In November 2020, Walgreens paid a $4.5m settlement to resolve a class-action lawsuit alleging that it stole wages from thousands of its employees in California between 2010 and 2017. The lawsuit alleged that Walgreens “rounded down employees’ hours on their timecards, required employees to pass through security checks before and after their shift without compensating them for time worked, and failed to pay premium wages to employees who were denied legally required meal breaks”.

Walgreens’ settlement includes attorney’s fees and other penalties, but $2,830,000 went to Walgreens employees to compensate them for the wages that the company had stolen. And, because it is a settlement, that amount represents a small fraction of the total liability. According to the order approving the settlement, it represents “approximately 22% of the potential damages”.

So this is a story of a corporation that stole millions of dollars from its own employees. How much news coverage did it generate? There was a single 221-word story in Bloomberg Law, an industry publication. And that’s it. There has been no coverage in the New York Times, USA Today, CNN, or the dozens of other publications that covered the story of a man stealing a few hundred dollars of merchandise. 

No one at Walgreens has had to take personal responsibility for stealing millions from its employees. Stefano Pessina, who served as Walgreens’ CEO during the majority of the alleged wage theft, saw his compensation rise from $7,133,155 in 2015 to $17,483,187 in 2020. In 2021, Pessina transitioned from CEO to executive chairman. Pessina’s 2021 compensation is not yet available, but the previous executive chairman made $8,797,713 last year. Needless to say, neither Pessina nor any Walgreens employee has had to spend any time in jail as a result of millions in wage theft.

 Walgreens recorded $2.3bn in profits in fiscal year 2021. Walgreens is still a highly profitable business. Meanwhile, the median Walgreens employee makes just $33,396. When the company steals hundreds or thousands of dollars in wages from its employees, it has a real impact on workers who are struggling to make ends meet.

Numerous companies steal billions in wages from workers in the United States each year. It is a crime that is seldom prosecuted – or covered in the media.

 One hundred and sixty-eight of Australia’s biggest companies have paid no tax since 2013 despite reaping profits totalling more than $9.85bn.

Household names: 168 Australian companies have paid no tax since 2013 | Tax | The Guardian

 Biden’s new executive order aims for the federal government to run on carbon-free electricity by the end of the decade, a step toward realizing a 65% reduction in emissions by 2030 and carbon neutrality by 2050. The US government would end purchases of gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035, transition to a “net-zero emissions building portfolio by 2045, including a 50% emissions reduction by 2032,” as well as implement a “Buy Clean” policy “to promote use of construction materials with lower embodied emissions.”

Bill Snape, senior counsel at the Center for Biological Diversity, said that “2050 is an extremely weak goal for the federal government to free itself from climate-heating pollution.”

“It ignores existing technology and adds decades to GSA’s own commitment to 100% renewable energy by 2025,” he said, a reference to the U.S. General Service Administration’s April 2021 decarbonization plan.

“This is like a teenager promising to clean their room in 30 years,” Snape added. “We need action now.”

Mitch Jones, managing director of advocacy programs at Food & Water Watch, said that “while this executive order lays out noteworthy investments in solar energy and important changes in transportation and energy efficiency, their effectiveness is undermined by the White House’s failures to address the root cause of the climate crisis: Fossil fuel development. If Biden was actually serious about tackling the climate crisis, he would ban new oil and gas extraction on federal lands like he repeatedly promised to do. Instead, the White House continues to approve new drilling and fracking projects on public lands, and just conducted a massive sale of offshore drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico. The administration also seems eager to expand the export of fossil fuels, creating new sources of climate, air, and water pollution at home.”

Jones continued, “The focus on ‘net-zero’ and zero-emissions goals leaves the door open for expensive and dirty energy infrastructure including nuclear and fossil fuel-based hydrogen. We need President Biden to stop pushing policies that will keep us hooked on dirty energy.”

“If Biden wants to be the climate president, it’s time to stand up against the fossil fuel industry, pass executive actions that actually meet the moment of the climate crisis, whip support from every elected official in his own party, and seize this narrow window of opportunity to pass climate legislation while Democrats still have a governing coalition,” Sunrise Movement campaign director Deirdre Shelly said in a statement. “Anything less is a failure.”

‘Like a Teenager Promising to Clean Their Room in 30 Years’: Biden Net-Zero Climate Goal for 2050 Ridiculed (commondreams.org)

100 million people sank into extreme poverty in 2020 while the increase in billionaires’ wealth has been the highest on record.

The richest 10% of the population now takes 52% of global income and the poorest half just 8%.

Lucas Chancel, co-director of the World Inequality Lab, based at the Paris School of Economics, explained, “While the wealth of billionaires rose by more than €3.6tn (£3tn), 100 million more people joined the ranks of extreme poverty.” 

The oil, gas and metals merchant Trafigura will reward its top traders and executives with bonus payouts worth more than £1bn after making record profits from the market upheaval during the Covid pandemic. At £1.1bn, the rewards are 87% up on last year.

Oil trading company Vitol, which handed the equivalent of more than $8m to each of its 350 most senior staff.

Super-rich increase their share of world’s income – BBC News

Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War, pointed out that, “Little could be more revealing of our nation’s broken budget priorities,” Miles added, “than the fact that this rubberstamp of three-quarters of a trillion dollars for warmaking was prioritized and will soon pass with bipartisan support, while the Build Back Better Act—which would invest in meeting real human needs—has been watered down and pushed to the back burner.”

He said, the $778 billion National Defense Authorization Act as “a reckless misuse of resources, a windfall for war profiteers, and proof positive that most in Congress have little concern for the actual security of people in the United States or around the world.”

The House-passed NDAA includes $25 billion more in spending than President Joe Biden requested in his budget blueprint earlier this year. That extra $25 billion is the exact sum researchers say is needed to produce enough coronavirus vaccines to achieve widespread global inoculation and end the pandemic.

Or it could have went to the federal government’s roughly $22.5 billion to fund 12 weeks of paid family leave for a year.

‘Reckless Misuse of Resources’: House Approves $778 Billion Military Budget (commondreams.org)

 Floods have become increasingly frequent in large Latin American cities, probably due to the effects of global warming and also to local factors, such as the extensive areas of concrete and asphalt that have replaced vegetation.

Extreme weather events are aggravating inequality “in a Latin America that has the most inequitable societies in the world,” said engineer Manuel Rodríguez, professor emeritus at the Universidad de los Andes who served as Colombia’s first minister of environment and sustainable development (1993-1996).

“The poorest of the poor live in shantytowns and slums in the areas most vulnerable to environmental risks, on undevelopable land along riverbanks or in the foothills,” where they are tragically affected by floods and landslides, he explained. 

This is especially important in Latin America, the world’s most urban region, where one in five people live in cities

.A good part of the 1.28 million inhabitants of the “favelas” or shantytowns of São Paulo, according to the 2010 official census, live on low-lying land, often along streams, without sanitation, and they are the first victims of floods. The poor make up 11 percent of the population of São Paulo proper.

In Rio de Janeiro there are also riverside favelas, but the ones built on hillsides or on the tops of hills that separate the city and some neighborhoods are much better known. The risk in these areas is landslides, which have killed many people.

In Brazil’s second largest city, favelas are home to 1.39 million people, 22 percent of the total population, according to the 2010 census.

Lima, which has 10 million inhabitants, and other cities in Peru and Ecuador were victims of El Niño Costero, a climatic phenomenon that warms the waters of the Pacific Ocean but only near these two countries, where it also leads to more intense rainfall.

These and other Andean countries also face the threat of melting glaciers that could deprive the population of the Andes highlands of water, said Rodríguez. In the Caribbean, the biggest threat is hurricanes, which are becoming more frequent and more intense.

 These phenomena hit the poor harder in Latin America, in the world’s most unequal region the poor have fewer resources to overcome the losses caused by the climate crisis, added the Colombian expert.

“Buying a new refrigerator and other appliances damaged each time it floods costs them much more. Poverty is a cause, driving them to disaster, and also a consequence of the disasters themselves,” said Guimarães, a former knowledge management coordinator at UN Habitat, the UN agency for human settlements.

The real estate business drives up the costs of the best, safest sites complete with infrastructure and services. There are too many at-risk areas where the poor “build their homes with their own hands,” without the support of a public policy that ensures them housing with “access to the city,” she told IPS.

 Pushed to the periphery, where land is cheaper, but there are no jobs or public services, nor urbanization, the poor prefer slums near the center

“There is a spatial inequality that results from the low-density expansion model of cities, which pushes low-income families to the periphery, makes access to public transportation difficult and requires long commutes,” said Pablo Lazo, director of Urban Development and Accessibility at the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Mexico.

This urbanization model also gives rise to shantytowns in risky areas, “a constant pattern that is repeated in Mexico City, whose eastern neighborhoods are built on hillsides, where water runs off very quickly, fueling landslides,” he said in an interview with IPS via video call from the Mexican capital. Greater Mexico City is home to nearly 20 million people.

Lazo highlighted the need for mechanisms to control the market’s “greed”, such as a requirement that private housing projects include low-cost units.

“In France that proportion is 50 percent,” he said, to illustrate.

Braga said one good possibility for reducing the housing deficit in Rio de Janeiro would be by allocating empty public buildings to social housing. There are many unused state-owned buildings because the city was the capital of the country until 1960.

Climate Crisis Exacerbates Urban Inequality in Latin America | Inter Press Service (ipsnews.net)

 Union members have been on strike since October rejecting a proposed two-tier system, in which transitional employees get lesser pay and benefits compared to longer-tenured workers.

Temporary strike-breakers have already been working at Kellogg’s cereal plants in Michigan, Nebraska, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, Now they will be placed on permanent contracts.  

“Interest in the [permanent replacement] roles has been strong at all four plants, as expected. We expect some of the new hires to start with the company very soon,” Kellogg spokesperson Kris Bahner said.

Kellogg also said there was no further bargaining scheduled and it had no plans to meet with the union.

  The World Inequality Report, an exhaustive summary of worldwide income and wealth data that shows inequities in wealth and income are “about as great today as they were at the peak of Western imperialism in the early 20th century.”

“Indeed, the share of income presently captured by the poorest half of the world’s people is about half what it was in 1820, before the great divergence between Western countries and their colonies,” the report notes. “In other words, there is still a long way to go to undo the global economic inequalities inherited from the very unequal organization of world production between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries.”

In the nearly three decades since 1995, members of the global 1% have captured 38% of all new wealth while the poorest half of humanity has benefited from just 2%.

“In the U.S., the return of top wealth inequality has been particularly dramatic, with the top 1% share nearing 35% in 2020, approaching its Gilded Age level,” states the report, whose contributors include prominent economists Thomas Piketty and Gabriel Zucman. “In Europe, top wealth inequality has also been on the rise since 1980, though significantly less so than in the U.S.”

At present, the richest 10% of the world’s population grabs more than half of all global income, the researchers found. The billions of people in the poorest half of the global population, meanwhile, get just 8% of the world’s income.

“Global wealth inequalities are even more pronounced than income inequalities,” the report finds. “The poorest half of the global population barely owns any wealth at all, possessing just 2% of the total. In contrast, the richest 10% of the global population own 76% of all wealth.”

 As Lebanon plunged deeper into one of the world’s worst economic meltdowns, the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees (UNRWA) last week sounded the alarm about a major funding gap that could further cut access to basic services for about 200,000 Palestinian refugees.

The United Kingdom alone cut more than half its funding to UNRWA from 42.5 million pounds ($56.5m) in 2020 to 20.8 million ($27.6) this past year, while Gulf states that once contributed $200m in 2018 only provided $20m this year.

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini called it an “existential crisis” and warned the funding shortage could dramatically reduce access to education and basic healthcare services.

  Olivier De Schutter – UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights – said camps in Beirut “suffer from a chronically decaying infrastructure as a result of competing sources of basic service delivery”.

“These communities have been living in the camps for at least three generations, and they deserve better – their right to work, own property, education.”

Refugees in Shatila camp pushed to the brink amid aid crisis | Humanitarian Crises | Al Jazeera

Gasoline prices have hit a seven-year high in the US due to the rising cost of oil, with Americans now paying about $3.40 for a gallon of fuel compared with around $2.10 a year ago.

 Oil and gas companies made a combined $174bn in profits in the first nine months of the year as gasoline prices climbed in the US.

The bumper profit totals show that in the third quarter of 2021 alone, 24 top oil and gas companies made more than $74bn in net income.

 From January to September, the net income of the group, which includes Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP, was $174bn.

Exxon alone posted a net income of $6.75bn in the third quarter, its highest profit since 2017, and has seen its revenue jump by 60% on the same period last year. 

The company credited the rising cost of oil for bolstering these profits, as did BP, which made $3.3bn in third-quarter profit.

 “Rising commodity prices certainly helped,” Bernard Looney, chief executive of BP, told investors.

The analysis of major oil companies’ financials shows that 11 of the group gave payouts to shareholders worth more than $36.5bn collectively this year.

 While a dozen bought back $8bn-worth of stock. 

 New oil drilling has made the US awash with oil in recent years, turning the country into a top-level exporter as well as domestic supplier, but this has kept prices low to the displeasure of investors. “A lot of this has been driven by investor sentiment,” said Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, of the current reluctance to expand production. “They don’t want them to spoil the party.”

“It’s not the government that is banning them from drilling more,” Pavel Molchanov, an analyst at Raymond James, told CNN. “It’s pressure from their shareholders.”