STWR - Share The World's Resources

15th October 07, John Feeney, Growth is Madness

There’s a simple theme in today’s environmental writing. It shows up in titles like “Cut Your Consumption by Switching to Fluorescent Light Bulbs,” “Lawmakers Developing Fuel Economy Plan,” and “Is Wind Power Right for You?”

The trend is to promote reduced personal resource consumption. And it’s a crucial part of the solution to our energy and ecological woes.

10th October 07 - Parshuram Rai, Countercurrents.org

More than 24,000 people die of hunger every day, nearly 78 percent of them women and children. More than 1.4 billion people in the world face chronic hunger and over 13 million die of hunger every year. They die of hunger not because the world does not have enough food for the entire population, but because of insensitive and callous values where profit in the marketplace seems to be the final arbiter of human destiny.

10th September 07 - Steve Rendall, CommonDreams.org

During the 20 years of FAIR’s existence, there have been two periods when mainstream journalists made promises about dedicating themselves to greater coverage of poverty, racism and inequality. The first followed the Los Angeles riots of 1992 (Extra!, 7-8/92); the second was after Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans (Extra!, 7-8/06). Both promises went largely unfulfilled.

9th September 07 -John Pilger, New Statesman

Class allows us to connect the present with the past and to understand the malignancies of a modern economic system based on inequity and fear

A state of parallel worlds determines almost everything we do and how we do it. The word that once described it, class, is unmentionable, just as imperialism used to be. Thanks to George W Bush, the latter is back in the lexicon, if not at the BBC.

3rd Sept 07, Admin, WorldChanging

In a new study, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) reports that the gap between the rich and poor in many Asian countries, particularly China, has grown significantly in recent decades as economies have boomed. The United States is struggling with the same issue as new technologies such as the Internet converge with fluid and speculative economic markets, bolstering the “super-rich,” according to The Observer.

31st August 07, Sarah Anderson, Foreign Policy in Focus

European business leaders have traditionally taken home far less compensation than their American counterparts. But European executive compensation has been rising, and these pay increases have citizens in European nations deeply concerned.

In fact, public outrage on both sides of the Atlantic has contributed to an unprecedented political debate over what to do about excessive executive pay.

16th August 07 - Seumas Milne, The Guardian (UK)

Britain is facing a crisis of inequality. As the American economist Paul Krugman warned a couple of years back, we are witnessing the "return of the robber barons" of the 1920s and a winner-takes-all society. It's not just the billionaire oligarchs and tax-avoiding Lear jet commuters who flaunt their wealth alongside rundown housing estates - or the boardroom kleptocrats in gated communities who award themselves eye-watering bonuses at the expense of insecure, low paid workers. After 10 years of New Labour administration almost all the main indicators are moving in the wrong direction as Britain heads back towards Victorian levels of inequality.