Archives: Endorsements

Make the super-rich pay their fair share.

American billionaires are 33% richer than they were at the start of the pandemic, all while inequality has worsened and inflation has soared. Billionaires like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos pay a “true tax rate” of just 3% or less while working people around the globe pay far more.

Enough is enough. It’s time for the ultra-rich to pay their fair share of taxes.

Just a modest tax of up to 5 percent on the world’s richest individuals could bring in $1.7 trillion in a year, enough to lift 2 billion people out of poverty.

Sign your name and demand that President Biden, Congress, and world leaders address the inequality crisis globally and here at home by making multi-millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share of taxes.

 

Message to President Biden and Members of Congress:
The richest 1 percent globally have captured nearly two-thirds of all new wealth since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population. Billionaire fortunes are increasing by $2.7 billion a day while crushing inflation outpaces the wages of 1.7 billion workers.

Decades of tax cuts for the richest and corporations have fueled inequality, with the poorest people in many countries paying higher tax rates than billionaires. Oxfam is demanding wide-ranging increases in taxation of the super-rich, and we call on President Biden, Congress, and world governments to tax the extraordinary wealth of multi-millionaires and billionaires.

Increased taxes on the wealthiest individuals could lift people out of poverty, address the climate crisis, fund childcare, and create well-paying jobs.

We urge you to join Oxfam’s global community and make the ultra-rich pay their fair share of taxes.

Endorse here: https://www.oxfamamerica.org/take-action/action-alert-tax-the-rich/

END ALL WARFARE – NO SANCTIONS

 

The SanctionsKill Campaign is a broad coalition of social justice, solidarity, and peace forces focused on exposing the devastating impact of US sanctions on civilian populations globally.

Sanctions are not a substitute for war

The current regime of sanctions against Russia is not a substitute for war, but a form of warfare. Sanctions kill many thousands just as bombs do. Sanctions create hyperinflation, artificial famines, social upheavals, and health crises that punish civilian populations. As US President Biden said, the sanctions are intended “to inflict further pain.”

Sanctions are collective punishment and illegal under international law.

Nor are the sanctions by the US and its allies against Russia a deterrent to war. They will not reduce hostilities, but are an escalation of the current conflict.

Sanctions consolidate US dominance in Europe

Sanctions are being used to consolidate US dominance in the region, even though it is counter to the material interests of the European Union (EU) and the UK to cut economic ties with Moscow.

The growth in EU trade with Russia and China threatens the domination of US corporate power in Europe. The EU is the biggest investor in Russia. While the US is the largest exporter of methane gas, the EU purchases substantial gas from Russia at much lower prices, and also oil and wheat.

With the EU and especially Germany unwilling to impose sanctions, which would break all relations with Russia, Biden threatened the US allies that the only alternative to going along with the US would be nuclear war. The US president said: “You have two options. Start a Third World War…Or two, make sure that the country that acts so contrary to international law ends up paying a price.” Biden said the US “goal from the very beginning” was to keep NATO and the EU “on the same page.”

Using the dominant role of the dollar in the world economy, Washington has unilaterally imposed over 5,500 sanctions on Russia, making it the most sanctioned target of US aggressive policies.

US sanctions dragging the whole world into the conflict

Unfortunately, Russia is not the only victim of these unilateral coercive measures. Over 40 countries, comprising a third of humanity, are so targeted by the US. These include Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, China, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Palestine, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Third countries trading with targets of US sanctions also face heavy fines. This deadly form of economic warfare destroys regional development.

Further, the US is compelling other countries to execute these extreme economic penalties. We note, with grave concern, that these sanctions imposed on Russia are dragging the whole world into a conflict which has a high potential of spiraling out of control.

The United Nations did not approve the US-instigated sanctions. Many countries now refuse to join with the US/EU sanctions imposed on Russia. To date India, Pakistan, Indonesia, South Africa, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and other countries with smaller economies have refused to comply with the US measures. In fact, almost all of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa, and most of Asia reject the sanctions.

Sanctions are a crime against humanity

Such sanctions would damage these countries’ own trade relations. Supply chain disruptions and inflationary pressures from the US-led sanctions are already disproportionately impacting poor and working people globally due to shortages and higher prices for food, fuel, and basic commodities. Especially impacted are people in the developing world.

As over 60 years of US sanctions against the Cuban Revolution prove, sanctions meant to achieve the regime change the US wants to impose have, in fact, resulted in raining misery upon the targeted people. These sanctions serve as a cautionary lesson to any nation that wishes to exercise its sovereignty under the globally inflicted Pax Americana. It is a crime against humanity.

Ending the Ukraine War

This devastating war started with the US-orchestrated coup in 2014 coup, overthrowing the democratically elected government in Ukraine. Although Ukraine is not a formal NATO member, the US has since dumped mountains of lethal arms and deployed US military “advisors” into Ukraine.

Ukraine is a pawn in Washington’s strategy against Russia. Since the coup, Ukraine has been reduced to the poorest country in Europe with the highest rate of migration. Kiev’s continuing aggression against its eastern provinces and mass privatizations of socially owned property have furthered the economic ruin.

Sanctions Kill Campaign calls on all sides to end hostilities and for the US to employ diplomacy; not weapons, sanctions and war!

Click here to endorse.

Over 1,000 scholars, artists and intellectuals from more than 45 countries have signed the following declaration calling for the dismantling of the apartheid regime set up on the territory of historic Palestine and the establishment of a democratic constitutional arrangement that grants all its inhabitants equal rights and duties. The signatories include many distinguished figures, including the Nobel Peace Prize laureates Adolfo Pérez Esquivel and Mairead Maguire, the Nobel Chemistry Laureate George Smith, academics with legal expertise Monique Chemillier-Gendreau, John Dugard and Richard Falk, scholars Étienne Balibar, Hagit Borer, Ivar Ekeland, Suad Joseph, Edgar Morin, Jacques Rancière, Roshdi Rashed and Gayatri Spivak, health researcher Sir Iain Chalmers, composer Brian Eno, musician Roger Waters, author Ahdaf Soueif, economist and former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN Sir Richard Jolly, former Vice President European Parliament Luisa Morgantini, South African politician and veteran anti-apartheid leader Ronnie Kasrils and Canadian peace activist and former national leader of the Green Party of Canada Joan Russow.

Whereas :

1- Israel has subjected the Palestinian people for 73 years to an ongoing catastrophe, known as the Nakba, a process that included massive displacement, ethnic cleansing, war crimes, and crimes against humanity ;

2- Israel has established an apartheid regime on the entire territory of historic Palestine and directed toward the whole of the deliberately fragmented Palestinian people ; Israel itself no longer seeks to hide its apartheid character, claiming Jewish supremacy and exclusive Jewish rights of self-determination in all of historic Palestine through the adoption in 2018 by the Knesset of a new Basic Law ;

3-The apartheid character of Israel has been confirmed and exhaustively documented by widely respected human rights organizations, Adalah, B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and in the UN ESCWA academic study that stresses the importance of defining Israeli apartheid as extending to people rather than limited to space, [“Israeli Practices towards the Palestinian People and the Question of Apartheid,” UN ESCWA, 2017] ;

4- Israel periodically unleashes massive violence with devastating impacts on Palestinian civilian society, particularly against the population of Gaza, which endures widespread devastation, collective trauma, and many deaths and casualties, aggravated by being kept under an inhuman and unlawful blockade for over 14 years, and throughout the humanitarian emergency brought about by the COVID pandemic ;

5- Western powers have facilitated and even subsidized for more than seven decades this Israeli system of colonization, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid, and continue to do so diplomatically, economically, and even militarily.

Considering :

i- The Universal Declaration of Human Rights which stipulates in its first article that ’all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.’ And taking account that the inalienable right of self-determination is common Article 1 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Political Rights, and as such, a legal and ethical entitlement of all peoples.

ii- The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid which stipulates in Article I that ’apartheid is a crime against humanity and that inhuman acts resulting from the policies and practices of apartheid and similar policies and practices of racial segregation and discrimination, as defined in article II of the Convention, are crimes violating the principles of international law, in particular the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations, and constituting a serious threat to international peace and security.’ The States Parties to this Convention undertake in accordance with Article IV :
_ “(a) To adopt any legislative or other measures necessary to suppress as well as to prevent any encouragement of the crime of apartheid and similar segregationist policies or their manifestations and to punish persons guilty of that crime ;
_ “(b) To adopt legislative, judicial and administrative measures to prosecute, bring to trial and punish in accordance with their jurisdiction persons responsible for, or accused of, the acts defined in article II of the present Convention, whether or not such persons reside in the territory of the State in which the acts are committed or are nationals of that State or of some other State or are stateless persons.”

The endorsers of this document :

A- Declare their categorical rejection of the apartheid regime set up on the territory of historic Palestine and imposed on the Palestinian people as a whole, including refugees and exiles wherever they might be in the world.

B- Call for the immediate dismantling of this apartheid regime and the establishment of a democratic constitutional arrangement that grants and implements on all the inhabitants of this land equal rights and duties, regardless of their racial, ethnic, and religious identities, or gender preferences, and which respects and enforces international law and human conventions, and in particular gives priority to the long deferred right of return of Palestinian refugees expelled from their towns and villages during the creation of the State of Israel, and subsequently.

C- Urge their governments to cease immediately their complicity with Israel’s apartheid regime, to join in the effort to call for the dismantling of apartheid structures and their replacement by an egalitarian democratic governance that treats everyone subject to its authority in accordance with their rights and with full respect for their humanity, and to make this transition in a manner sensitive to the right of self-determination enjoyed by both peoples presently inhabiting historic Palestine.

D- Call for the establishment of a National Commission of Peace, Reconciliation, and Accountability to accompany the transition from apartheid Israel to a governing process sensitive to human rights and democratic principles and practices. In the interim, until such a process is underway, issue a call for the International Criminal Court to launch a formal investigation of Israeli political leaders and security personnel guilty of perpetuating the crime of apartheid.

* Academics, artists and intellectuals can endorse this declaration by completing this form.

* Endorsed by 1,028 academics, artists and intellectuals on July 26, 2021

The U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba is an enduring international symbol of injustice and torture, and it continues to cause profound harm to the 40 men who remain imprisoned. New reports show that President Biden is currently reviewing policies with the goal of closing the prison — we must make sure that he moves quickly to end indefinite detention without charge or trial and close Guantánamo once and for all.

The prison, designed to indefinitely detain Muslims, is a critical fixture of the post-9/11 “War on Terror” that has predominantly criminalized, surveilled, incarcerated, and tortured Muslims, U.S. citizens and non-citizens alike, with little legal recourse. While Guantánamo is part of the US’ carceral state, its existence in the War on Terror symbolizes a place beyond the law where the US government has extended the boundaries of what is considered acceptable treatment of Muslims in addition to other marginalized communities. Moreover, Guantánamo has exported its harsh conditions to domestic prisons such as Communication Management Units, located in Terre Haute, Indiana and Marion Illinois.

Since 2002, the U.S. has imprisoned nearly 800 Muslim men and boys. Today, 40 men remain. Most have never been charged with a crime, and none have had access to a fair trial. Many were tortured by the U.S., and all have suffered from the physical and psychological effects of indefinite detention for over a decade. A number of men have even been approved for transfer by the government, yet political delays have kept them languishing behind bars.

With the 20th anniversary of the global “War on Terror” approaching, ending indefinite detention and closing the prison is a necessary step towards justice, accountability, and reconciliation.

Guantánamo is just one the U.S. government’s more contemporary pursuits in egregious human rights violations in a long history of abuses against Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities within the US and abroad. The prison is part of the decades-long legacy of mass incarceration and U.S. militarism, and more recently, the connections with the mass immigration detention and deportation apparatus have also become clear. Calls for its closure must be part of our collective demands to expose the U.S.’s racist history and contemporary practices in policing and mass incarceration, and demand investment instead in community healing and other needs.

President Biden has said he intends to close Guantánamo. Now he must take action towards that goal. The Biden administration should release the dozens of men who have never been charged with a crime to their home or third countries and resolve the remaining cases by bringing them to federal court for trial or negotiating their transfer to foreign countries to serve sentences. The U.S. must ensure that no one is transferred to countries where they are in danger of persecution and torture.

Add your name: Urge the Biden administration to close Guantánamo prison and end indefinite detention once and for all.

Sign here.

As we approach the 73rd anniversary of the Nakba, the Zionist colonization of Palestine and the forced expulsion of Palestinians, the Nakba is continuing. This is apparent everywhere in Palestine, but perhaps is most clear in the heart of Jerusalem, Palestine’s capital: in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan, where Palestinian families are being threatened with imminent expulsion from their homes and lands by the Israeli regime and its colonial settlers, as they refuse to concede their lives to racist Zionist colonialism.

Palestinians in Jerusalem are under attack on multiple levels, defending their land, city and identity from erasure and colonialism for 73 years. They face the stripping of their identity and residence — even from their place of birth — severe repression, land confiscations, home demolitions and ongoing Zionist attempts to erase the Palestinian and Arab presence and nature of the city.

Right-wing settler mobs have rampaged through Sheikh Jarrah in the past days, screaming “Death to Arabs” and attacking Palestinians. Settlers attacked Palestinians breaking the Ramadan fast during Iftar, pepper spraying them and throwing rocks at them. Working hand in hand with these violent settlers, the Israeli military has attacked residents, sprayed skunk water and tear gas throughout the neighbourhood, invaded homes, assaulted women, children and elders and seized dozens of Palestinian youth defending their own homes.

In Silwan, Palestinians are being threatened with violent expulsion from their Jerusalem homes in order to make way for a “David-themed” tourist attraction to produce income for the Zionist settler colonial project, built atop the homes and lives of the indigenous Palestinian people.

Palestinians in Jerusalem — and throughout occupied Palestine and in exile — continue to resist and to prove that the Palestinian struggle continues and that organizing and resistance is the road to liberation. We know that it is this resistance that will defeat the attacks of Zionism and imperialism, and our actions and organizing around the world can work to build support for the Palestinian people and their resistance in Jerusalem, Gaza, throughout occupied Palestine and in exile and diaspora.

Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network urges all friends of Palestine around the world to join the campaign to #SaveSheikhJarrah. Boycott Israel, take the streets and take action, organize direct actions and speak out to defend Jerusalem, defend Palestine and support the Palestinian resistance and the liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea!

Join us in the Week of Palestinian Struggle from 15-22 May — and before the week officially begins — to escalate our organizing, resistance and action to support the Palestinians struggling, resisting, fighting and facing the most severe, brutal and deadly colonial violence on the front lines of liberation struggle.

 

Here are some ways that you can take action

We’re on the brink of a full scale war in Israel and Palestine.

At least 55 Palestinian children have already been killed. Mothers dead. Hundreds injured.

The tensions keep escalating. Fast.

It’s all rooted in Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and decades of violent oppression of the Palestinian people, which Human Rights Watch just concluded amounts to “crimes against humanity.”

This is where it all began, and this is where it must end.

Possibly the only way to stop this horrific cycle of Israel’s violent displacement of Palestinians from their homes, daily punishment of innocent families, Hamas firing rockets, and Israel bombing Gaza is to make the economic cost of this conflict too high to bear.

It’s what helped end apartheid in South Africa, and it can help end apartheid here.

We’re fast approaching 3 million signatures. Click below to sign our call to sanction Israel for breaking international law and committing crimes against humanity, and let’s make this a turning point.

Sign the petition.

American Muslim News Brief

(WASHINGTON, D.C., 5/14/20) – The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, today thanked member of Congress who yesterday stood in support of Palestinian human rights as dozens of civilians are being massacred by Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.

ACTION REQUESTED: Sign CAIR’s Card Thanking Members of Congress for Supporting Palestinian Human Rights

According to media reports, the Israeli government’s ongoing bombardment of the Gaza Strip has so far killed 119 Palestinians, including 31 children and 19 women. An entire family of 6 was killed in their home. In addition, the Israeli government continues to attack worshippers and protesters at the Al-Aqsa Masjid compound while fighting to expel Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah.

SEE: Palestinians flee as Israeli artillery pounds northern Gaza

Several Democrats in House of Representatives spoke out against America’s military support for Israel and called for the protection of Palestinians’ rights.

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) criticized the Biden administration for statements that she said did not acknowledge “Palestinian humanity. “To read the statements from President [Joe] Biden, Secretary [of State Antony] Blinken, General [Lloyd] Austin and leaders of both parties, you would hardly know Palestinians existed at all,” said Tlaib.

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu an “ethno-nationalist leader. “Consider that 78 percent of their [Palestinians’] land was taken from them.”

Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) SAID: “Palestinians know what state violence, militarized policing and occupation of their communities look like, and they live that reality of having to go through checkpoints while trying to live their lives.” “We are anti-war, we are anti-occupation, and we are anti-apartheid,” she said…

KEEP CAIR STRONG

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