobs, and we can pay for much of it through fair taxes that also stem the excessive inequality that is eating away at our democracy," said John Cavanagh, Director of the Institute for Policy Studies.
Original Signatories
Congressional Progressive Caucus Center
Institute for Policy Studies
Alliance for Quality Education
Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)
Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO
BOLD ReThink
Center for LGBTQ Economic Advancement & Research (CLEAR)
Center for Popular Democracy
Chicago Foundation for Women
Common Defense
Community Health Councils
Demos
Early Care & Education Pathways To Success (ECEPTS)
Earthworks
Family Values @ Work
Friends of the Earth U.S.
Green New Deal Network
HBCU Collective
Indivisible
Insight Center
Institute For Women's Policy Research
Jobs With Justice
Keystone Progress
Labor Network for Sustainability
Legal Aid at Work
MomsRising
MoveOn
National Association of Social Workers
National Korean American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC)
National Network of Arab American Communities (NNAAC)
National Partnership for Women & Families
Open Society Policy Center
Parent Voices CA
People's Action
Rights & Democracy
Service Employees International Union
Supermajority
Voices for Progress
Take On Wall Street
The Century Foundation
Women and Girls Foundation of Southwest PA
Working Families Party
Young Invincibles
Institute for Policy Studies turns Ideas into Action for Peace, Justice and the Environment. We strengthen social movements with independent research, visionary thinking, and links to the grassroots, scholars and elected officials. I.F. Stone once called IPS "the think tank for the rest of us." Since 1963, we have empowered people to build healthy and democratic societies in communities, the US, and the world. Click here to learn more, or read the latest below.
LATEST NEWS
Record 76 Million Internally Displaced in 2023, Largely Due to Violence
"We have never, ever recorded so many people forced away from their homes and communities," one expert said. "It is a damning verdict on the failures of conflict prevention and peacemaking."
May 14, 2024
War, conflict, and environmental disasters displaced a record 75.9 million people from their homes at the end of 2023, the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center reported Tuesday.
The vast majority of the displaced—68.3 million—were forced from their homes due to conflicts, the highest number since data became available 15 years ago.
"Millions of families are having their lives torn apart by conflict and violence," Jan Egeland, secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council—which houses IDMC—said in a statement. "We have never, ever recorded so many people forced away from their homes and communities. It is a damning verdict on the failures of conflict prevention and peacemaking."
"This report is a stark reminder of the urgent and coordinated need to expand disaster risk reduction, support peacebuilding, ensure the protection of human rights, and, whenever possible, prevent the displacement before it happens."
The IDMC publishes its Global Report on Internal Displacement every year, which is considered the definitive source for data on internal displacements worldwide. This year's report notes that the number of people displaced within their own countries increased by 51% in the last five years while the number displaced by conflict alone swelled by 49%, spiking in 2022 and 2023. The uptick was primarily due to Russia's invasion of Ukraine as well as renewed or ongoing conflicts in Congo, Ethiopia, and Sudan.
"Over the past two years, we've seen alarming new levels of people having to flee their homes due to conflict and violence, even in regions where the trend had been improving," said IDMC director Alexandra Bilak. "Conflict, and the devastation it leaves behind, is keeping millions from re-building their lives, often for years on end."
In addition to tracking the number of displaced people, the IDMC also looked at the total number of new displacements in 2023. It recorded 46.9 million new movements—20.5 million due to war and conflict and 26.4 million due to natural disasters.
"As the planet grapples with conflicts and disasters, the staggering numbers of 47 million new internal displacements tells a harrowing tale," International Organization for Migration Deputy Director General Ugochi Daniels said in a statement. "This report is a stark reminder of the urgent and coordinated need to expand disaster risk reduction, support peacebuilding, ensure the protection of human rights, and, whenever possible, prevent the displacement before it happens."
Of the 20.5 million conflict-driven displacements last year, nearly two-thirds were due to violence in Sudan, Congo, and Palestine.
In Sudan, renewed hostilities between government and paramilitary forces ignited in April of last year, forcing 6 million new movements and leaving 9.1 million displaced.
"This figure is the highest ever reported for a single country globally since 2008," the report authors wrote.
All told, conflict forced 13.5 million displacements in sub-Saharan Africa, the highest number for the region in 15 years.
Nearly 17% of total conflict displacements in 2023 were forced in Gaza, even though Israel only began its war on the enclave during the last quarter of the year. Although it was only home to around 2.3 million people at the start of the war, Gaza saw 3.4 million displacements, as many people were forced to move multiple times.
"This figure should be considered conservative, because many people were displaced within governorates before moving across them, but such movements were unaccounted for," the report authors explained.
By the end of 2023, around 1.7 million people in Gaza—or 83% of the population— were displaced, "all of them facing acute humanitarian needs," the authors wrote.
The report also says that 7.7 million people were living outside their homes by the end of 2023 due to disasters such as extreme weather and geological events such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. The 26.4 million disaster-driven displacements were the third-highest amount in the last 10 years.
Displacing disasters in 2023 included climate change-fueled events like cyclone Freddy—which caused 1.4 million displacements in southeast Africa—and Canada's record wildfire season, which fueled 185,000 displacements, the highest number for Canada on record.
"No country is immune to disaster displacement," Bilak said. "But we can see a difference in how displacement affects people in countries that prepare and plan for its impacts and those that don't. Those that look at the data and make prevention, response, and long-term development plans that consider displacement fare far better."
Egeland called for more attention to the plight of displaced people after the initial trigger fades from the headlines.
"The suffering and the displacement last far beyond the news cycle," Egeland said. "Too often their fate ends up in silence and neglect. The lack of protection and assistance that millions endure cannot be allowed to continue."
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Veteran Human Rights Leader Has Seen Enough: Israel Perpetrating Genocide in Gaza
Israel's "sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory" pushed Human Rights Watch co-founder Aryeh Neier to view the assault on Gaza as a genocide.
May 14, 2024
A widely respected humanitarian law expert who has resisted using the term "genocide" for Israel's killing of tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza—a word used "sparingly" in the international human rights movement, he noted—said Tuesday that he has concluded a genocide is indeed taking place, evidenced particularly by Israel's blocking of humanitarian aid.
Aryeh Neier, who co-founded Human Rights Watch in 1978, served as its executive director for 12 years, and also led the American Civil Liberties Union and the Open Society Foundations, noted in an essay in The New York Review of Books that his organizations have used the term "genocide" to describe few mass killings.
Neier was not convinced of South Africa's genocide claim against Israel when it argued its case with the International Court of Justice in January, even though he was "deeply distressed" by the human impact of Israel's relentless U.S.-backed bombing campaign in Gaza.
The 2,000-pound bombs being used against Gaza's population of 2.3 million Palestinians were "clearly inappropriate," wrote Neier in the magazine's June 6 issue. "Yet I was not convinced that this constituted genocide."
Neier wrote that he believed at the time that Israel's retaliation against Hamas for the October 7 attack it led in southern Israel could "include an attempt to incapacitate" the Palestinian group, necessitating the wide-scale assault on Gaza, where it operates.
"I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza," wrote Neier, whose family escaped Nazi Germany as refugees when he was an infant. "What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory."
Israel's intent to block aid—and to treat Gazans as "collectively complicit for Hamas's crimes"—has been clear since shortly after the October 7 attack, when Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said: "There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we act accordingly."
"I am now persuaded that Israel is engaged in genocide against Palestinians in Gaza. What has changed my mind is its sustained policy of obstructing the movement of humanitarian assistance into the territory."
The result of that policy, wrote Neier, has been the deaths of at least 28 Palestinian children from starvation, according to numbers released by the Gaza Health Ministry in April.
"That number could multiply many times over if reports on food insecurity are valid," he wrote, citing warnings from U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Samantha Power and World Food Program Executive Director Cindy McCain that famine has already taken hold in parts of Gaza.
Under the "complete siege" ordered by Gallant and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, noted Neier, Israel has severely restricted the number of aid vehicles allowed into Gaza, where the population relied on deliveries from about 500 aid trucks per day before the current escalation. Trucks have been subjected to "time-consuming and onerous inspections," with shipments turned away for including items like children's medical scissors and maternity kits.
Neier also cited Israel's killing of more than 200 aid workers and its persuading of international donors to stop funding the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA)—based on unproven allegations that a dozen of its 13,000 Gaza-based staffers had connections to Hamas—as evidence that Israel is taking numerous steps to stop aid from getting to Gaza's starving population, while killing at least 35,173 Palestinians.
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in response to Neier's essay that "no one has more authority among human rights advocates than" the author.
"Aryeh Neier is an immensely respected—and not at all politically radical—figure in the human rights community who can't be credibly accused of having any sort of obsession with Israel," said writer Abe Silberstein.
Neier wrote that after working to protect human rights for more than six decades, "there is much about [Israel's attack on Gaza] that is deeply depressing, including how difficult it is to find a way to give victims any hope that justice will eventually be done."
"I myself hope that the frequent citation of international humanitarian law as the standard for judging the conflict will have a positive effect," he wrote. "Whatever else emerges from this war, and whatever judgment comes from the International Court of Justice (ICJ), it is evident that Israel has done itself as well as its Palestinian victims long-term harm."
The ICJ is currently considering South Africa's claim that Israel is committing genocide, having issued a preliminary ruling in January that the case was "plausible" and that Israel must take steps to prevent genocidal acts.
Although the ICJ does not have jurisdiction to adjudicate war crimes or crimes against humanity charges, wrote Neier, "if it ultimately finds that Israel has committed genocide, that will be a resounding defeat for a state that was born in the aftermath of a genocide that many of its founders had barely survived."
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A spokesperson for the American Economic Liberties Project called the CNBC host a "mouthpiece and cheerleader for monopolists across the economy."
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The American Economic Liberties Project on Monday called outCNBC's Jim Cramer for at least dozens of "hostile" televised attacks on Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and her "historic pro-working families record."
The left-leaning group has been compiling Cramer's "most egregious on-air outbursts" over Khan since early last year and its tracker now features more than 30 clips from "Mad Money" and "Squawk on the Street."
When President Joe Biden nominated Khan to lead the FTC in 2021, she was an associate professor of law at Columbia Law School who had previously worked for the Open Markets Institute, the office of former Commissioner Rohit Chopra, and the U.S. House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial, and Administrative Law.
As the clips collected by the project show, Cramer has described Khan as an "empty suit," "stupid," and a "total hack." The ex-hedge fund manager has also compared the agency leader's views to those of Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, and Don Quixote.
Cramer has called out specific FTC actions under Khan—repeatedly blasting a lawsuit against Amazon, a company founded by one of the richest persons on the planet—and broadly accused the "rogue" agency of "torturing all the companies that America likes."
When one of Cramer's colleagues pointed out last October that he has taken "every opportunity to just come back to Khan," he responded, "No, I've missed opportunities and I regret that."
The tracker page states that "if Cramer was accurately reporting what the FTC is doing, he would see that Chair Khan is pursuing a pro-business, pro-innovation, and pro-worker agenda. And he is capable of it: he did, for example, proclaim the FTC's case against Kroger-Albertsons to be strong."
Noting Cramer's praise for Jonathan Kanter, an assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice whom the host has called a "heavyweight" and "rigorous thinker," the page adds that "he is so blinded by his obsession of Chair Khan that he sometimes even rails against her for suits brought by the DOJ and forgets to give the Antitrust Division credit for its work."
American Economic Liberties Project spokesperson Jimmy Wyderko said in a statement Monday that "Jim Cramer's anger over the FTC's enforcement record has turned into a full-blown obsession, launching nearly weekly barbs at Chair Khan with the zeal of a carnival barker defending his turf."
"This has manifested on national cable news through a series of unhinged, incoherent, and often inaccurate rants from Jim Cramer attacking the FTC for standing up to big corporations and delivering kitchen table wins to working families," he continued.
"Given Jim Cramer's role as mouthpiece and cheerleader for monopolists across the economy, Chair Khan should consider his harassment a badge of honor," Wyderko added. "We hope to see Jim Cramer get over his fixation syndrome, which is evidently even starting to frustrate his colleagues, as soon as he is able."
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