The Economic Policy Institute finds that CEO pay in the United States rose by a staggering 1,322% between 1978 and 2020—a sharp contrast to the pay increase of the typical worker, which was just 18% during that same period.

In 2020, a year of pandemic and widespread economic dislocation, the top executives at the largest public firms in the U.S. were paid 351 times as much as the typical worker, with CEO pay measured by salary, bonuses, long-term incentive payouts, and exercised stock options. The CEO-to-worker-pay ratio was 61-to-1 in 1989.

 In 2020, EPI finds, a CEO at one of the top 350 public companies in the U.S. was paid $24.2 million on average.

CEOs saw their compensation increase by 18.9% between 2019 and 2020 while the pay of typical workers—those who were able to hold on to their jobs amid mass layoffs stemming from the pandemic—rose just 3.9% over that time.

“Even that wage growth is overstated,” notes EPI, which has been tracking and documenting executive pay trends for years. “Perversely, high job loss among low-wage workers skewed the average wage higher.”

“CEOs are getting more because of their power to set pay and because so much of their pay (more than 80%) is stock-related, not because they are increasing their productivity or possess specific, high-demand skills,” Mishel and Kandra write. 

Since 1978, CEO Pay Has Risen 1,322%. Typical Worker Pay? Just 18% | Common Dreams News

 In response to the latest U.N. report, Greta Thunberg said world leaders had ignored scientists’ previous warnings about climate change:

“I expect them to go out and have big speeches, or press releases, or posts on social media where they say the climate crisis is very important and we are doing everything that we can,” Thunberg said. “As it is now, nothing is changing. The only thing that’s changing is the climate.”

The long-awaited IPCC report has now been made public and it does not make for any reassuring reading.

A 2m rise in sea levels by the end of this century “cannot be ruled out”.

The long-awaited IPCC report has now been made public and it does not make for any reassuring reading.

A 2m rise in sea levels by the end of this century “cannot be ruled out”.

 Low-income countries are struggling to protect themselves against climate change, officials and experts have told the BBC. Organisations representing 90 countries say that their plans to prevent damage have already been outpaced by climate-induced disasters, which are intensifying and happening more regularly.

“Our existing plans are not enough to protect our people,” says Sonam Wangdi, chair of the UN’s Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group on climate change.

 Dr Hugh Saddler,  an honorary associate professor at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy,  in research published by the think tank, the Australia Institute, ranked the performance of 23 OECD countries and Russia on eight climate measures, including share of electricity from non-fossil fuels, per capita emissions from transport and overall emissions intensity of each economy.

He found Australia was ranked 20th or worse in seven of the eight categories. In relative terms, it had not improved in any category since 2005 and had gone backwards compared to other developed countries in four.

“Despite the last decade of growth in solar and wind energy, fossil fuels still dominate Australia’s energy sector and its rate of electrification – that is getting off coal, oil and gas for energy – is one of the worst in the OECD,” Saddler said.

Saddler explained his research showed the government’s “so-called gas-fired economic recovery”, under which the Coalition has committed hundreds of millions of dollars to fossil fuel power and opening up new gas basins, was “absolutely counter to the needs of Australia’s energy system transition”.

He pointed out that, “Over the past 15 years, Australia has squandered its golden opportunity to decouple its energy sector from fossil fuels, unlike so many other OECD countries,” he said. “As a result, Australians are left with high-polluting and inefficient power, heating, housing and transport. This also drives up our cost of living and drives down our energy productivity.”

He found all of Australia’s emissions reductions since 2005 have been due to farming activities, mainly due to a large fall in the amount of “land-clearing”. In basic terms, the annual destruction of forests and other ecosystems for agriculture and timber collection decreased over the decade from 2007 to 2017 – it still happens, but at a slower rate. Saddler’s report said if this change in how land was used was excluded from national emissions accounts Australia’s emissions had increased by 7% since 2005. 

“Large one-off reductions in land-clearing are in no way evidence of a trend towards the decarbonisation of the Australian economy,” the report said. “For the purposes of international comparison, it is important to note that most other developed countries have no capacity to benefit from large reductions in land-clearing for the simple reason that they cleared most of their land centuries ago.”

Findings included:

Australia had the second-most emissions-intensive energy system after Poland, a big coal producer.

It achieved the second smallest increase in energy productivity across the 15 years, ahead of only Portugal. This is despite federal and state energy ministers releasing a national energy productivity plan in 2015.

It has significantly increased its share of wind and solar energy but other countries have moved faster – it slipped from 13th (in 2005) to 14th (in 2019) on a ranking of the share of electricity from new renewable energy generation.

It was one of only three countries to have increased total energy combustion emissions.

Prior to Covid-19, it had the third-highest per capita transport emissions, behind the US and Canada. Both North American countries reduced per capita transport emissions faster between 2005 and 2019 than Australia.

Australia ‘lagging at the back of the pack’ of OECD countries on climate action, analysis finds | Environment | The Guardian

In the middle of the pain of the pandemic last year and having cut humanitarian foreign aid, the UK government chose to announce a nearly 17 billion pound increase in military spending spread over four years.

Challenging the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, in March, the government announced it would raise the cap on the number of warheads the country possessed by a staggering 40 percent, and that it would no longer make public the number of operational nuclear weapons that it controlled.

The U.K. recently sent an aircraft carrier and broader naval strike group into the South China Sea. 

This follows another naval deployment when the U.K. sent a navy strike force into the waters off Crimea — territory illegally annexed by Russia from Ukraine in 2014  to show Britain’s sympathy for Ukrainian claims to sovereignty over Crimea.  A confrontation came horrifyingly close after Russia scrambled fighter jets and navy vessels reportedly fired warning shots at the approaching British ships.

Britain is now the only G7 country cutting rather than increasing its international aid commitments. 

It is, at the same time, spending more on its military than any other G7 member apart from the United States, making it the fifth-highest military spender on the planet. 

In 2020, Germany spent 1.4 percent of its GDP on its military, and France, itself in the middle of a significant military build-up, spent 2.1 percent. Britain, by contrast, spent 2.2 percent.

The UK Is Embarking on Largest Military Spending Hike Since the Cold War (truthout.org)

 That India performs much worse on stunting than countries poorer than it. India has one of the highest rates of child stunting in the world: more than a third of its children under five years are short enough for their age to be counted as “stunted” under the World Health Organisation’s guidelines. This is more than the stunting rate in sub-Saharan Africa, one of the poorest regions in the world.

Researchers have theorised that it has to do with unhygienic conditions found in India due to the prevalence of open defecation as well as the fact that daughters are mistreated in India compared to sons.

Along with hygiene and gender, a third factor might be making India’s rates of stunting shoot up: caste and communal discrimination.

A new paper by Ashwini Deshpande, professor of economics at Ashoka University and Rajesh Ramachandran, a post-doctoral researcher at the faculty of economics at Heidelberg University, finds that stunting varies starkly when it comes to caste and community in India.

Most research till now has compared India as a whole in trying to determine why it lagged other countries so severely when it came to child health. Contrary to the all-India trend, upper-caste Hindus actually have stunting rates (26%) lower than sub-Saharan African children. However, Indian children from Dalit and Adivasi communities (Scheduled Caste/Scheduled Tribe) have stunting rates significantly higher than those of African children. A similar trend holds for Other Backward Classes, a vast group of castes in between upper castes and Dalits in the social order. for Dalit children, their rates of stunting sharply increase in relation to the practice of untouchability.

Casteism and communalism: Why Indian children are shorter than even their counterparts in Africa (scroll.in)

 About 42 percent of Argentina’s 19 million people live below the poverty line, with unemployment at 10.2 percent amid an economic downturn worsened by COVID-19.

Tens of thousands of Argentinians have protested across the country over poverty and unemployment as an economic crisis worsened by the coronavirus pandemic continues to hit working people hard. Protests also took place in Buenos Aires and other parts of the country, including in Argentina’s second city of Cordoba and the western city of Mendoza.

The soup kitchens are seeing whole families coming to eat and many of the children have to be attended to by health professionals because they are malnourished.

“If you don’t protest, if you don’t make noise, they won’t listen to you. You can’t achieve much by staying silent,” said Estela Avila, 59, who is the president of a new union called Asociación de Trabajadoras del Hogar y Afines (Association of Household and Related Workers).

  We must brace ourselves for ever-rising sea levels: extreme weather, drought, famine — all of which, according to the World Bank, could result in 143-million climate refugees by 2050.

The largest single U.S. emitter of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) is the Pentagon, the Department of Defense.

Brown University’s Cost of War Project reports America’s military’s GHG exceed those of many industrialized nations, such as Denmark, Sweden and Portugal, with the “War on Terror” alone producing 1,267 million metric tons of GHG’s, the carbon equivalent of a 12-million pound mountain of coal. One B-52 Stratofortress, Boeing’s long-range bomber, consumes as much fuel in an hour as the average car driver uses in seven years.

The Pentagon Is Killing Us – Consortiumnews