The median pay package for a CEO at an S&P 500 company hit $12.7 million in 2020.

 That means half the CEOs in the survey made more, and half made less. It’s 5% more than the median pay for that same group of CEOs in 2019 and an acceleration from the 4.1% climb in last year’s survey. Meanwhile, regular workers also saw gains, but not at the same rate as their bosses. And millions of others lost their jobs.

Advance Auto Parts, CEO Tom Greco’s pay for 2020 was in line to take a hit because of a mountain of pandemic-related costs. Extended sick-pay benefits and expenses for hand sanitizer and other safety equipment totaling $60 million dragged on two key measurements that help set his performance pay. But because the board’s compensation committee saw these costs as extraordinary and unanticipated, it excluded them from its calculations. That helped Greco’s total compensation rise 4.7% last year to $8.1 million.

Carnival, the cruise operator gave stock grants to executives, in part to encourage its leaders to stick with the company as the pandemic forced it to halt sailings and furlough workers. For CEO Arnold Donald’s 2020 compensation, those grants were valued at $5.2 million, though their full value will ultimately depend on how the company performs on carbon reductions and other measures in coming years. That helped Donald receive total compensation valued at $13.3 million for the year, up 19% from a year earlier, even as Carnival swung to a $10.2 billion loss for the fiscal year.

Wages and benefits for all workers outside the government rose just 2.6% last year. That’s according to U.S. government data that ignore the effect of workers shifting between different industries. It’s an important distinction because more lower-wage earners lost their jobs as the economy shut down than professionals who could work from home.

Sarah Anderson, who directs the global economy project at the Institute for Policy Studies, said, “This should have been a year for shared sacrifice. Instead it became a year of shielding CEOs from risk while it was the frontline employees who paid the price.”

CEO pay rises to $12.7M even as pandemic ravages economy (apnews.com)

 It appears that the Palestinian Authority is doing the dirty work of the Israeli’s by cracking down on militants in the demonstrations against the occupation. The campaign of arrests as a fear tactic, which is taking place at the same time as Israel’s “law and order” operation within the 1948 territories where hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel have been rounded up, is in line with how authoritarian governments behave.

Tarqi al-Khudeiri was charged with “stirring up strife”, “incitement” and “insulting symbolic leaders”.

“Palestinians need to hold on to this unity that we’ve witnessed has been forged over the recent events in Sheikh Jarrah and the rest of Jerusalem, in Gaza, and in 1948 Palestine,” he said. “We need to remain united under one flag to fight the Israeli normalisation, occupation and security coordination as a way of burying the so-called peace process, which is as dead as it gets. At the end of the day, what we are doing in the streets is so that our people can thrive and live honourably and in freedom.”

Al-Khudeiri’s case is one of the dozens of recent arrests of Palestinian activists and university students by Palestinian Authority security forces in the occupied West Bank. Other detainees include Mahdi Abu Awwad, Mustafa Al-Khawaja, Akram Salamah, Anas Qazzaz and Hussam Amareen, a medical student at al-Quds University. 

Shaker Tameiza, a lawyer with the Addameer prisoners’ rights group, the campaign of arrests began following the end of the Israeli offensive on the Gaza Strip, and after the West Bank witnessed popular protests expressing their support and solidarity.

“According to the testimonies we’ve heard, the arrested were subjected to torture in the form of shabah, verbal abuse, and physical beating,” he said. All of the arrests are based on the violation of freedom of expression, such as social media posts and chants during protests. “Most of the charges the activists are accused of are more or less the same, such as ‘stirring up sectarian and racial strife’ – which is taken to mean insulting the PA,” Tameiza said.

The crackdown on activists is not new, and is rooted in what political analyst Khalil Shaheen described as the PA’s “survival policy”. The PA is hanging on to its legitimacy from the international community by solely adopting the two-state solution discourse and the so-called peace process negotiations, he explained.

“That means that it sees any other policy, even if it is rooted in popular protests, as a threat against it. Any deviation from this PA strategy results in the government cracking down on activists, as it is not in the PA’s interest to see protests turn into an Intifada. The PA is worried that armed confrontation with Israel will spread to the occupied West Bank.” 

Shaheen went on to say, “On top of that, there’s a new generation of activists coming out that are not politicised according to party membership, and therefore cannot be co-opted. These youth have been at the forefront of confrontations with Israeli forces, either in Jerusalem or in Haifa, and are not traditionally known to the PA.”

Shaheen continued, “The PA rules with fear because it is desperate to maintain its authority,” he said. “This is why they have postponed elections because they knew it would be an embarrassing defeat for the dominant party Fatah.”

Why is the Palestinian Authority arresting West Bank activists? | Israel-Palestine conflict News | Al Jazeera

  For $25 billion dollars (3% of the U.S. annual military budget) the world could establish regional manufacturing hubs to produce eight billion coronavirus vaccine doses in less than a year.

The report compiled by Dr. Zoltán Kis, a research associate at the Centre for Process Systems Engineering at Imperial College London, and Zain Rizvi, law and policy researcher in Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines Program, shows that with minimal investment by the wealthiest nations, enough vaccine supply could be produced to inoculate 80% of the population in low- and middle-income countries by May 2022.  If present trends continue, impoverished nations in the Global South won’t be vaccinated until 2024, experts say.

“The global vaccine apartheid is a policy choice,” the People’s Vaccine Alliance tweeted. “We have the means to end it.” 

Africa and Latin America have 0.17% and 2% of global vaccine production capacity, respectively, but Kis and Rizvi noted that the WHO has said: “19 manufacturers from more than a dozen countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America have expressed interest in ramping up mRNA vaccine production.”

Peter Maybarduk, Public Citizen’s Access to Medicines director, said in a statement, “It will require resources and coordination, but we know this can be done. The sooner we start, the more lives we will save and the faster our world will stop unravelling.”

Rich Nations Could ‘Make Enough Vaccine for the World’ With Just $25 Billion: Analysis | Common Dreams News

 The Lancet said efforts to curb the habit had been outstripped by population growth with 150 million more people smoking in the nine years from 1990, reaching an all-time high of 1.1 billion.

Smoking killed almost 8 million people in 2019 and the number of smokers rose as the habit was picked up by young people around the world.

89% of new smokers were addicted by the age of 25 but beyond that age were unlikely to start.

Just 10 countries made up two-thirds of the world’s smoking population: China, India, Indonesia, the US, Russia, Bangladesh, Japan, Turkey, Vietnam and the Philippines.

 One in three tobacco smokers (341 million) live in China.

Number of smokers has reached all-time high of 1.1 billion, study finds | Smoking | The Guardian

 The owner of JD Sports, Millets and Black Leisure, and a string of overseas sportswear chains,  Peter Cowgill, has been handed almost £6m in bonuses since February last year despite the company accepting more than £100m in government support.

The retailer has already been criticised for restarting dividend payments to shareholders while retaining the government pandemic financial support. In April, after revealing that it was paying out £14m to shareholders.

JD Group paid its boss £6m after government support of £100m | Executive pay and bonuses | The Guardian

 Tyranny

The tyrant broods in his distant castle,

Plucking adversaries out of the air

To languish in the dungeons of his lair;

Every man, woman and child his vassal.

Yet, even at the zenith of his power,

Despots abroad with critical tongues

Will conceal their own by speaking his wrongs,

Each hoping to baulk their reckoning hour.

And secure they are while people can’t see

The chains that bind them to separate lands

Are being forged and re-forged by their own hands:

If they saw the links they might set themselves free.

What holds in thrall all working folk et al

Is the despotism of capital.

D.A.

It is well known that the United States provides substantial aid to Israel, the degree to which the Israeli military relies on U.S. planes, bombs, and missiles is not fully appreciated. 

According to statistics compiled by the Center for International Policy’s Security Assistance Monitor, the United States has provided Israel with $63 billion in security assistance over the past two decades, more than 90 percent of it through the State Department’s Foreign Military Financing, which provides funds to buy U.S. weaponry.  

But Washington’s support for the Israeli state goes back much further. Total U.S. military and economic aid to Israel exceeds $236 billion (in inflation-adjusted 2018 dollars) since its founding — nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Selling Death – Consortiumnews

 As Japan’s population continues to drop, with just 14.93 million children aged 14 or younger on April 1, a decline of 190,000 on the same date a year ago and the lowest annual figure since 1950, household pets are on the rise.

There are some 20 million cats and dogs registered across the country, and an additional 60,000 pets joined households in 2020.

“They are willing to spend money on giving them the best food available,” Chris Dunn, an executive of the Japan branch of the Pet Planet food company said.

Many pet owners in Japan come from middle-to-high-income households, so the surge in pet sales has been followed by the emergence of a bewildering array of accessories for animals.  Pet shops in Japan often stock a diverse range of clothing for dogs, from rainwear to fancy dress outfits. In addition to leashes, collars, toys and animal beds, the most popular products are strollers for taking pets to the park. 

Dunn believes that the biggest reason why people in Japan are buying pets is for psychological support, whether they are doing so consciously or not.

Japan: Are pets replacing children during the pandemic? | Asia| An in-depth look at news from across the continent | DW | 26.05.2021

The IPPR thinktank shows the UK’s poverty rate among working households last year reached a record high for this century.

Working people have come under increasing financial pressure during the last 25 years from soaring property prices, private sector rent hikes and crippling childcare costs.

An increase in relative poverty from 13% in 1996 to 17.4% of working households in the year to March 2020 illustrates the combination of low wage rises and the spiralling cost of living.  Since 2010 the situation has deteriorated steadily to leave working families at the highest risk of falling into poverty since the welfare system was at its most adequate in 2004.

 The report said four factors lay behind the growth in poverty:

Spiralling housing costs among low-income households.

Low wages and modest pay rises.

A social security system that has failed to keep up with rental costs.

A lack of flexible and affordable childcare.

 For more than 50 years, Interstate 81 has cut through the heart of hard-luck Syracuse, New York, raining vehicle exhaust on its Southside neighborhood, where most residents are Black and poor. Road builders at the time were largely free to ignore environmental, historical, social or other factors, allowing them to focus on the most direct route from one point to another. More often than not, that meant routing those freeways through Black neighborhoods, where land was cheap and political opposition low. 

“When they put that highway up they destroyed this community,” said David Rufus, a lifelong Southside resident who is now an organizer for the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU). 

Black neighborhoods were targeted even when more logical routes were available, research by the late urban historian Raymond Mohl shows. Existing long-distance highways, like the New York State Thruway, largely skirted city centers. The new interstates were built right through them.

Syracuse wasn’t the only city where Black residents were displaced by the U.S. freeway-building boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Across the country, local officials saw the proposed interstate system as a convenient way to demolish what they regarded as “slum” neighborhoods near their downtown business districts, historians say. With the federal government picking up 90% of the cost, freeway construction made it easier for politicians and business leaders to pursue their own “urban renewal” projects after residents were evicted.

University of California, Irvine law professor Joseph DiMento, an expert in the policies of the freeway-building era, explains, “The reasons they were built were heavily for removal of Blacks from certain areas.”

*In Miami, Interstate 95 was routed through Overtown, a Black neighborhood known as the “Harlem of the South,” rather than a nearby abandoned rail corridor.

*In Nashville, Interstate 40 took a noticeable swerve, bisecting the Black community of North Nashville.

*In Montgomery, Alabama, the state highway director, a high-level officer of the Ku Klux Klan, routed Interstate 85 through a neighborhood where many Black civil rights leaders lived, rather than choosing an alternate route on vacant land.

*In New Orleans and Kansas City, officials re-routed freeways from white neighborhoods to integrated or predominantly Black areas.

The road-building program ultimately displaced more than 1 million Americans, most of them low-income minorities, according to Anthony Foxx, former transportation secretary under Obama.

U.S. freeways flattened Black neighborhoods nationwide (trust.org)