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)

 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 rate of food inflation in the UK has reached its maximum since 1977, with consumers in poorer areas reporting they are buying less food, a survey by the Office for National Statistics published on Thursday shows.

Lower-income households appear to be the hardest hit by spiraling inflation, with 61% of consumers living in the most deprived areas buying less when food shopping compared to last year, as opposed to 44% in the least deprived areas.

Although overall inflation in the UK – including housing costs – slightly decreased from 9.6% in October 2022 to 9.3% in November, food and non-alcoholic drink prices jumped by 16.5% year-on-year last month in the highest increase since September 1977 (17.6%), according to the ONS.

Concerns are mounting that unprecedented food inflation may affect the health of the population. The ONS reported that 23% of people surveyed by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) said they skipped or reduced the size of a meal because they could not afford to buy food.

Four in five adults – or 81% – of those polled by the FSA said they were concerned about the cost of food during Christmas and New Year, up from 62% a year ago.

The cost of essentials such as bread and cereal saw the largest price increases last month, surging by 1.9% and contributing towards an increase of 16.6% in the year to November 2022.

The annual inflation gap between low-income and high-income households was the largest in October since March 2009 and stood at 10.5% for less wealthy consumers versus 9.1% for better-off families.

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Dave C

  In its search for ever-greater profits, Big Pharma is strangling healthcare,

 Consumers in the UK have slashed spending on Christmas gifts this year as household incomes across the country have suffered amid the biggest jump in prices in 40 years, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing a survey published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

Six in ten adults surveyed admitted they were planning to cut the amount they spend during this festive season by buying fewer and less expensive presents. Meanwhile, British charities have reported booming sales as cash-strapped shoppers are looking for second-hand Christmas gifts.

With disposable income hit by skyrocketing inflation, people are tightening their belts and expect to eat out and socialize less, the public opinion and social trends survey showed. Inflation in the UK reached 11.1% in October, more than five times the Bank of England’s 2% target.

About 18% of respondents told the ONS they had no savings to shield themselves from surging costs and 7% reported they had missed a bill payment in the past month. Households were facing the highest financial pressure from energy bills, as well as mortgage and rent payments, the ONS said.

Nearly half of UK adults reported they were hardly able to heat their homes and three-quarters were alarmed about the cost of living.

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Dave C.

Each international conference keeps pledging funds for the poorer nations of the world to cope with climate change. Often the money fails to materialise.

Biden has promised $11.4bn each year for developing countries to ease climate impacts and help them shift to renewable energy but the vast $1.7tn spending bill to keep the US government running, passed by the Senate on Thursday, includes less than $1bn in climate assistance for these countries.

The failure to so far meet Biden’s pledge risks undermining America’s insistence that it is committed to helping deal with the fallout of a climate crisis that it is a leading instigator of, through its huge historical and ongoing greenhouse gas emissions. Developing countries will need anything from $340bn to $2tn a year by 2030, according to various studies, to cope with the cascading impacts of global warming.

Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, based in Bangladesh, said “So one billion is really an insult to the developing countries. The paltry allocation of only $1bn to support the developing countries is extremely disappointing.”

“Funding levels for international climate aid are woefully inadequate to meet our global commitments or do our fair share to support under-resourced countries bearing the brunt of climate impacts,” said Sara Chieffo, at the League of Conservation Voters.

US fails to give money promised for developing countries to ease climate impacts | Climate crisis | The Guardian

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

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)

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

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.”