Of all the effects of the economic crisis, perhaps one of the least visible, but most consequential has been the rising rate of income inequality around the world.
A recent report, released by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and entitled “Society at a Glance 2011 – OECD Social Indicators,” shows exactly where the gap between rich and poor has grown widest.
Based on a measurement known as the Gini coefficient, which rates countries from 0 to 1, where zero indicates perfect equality and one indicates all wealth goes to a single individual, the report finds growing rates of income inequality everywhere from Oceania to Scandinavia. Between the mid-1980s and late 2000s, the average Gini coefficient for OECD countries rose annually by an average of 0.3 percent, and now sits at 0.31.
High rates of income inequality might be unsurprising in developing countries such as Portugal and Mexico. But countries with historically low levels of income inequality have experienced significant increases over the past decade, too, including Denmark, Sweden and Germany, the OECD recently reported.
Below are the nations with the worst income inequality according to the OECD.
#1 CHILE
GINI Coefficient: 0.50
Avg. Annual Change in GINI Coefficient from mid-’80s to late-’00s: -0.47
#2 MEXICO
GINI Coefficient: 0.48
Avg. Annual Change in GINI Coefficient from mid-’80s to late-’00s: 0.21
#3 TURKEY
GINI Coefficient: 0.48
Avg. Annual Change in GINI Coefficient from mid-’80s to late-’00s: 0.21
#4 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
GINI Coefficient: 0.38
Avg. Annual Change in GINI Coefficient from mid-’80s to late-’00s: 0.48
#5 ISRAEL
GINI Coefficient: 0.37
Avg. Annual Change in GINI Coefficient from mid-’80s to late-’00s: 0.57
#6 PORTUGAL
GINI Coefficient: 0.36
Avg. Annual Change in GINI Coefficient from mid-’80s to late-’00s: -0.17
# 7 UNITED KINGDOM
GINI Coefficient: 0.34
Avg. Annual Change in GINI Coefficient from mid-’80s to late-’00s: 0.77
#8 ITALY
GINI Coefficient: 0.34
Avg. Annual Change in GINI Coefficient from mid-’80s to late-’00s: 0.36
#9 AUSTRALIA
GINI Coefficient: 0.34
Avg. Annual Change in GINI Coefficient from mid-’80s to late-’00s: 0.64
#10 NEW ZEALAND
GINI Coefficient: 0.34
Avg. Annual Change in GINI Coefficient from mid-’80s to late-’00s: 0.64
By Janell Ross
HUFFINGTON POST
American workers’ productivity has soared over the last 30 years, but that extra output hasn’t translating into higher earnings for the American middle class, according to a report released this week.
A 40-year-old male high school graduate earned less in real terms in 2009 than he would have in 1980, according to the report by the Employment Policy Research Network, a collective of labor, management, economics, employment and sociology researchers from 50 universities brought together by the nonpartisan nonprofit Labor and Employment Relations Association.
As middle-class Americans have lost out economically over that 30 year period, productivity, corporate profits and the incomes of America’s rich have all soared, the report said. By 2009, 1 percent of the population lived on 21 percent of the nation’s total annual earnings.
The study warned that the average middle-aged man can no longer expect or assume his children’s economic situation will be better than his own.
Declining middle-class wages have also helped erode the federal government’s solvency, the study’s authors said. It might even be causing a decline in the marriage rate.
“As the link between productivity and wages broke down, families and the government turned to borrowing and credit to support living standards,” Frank Levy, one of the study’s authors and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor of urban economics said in a statement. “These options are no longer sustainable.”
Starting in the 1970s, a series of economic challenges — inflation being most prominent — left companies scrambling to reduce costs, according to the study’s authors. Workers, their pay, their unions and their legal protections, along with laws limiting the way that companies could do business, all became the target of corporate attack.
Soon enough, companies slashed employees and wages and developed new products and services that could often be produced by cheaper workers overseas, the study’s authors said. The demand for American blue-collar workers, in short, fell far behind their supply.
Executives who conceived of and managed corporate restructuring efforts — job cuts, taking on and managing debt and wringing more work for what was effectively less pay from workers — have been rewarded handsomely, the report found. At the same time, the middle class has been asked to do more while receiving less pay, shoddier benefits and no assurance that their jobs will not be sent abroad in the next round of corporate restructuring.
WASHINGTON (By Deborah Zabarenko) – Heavy rains, deep snowfalls, monster floods and killing droughts are signs of a “new normal” of extreme U.S. weather events fueled by climate change, scientists and government planners said on Wednesday.
“It’s a new normal and I really do think that global weirding is the best way to describe what we’re seeing,” climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University told reporters.
“We are used to certain conditions and there’s a lot going on these days that is not what we’re used to, that is outside our current frame of reference,” Hayhoe said on a conference call with other experts, organized by the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists.
An upsurge in heavy rainstorms in the United States has coincided with prolonged drought, sometimes in the same location, she said, noting that west Texas has seen a record-length dry period over the last five years, even as there have been two 100-year rain events.
Hayhoe, other scientists, civic planners and a manager at the giant Swiss Re reinsurance firm all cited human-caused climate change as an factor pushing this shift toward more extreme weather.
While none would blame climate change for any specific weather event, Hayhoe said a background of climate change had an impact on every rainstorm, heat wave or cold snap.
“What we’re seeing is the new normal is constantly evolving,” said Nikhil da Victoria Lobo of Swiss Re’s Global Partnerships team. “Globally what we’re seeing is more volatility … there’s certainly a lot more integrated risk exposure.”
CHICAGO’S SEWERS
In addition to more extreme local weather events, he said, changes in demographics and how materials are supplied make them more vulnerable.
“In a more integrated economic system, a single shock to an isolated area can actually end up having broad-based and material implications,” da Victoria Lobo said. For example, if a local storm knocks out transport and communications systems, “someone 1,000 miles away is not receiving their iPad or their car.”
Aaron Durnbaugh, deputy commissioner for natural resources and water quality for Chicago, said adapting to climate change is a daunting task.
Citing the down-to-earth example of Chicago’s 4,400 miles of sewer mains, which were installed over the last 150 years and will take decades to replace, Durnbaugh said accurate forecasting of future storms and floods is essential.
The city of Chicago’s cost of dealing with extreme weather events through the end of this century has been conservatively estimated in a range from $690 million to $2.5 billion, Durnbaugh said, with the cost to homeowners and local businesses expected to be far higher.
Globally, da Victoria Lobo said the annual average economic losses from natural disasters have escalated from $25 billion in the 1980s to $130 billion in the first decade of the 21st century.
(Editing by Eric Walsh)
By MARCO SIBAJA
HUFFINGTON POST
BRASILIA, Brazil — Brazil has set up a crisis center to combat increased deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, the nation’s environmental minister said Wednesday.
Minister Izabella Teixeira said officials had to take action after satellite data showed a significant increase in deforestation over the past two months. In the previous year, Brazil recorded the lowest annual deforestation rates since records started being kept more than two decades ago.
“We created a crisis committee … to determine and combat the causes of this increase,” Teixeira said.
The committee, which will meet weekly, is made up of environmental agents, federal police, highway federal police and state agents, Teixeira said.
The committee will coordinate about 700 agents and police officers in the region to fight deforestation, she said.
Satellite images from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research showed 230 square miles (590 square kilometers) of deforestation in March and April, nearly six times more than in the same period last year.
Deforestation in the Amazon last year dropped to its slowest pace in 22 years, Brazilian officials said. Between August 2009 and July 2010, 2,490 square miles (6,450 square kilometers) of forest were deforested, a 14 percent drop from the year before, and the least since 1988.
Government officials hailed the numbers as a sign that stepped-up enforcement of environmental laws were working.
Some environmental experts, however, warned that simple economics were driving the deforestation rates, and that as the global economy recovers from financial crisis, the rates would rise again as demand for soy and cattle raised in the Amazon increases. Farmers and ranchers would likely clear more land to produce those products.
Teixeira said the biggest challenge awaits in the western state of Mato Grosso, which had contained deforestation over the past two years but saw a significant increase in April and March.
Brazil’s environmental protection agency Ibama said it’s increased the number of operations to control deforestation and has seized in this year alone 40 tractors and 76 trucks used in illegal logging in Mato Grosso.
Brazilian farmers, meanwhile, have been demanding the country’s Congress ease environmental laws in the Amazon region. They support a bill that would let them clear half the land on their properties in environmentally sensitive areas. Current law allows farmers to clear just 20 percent of their land in the Amazon zone.
Monday, May 23 · 7:00pm – 10:00pm
David Brower Center, Tamalpais Room
2150 Allston Way
Berkeley, CA
Join JINN, Emem Okon from the Niger Delta and members of communities from around the world that have been impacted by Chevron’s reckless business operations at this teach-in on the True Cost of Chevron. This event is being held just three days before Chevron’s annual shareholder meeting when the company will release its own annual report.
Then, join us for the rally/protest outside of Chevron’s AGM May 25!
Leaders from Chevron-affected communities that will be traveling from their homes to join us in the Bay Area for these events include:
What Chevron’s annual report won’t tell you (or the company’s shareholders) is the true cost paid for Chevron’s business operations around the world: the lives lost, the wars fought, the communities destroyed, the environments decimated, the livelihoods ruined, and the political voices silenced. Nor will it describe the global resistance movements gaining voice and strength against Chevron’s particularly callous method of operation.
The Teach-In on the True Cost of Chevron will have the real scoop on Chevron’s destructive business and the movements gaining steam around the world to hold the company accountable.
Learn more at: http://truecostofchevron.com/
Wednesday, May 25 · 7:00am – 11:00am
Chevron’s World Headquarters
6001 Bollinger Canyon Rd
San Ramon, California 94583
Join us! Biodiesel Bus leaving from Justin Herman Plaza (Market & Embarcadero) in SF at 6:30 am!
RSVP to cheryl@justiceinnigerianow.org to join JINN, Emem Okon from Kebetkache Women Development and Resource Center in Nigeria on May 25th . JINN and Emem are joining people from communities around the world who are impacted by Chevron’s irresponsible operations. Be a part of this gathering in San Ramon, CA to confront Chevron at its annual shareholder meeting. You will be joining people from Nigeria, Angola, Alaska, Ecuador, Indonesia, Canada, Texas, California, and more. The communities represented have two things in common: they all come from communities that have suffered the dire impacts of Chevron’s reckless pursuit of profits, and they’re all fighting back.
Join us for a colorful and fun rally outside Chevron’s headquarters in support of human rights, environmental, economic and climate justice, and more!
Want to learn more about the True Cost of Chevron before the Protest? Join our Teach-In on May 23
Across the globe, Chevron’s outdated practices are putting our climate and the health of communities at great risk.
DIRECTIONS
From Berkeley or SF, take 80 to 24 (Caldicott Tunnel). Then 680 South. Off at Bollinger Canyon. Make a left onto Bollinger over bridge. Chevron HQ on right.
Drivers will have to park in Whole Foods parking lot across the street or at San Ramon Central Park (on left after Bishop Ranch One E).
From 580, take 680 N. Make a right at Bollinger Canyon Exit.
HQ is between Walnut Creek and Dublin Pleasanton BART stations. There are buses from these stations that go to Bishop Ranch (the corporate business park that Chevron HQ is located in).
RSVP here to let us know if you will join us on May 25th: cheryl@justiceinnigerianow.org
For more information on Chevron’s toxic legacy around the world: http://truecostofchevron.com/
NEW YORK – MAY 18: Protesters hold signs with images of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon while demonstrating outside JPMorgan Chase’s annual shareholder meeting in downtown Manhattan May 18, 2010 in New York City. The protesters demonstrated against the bank’s opposition to financial reform and its mortgage practices. Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images
By Zach Carter
HUFFINGTON POST
WASHINGTON — More than 1,000 activists descended on JPMorgan Chase’s annual shareholder meeting Tuesday, according to community organizers present at the event, demanding action on the company’s foreclosure practices and calling for an end to the company’s investment in a company promoting genocide in Darfur.
Neighborhood activists, religious leaders, outraged homeowners and political activists presented the company’s shareholders with stories of alleged abuse and neglect by JPMorgan Chase, particularly from Chase’s mortgage wing, according to activists present at the event, who provided HuffPost with several photos. The shareholder meeting and demonstration were held at a JPMorgan Chase building in Columbus, Ohio, a city ravaged by the foreclosure crisis and heavy unemployment.
George Goehl, Executive Director of National Peoples’ Action, a coalition of anti-foreclosure activists, said his group briefly blocked all five entrances to the building in an effort to disrupt the shareholder meeting and show their outrage over Chase’s foreclosure policies. Goehl said NPA had bused in two separate groups of 500 activists, mostly from midwestern states.
One of the biggest subprime lenders during the housing bubble, Chase has been immersed in legal troubles associated with foreclosures, facing accusations that the bank improperly ‘robo-signed’ thousands of foreclosure documents and defrauded taxpayers. Federal banking regulators slapped the company and several other big banks with a consent order requiring it to review its foreclosure practices, although fines have not been issued. The company has apologized for illegally foreclosing on the families of active-duty military members fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a set of confidential federal audits accuse the company of abusing the Federal Housing Administration by deploying faulty documents when seeking reimbursement on foreclosures of government-guaranteed loans..
At today’s meeting, dozens of activists dressed in Robin Hood costumes used a plywood bridge to cross a series of ponds that partially surround the building. Protesters then placed model homes into the water, letting them sink in a demonstration against Chase’s foreclosure practices.
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By Robert Reich
Forty years ago, wealthy Americans financed the U.S. government mainly through their tax payments. Today wealthy Americans finance the government mainly by lending it money. While foreigners own most of our national debt, over 40 percent is owned by Americans – mostly the very wealthy.
This great switch by the super rich – from paying the government taxes to lending the government money — has gone almost unnoticed. But it’s critical for understanding the budget predicament we’re now in. And for getting out of it.
Over that four decades, tax rates on the very rich have plummeted. Between the end of World War II and 1980, the top tax bracket remained over 70 percent — and even after deductions and credits was well over 50 percent. Now it’s 36 percent. As recently as the late 1980s, the capital gains rate was 35 percent. Now it’s 15 percent.
Not only are rates lower now, but loopholes are bigger. 18,000 households earning more than a half-million dollars last year paid no income taxes at all. In recent years, according to the IRS, the richest 400 Americans have paid only 18 percent of their total incomes in federal income taxes. Billionaire hedge-fund and private-equity managers are allowed to treat much of their incomes as capital gains (again, at 15 percent).
Meanwhile, more and more of the nation’s income and wealth have gone to the top. In the late 1970s, the top 1 percent took home 9 percent of total national income. Now the top 1 percent’s take is more than 20 percent. Over the same period, the top one-tenth of one percent has tripled its share.
Wealth is even more concentrated at the top — more concentrated than at any time since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.
So what are America’s super rich doing with all this money? They’re investing it all over the world, wherever they can get the best return for any given level of risk. Treasury bills – essentially loans to the U.S. government — have proven good and safe investments, particularly during these last few tumultuous years.
You hear a lot of worries about foreigners dumping Treasuries if they lose confidence in the dollar because of our future budget deficits. What you hear less about are these super-rich Americans, who are just as likely to abandon Treasuries if spooked by future budget deficits.
The great irony is if America’s super rich financed the U.S. government the way they used to – by paying taxes rather than lending the government money – that long-term budget deficit would be far lower.
This is why a tax increase on the super rich must be part of any budget agreement. Otherwise the great switch by the super rich will make the income and wealth gap far wider.
Worse yet, average working Americans who can least afford it will either lose the services they depend on, or end up with a tax burden they cannot bear.
By Chris Arsenault
Al Jazeera
“The common denominator [with theft and “consensual” sales] is profiteering,” he told Al Jazeera.
The stories are grim and often impossible to confirm: illicit clinics, corrupt doctors and global networks dealing in human flesh.
International organ trafficking is a big business, with an estimated value of $50m in 2008, according to Michael Bos from the European Platform on Ethical Legal and Psychosocial Aspects of Organ Transplantation. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimated in 2007 that organ trafficking accounts for between five and 10 per cent of kidney transplants performed annually across the globe.
Antonio Medina, 23, a paperless Central American migrant moving through Mexico to the US, says he knows a fellow traveller who witnessed organ trafficking, after he and his wife were captured by a criminal gang.
“He was travelling with his wife and they [gangsters] took both of them,” Medina told Al Jazeera during an interview in Mexico. “They [gangsters] put them in separate rooms. He heard his wife screaming. After he went in and saw her on a table with her chest wide open and without her heart or kidney.”
Medina’s friend said he was saved from the grisly house-turned-clinic by Mexican soldiers. The claims, like many aspects of the organ trafficking business, are impossible to independently verify.
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