While many express platitudes about the coming festive season, others have little to have good cheer about. The number of children suffering dire drought conditions across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia has more than doubled in five months, according to UNICEF.

Around 20.2 million children are now facing the threat of severe hunger, thirst and disease, compared to 10 million in July, as climate change, conflict, global inflation and grain shortages devastate the region.

Nearly two million children across Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia are currently estimated to require urgent treatment for severe acute malnutrition, the deadliest form of hunger.

In addition, across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia:

More than two million people are displaced internally because of drought.Water insecurity has more than doubled with close to 24 million people now confronting dire water shortages.Approximately 2.7 million children are out of school because of the drought, with an additional estimated 4 million children at risk of dropping out.As families are driven to the edge dealing with increased stress, children face a range of protection risks – including child labour, child marriage and female genital mutilation (FGM).Gender-based violence (GBV), including sexual violence, exploitation and abuse, is also increasing due to widespread food insecurity and displacement.

The typical CEO of a major U.S. corporation has to work fewer than seven hours to make the amount of money that the average worker earns in an entire year, according to a new analysis by Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Anderson, an expert on executive compensation, wrote Friday that “if the typical CEO of a large U.S. corporation clocks in at 9:00 am on January 2, by 3:37 pm that afternoon he’ll have earned $58,260—the average annual salary for all U.S. occupations.”

 The growing chasm between typical worker pay and CEO compensation has soared by nearly 1,500% since 1978. Workers’ wages, meanwhile, have lagged significantly over the past four decades, rising just 29% between 1979 to 2021.

Anderson based her analysis on the average pay of a CEO of an S&P 500 company, which was $18.3 million—or $8,798 an hour—in 2021, the most recent data available.

“I started by looking at the fast food workers who often toil straight through the holidays,” Anderson wrote. “Most McDonald’s restaurants are open even on Christmas Day. Average pay for this labor force is just $26,060 for the whole year. A typical CEO would bank that by noon on his first day back in the corner office suite.”

“Then I thought of the home care aides who may be the only people around to cheer up their homebound elderly and disabled clients over the holidays,” she continued. “They earned an average of just $29,260 in 2021. The typical CEO of a big U.S. corporation would pocket that much by lunchtime on his first workday of the year. He’d have to work less than an hour more to make $36,460, the average annual pay for a pre-K teacher.”

A recent analysis by the Economic Policy Institute found that, on average, top CEOs in the U.S. were paid 399 times more than typical workers last year.

Separate research by the AFL-CIO showed that Amazon had the highest CEO-to-worker-pay ratio of all S&P 500 companies last year: 6,474 to 1.

Top US CEOs Make More in Seven Hours Than Average Workers Earn in an Entire Year: Analysis (commondreams.org)

Gwen Hines, the chief executive of Save the Children, told the Guardian that severe financial hardship would really begin to bite in January, with many families already unable to afford basic goods.

Hines said: “Many families in the UK are living in dire circumstances right now and we know Christmas and the new year is going to be particularly difficult. We are concerned January will be the time financial hardship really begins to bite.”

31% of households in the bottom fifth of earners said they were significantly reducing the amount they spend on presents, festive food and other seasonal treats. That compared with 16% among the highest fifth of earners.  64% of all workers surveyed said they would be trying to rein in the cost of Christmas this year, amid widespread predictions that the economy is sliding into recession.

Emily Fry, an economist at the Resolution Foundation thinktank, told the Guardian: “Low-income families have faced the toughest cost-of-living pressures this year from soaring food prices to energy bills, and it is taking its toll this Christmas…” She added that family finances had already been stretched thin by the Covid pandemic, leaving poorer families little room for manoeuvre. “People who already entered the pandemic with lower savings, less of a buffer to be able to deal with unexpected shocks, are now facing a second crisis.”

Citizens Advice recently reported that they had referred the equivalent of 3.5 people every minute to a food bank in the first week of December – more than in any other week on record.

Britain’s poorest families living in severe hardship, warns Save the Children | Poverty | The Guardian

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines tipping points as “critical thresholds in a system that, when exceeded, can lead to a significant change in the state of the system, often with an understanding that the change is irreversible.”

Published in the journal Nature Climate Change, a new study focuses on the potential shutdown of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the Amazon rainforest shifting to savannah, and the collapse of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets.

“To effectively prevent all tipping risks, the global mean temperature increase would need to be limited to no more than 1°C—we are currently already at about 1.2°C,” noted study co-author Jonathan Donges, co-lead of the FutureLab on Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “The latest IPCC report is showing that we’re most likely on a path to temporarily overshoot the 1.5°C temperature threshold.”

“Even if we would manage to limit global warming to 1.5°C after an overshoot of more than 2°C, this would not be enough as the risk of triggering one or more global tipping points would still be more than 50%,”  lead author and PIK scientist Nico Wunderling explained. “With more warming in the long-term, the risks increase dramatically.”

According to the study, “Our model analysis reveals that temporary overshoots can increase tipping risks by up to 72% compared with non-overshoot scenarios, even when the long-term equilibrium temperature stabilizes within the Paris range.”

Study co-author Ricarda Winkelmann, co-lead of the FutureLab on Earth Resilience in the Anthropocene at PIK, pointed out that “especially the Greenland and the West Antarctic ice sheet are at risk of tipping even for small overshoots, underlining that they are among the most vulnerable tipping elements.”

“While it would take a long time for the ice loss to fully unfold, the temperature levels at which such changes are triggered could already be reached soon,” she said. “Our action in the coming years can thus decide the future trajectory of the ice sheets for centuries or even millennia to come.”

Temporarily Passing Paris Climate Targets Could ‘Significantly’ Raise Tipping Point Risk: Study (commondreams.org)

73-year-old French billionaire Bernard Arnault, according to analysts at Forbes, is now the World’s richest person. On December 20, they estimated Arnault’s fortune to be $180.2 billion (€169.8 billion), which is nearly $17 billion more than Elon Musk’s.

Arnault is co-founder, chairman and CEO of LVMH Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton, commonly called LVMH. His holding company is its largest stockholder and has a majority of voting rights in the publicly traded company. 

LVMH is a Paris-based conglomerate made up of 75 separate brands of mostly drinks, high-end fashion and cosmetics. In 2021, it brought in revenues of €64.2 ($68.2 billion) billion, 20% more than in 2019. Fashion and leather goods accounted for 48% of revenue. The company — the largest luxury firm in the world — has over 175,000 employees and 5,500 stores. In November 2022, its market value was around €371 billion, according to Statista calculations, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world — ahead of Mastercard, Chevron and Nestle.

Bernard Arnault: The new richest man in the world – DW – 12/20/2022

 Covid-19 and drug overdoses led to a second straight year of worsening life expectancy in the US – its lowest in 25 years, according to the latest data from the Centers for Disease Control.

Merry Christmas?

It is Christmas days at the food bank,

Where patient queues wait in orderly lines,

While prices rise as the temperature declines.

Unheated homes become cheerless and dank

For those who’re working at two or three jobs

Yet still can’t earn enough for a whole week.

But if they demand more they’re damned for their cheek

Or branded as greedy, unruly mobs.

Remember how nurses were applauded

For the way they bore the pandemic brunt;

Heroes then, villains now because they shouldn’t

Ask for what capital says can’t be afforded.

There’s credit, which means debt and New Year bills,

All from the ringing of the Christmas tills.

D. A.  

 Speaker: Adam Buick

Friday 5th August 2022

 More than half of all adults in Great Britain are buying less food and drink, with surging costs leaving the most vulnerable worst off.

People in the most deprived areas of England are the most likely to have cut back, with 61% saying they were buying less food when shopping last month, compared with 44% in the least deprived areas and 51% across Great Britain.

Almost a quarter of those questioned in the Food Standards Agency’s consumer insight tracker said they had skipped or reduced the size of a meal because they could not afford to buy supplies, as food and non-alcoholic drink prices rose by 16.5% in the year to November 2022, the highest increase since September 1977, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Staple foods such as bread and cereals, have seen the largest price increases, rising by 1.9% in the past month alone, contributing to an annual increase of 16.6%. Campaigners and analysts suggest that supermarkets have been raising prices in their cut-price ranges more quickly than more luxury items, piling pressure on those needing to save money.

That meant inflation for low-income households, where staple foods make up a bigger share of the budget, stood at 10.5%, while the figure for high-income households was 9.1%.

One study published this week, which tracked the cost of almost 19,000 items in UK supermarkets on a daily basis from July to December, found that items originally below 75p accelerated at the fastest rate – 16%. In contrast, items priced from £1.50 to £5 in July went up by just under 4%, and those above £5 fell by nearly 4%.’

 Price tracking agency Skuuudle said the differences made “difficult reading for those on low incomes who are seeing the cost of many value items increase but who may not be able to benefit at all from the reduction in price of more expensive items. This change could well be driven by a reduced demand for more expensive items as more people turn to value products during the cost of living crisis.”

Rising cost of basic food items leaving poorest people worst off, UK study finds | Inflation | The Guardian

Examining the latest annual earnings data from the Social Security Administration, Elise Gould and Jori Kandra of the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) found that “the top 1% now amasses a record share of total earnings, while the bottom 90% share of earnings has hit a historic low…Wages for the top 1% grew more than seven times as fast as wages for the bottom 90% between 1979 and 2021,”

Earnings inequality in the United States has risen dramatically over the past four decades and continues to accelerate, with the top 0.1% seeing wage growth of 465% between 1979 and 2021 while the bottom 90% experienced just 29% growth during that same period.

The EPI experts noted that “the share of earnings at the very top—the top 0.1% of wage earners—is driving the rising earnings share of the top 1%.”

“The share of the top 0.1% increased from 1.6% of total earnings in 1979 to a whopping 5.9% of total earnings in 2021, roughly 3.7 times as much,” Gould and Kandra wrote. “Of the 7.3 percentage point rise in the share claimed by the top 1%, 4.3 percentage points (roughly 60%) can be explained by the rise of the top 0.1% share.”

“The bottom 90% of wage earners experienced wage growth that lagged far behind average growth for much of the last 40-plus years,” Gould and Kandra observed. “In 2021, average annual earnings of the bottom 90% were $36,571, while the top 5% earned, on average, $335,891, more than nine times as much as the bottom 90%.”

In 2020 and 2021, the first two years of the coronavirus pandemic, the “only group to experience real wage gains… was the top 1% of the earnings distribution.”

“While the bottom 90% experienced losses of 0.2%, those in the 90th-95th percentiles experienced larger losses of 2.0%,” EPI found. “Between 2020 and 2021, earnings for the top 1% and top 0.1% rose 9.4% and 18.5%, respectively.”

“With the possible exception of excess unemployment, declining union membership plays the single most significant role in slow and unequal wage growth,” the pair wrote. “This erosion was not driven by workers’ declining interest in unions, but rather by concerted employer opposition, along with state and federal policy that has made it nearly impossible for workers to form unions in the face of unwilling employers.”