 22nd May 07 - David R. Francis, The Christian Science MonitorProspects for stabilizing the world's soaring population have taken a blow. This development, if not reversed, will have huge economic, environmental, and political impacts on most people alive today. Two years ago, the United Nations projected that the number of people on this planet would reach 8.9 billion by 2050. In March, the UN Population Division revised that projection to 9.2 billion. If UN demographers are right, in 43 years the world's population will increase by 2.5 billion, up from 6.7 billion today. That growth is equivalent to how many people lived on Earth in 1950. The difference in the two UN projections, separated by only two years, is equal to today's population of the United States. |
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 3rd May 07 - Dean Baker, Centre for Economic and Policy Research / TruthoutThe Center for American Progress issued a useful report last week on ways to reduce and eventually eliminate poverty. The report proposed a national goal of cutting the number of people in poverty by half within a decade, and eliminating poverty altogether within a generation. While these are worthy goals, and the report describes many carefully designed policies for achieving them, there is a more basic problem that must also be considered in confronting poverty: We often don't count poor people. The point here is simple. The Labor Department's Current Population Survey (CPS), the generally accepted basis for poverty data, doesn't reach many of the people who fall below the poverty line. In fact, it is likely that factors associated with poverty, such as unstable living situations and an alienation from government, are causing the CPS to exclude many poor people from the survey. In the 1980s, the CPS covered approximately 93 percent of the US population. This effectively means that the CPS surveyors were able to contact people and receive answers in 93 percent of the homes they targeted. This coverage rate edged down in the 1990s, and has fallen to just 89 percent during the current decade. This means that they miss about 11 percent of the homes they target. |
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3rd May 07 - Gary Olsen, ZNet
Ernest Hemingway's wry reply to Fitzgerald was: "Yes, they have more money."
A less clever but potentially more instructive response might be: "Why?"
The top 1 percent of Americans are now receiving the largest share of national income since the pre-Great Depression year 1928. The top 10 percent get 48.5 percent of total income, an obscene rate of inequality.
According to Princeton University professor Peter Singer, the top 0.01 of taxpayers or 14,000 Americans earn an average of $12,775,000 with total earnings of $184 billion. The rest of the 0.1 percent, or 129,600 individuals, now have an average income of just over $2 million. And the top 0.5 or 575,900 have an average income of $623,000.
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 26th April 07 - Joel S. Hirschhorn, The Progress Report
Stop being a compliant consumer. Face the ugly truth. Don’t get fooled by the stock market. Accept the need for the mistreated middle class to become the revolutionary class. The British military establishment's most prestigious think tank sees what too few over-consuming Americans are willing to anticipate. Unjustified and mounting economic inequality is planting the seeds for global economic conflict.
Here is what the new report from the UK Defense Ministry's Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre warned might happen by 2035. "The middle classes could become a revolutionary class. The growing gap between themselves and a small number of highly visible super-rich individuals might fuel disillusion with meritocracy, while the growing urban under-classes are likely to pose an increasing threat...Faced by these twin challenges, the world's middle-classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest." |
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Professor Jeffrey Sachs, one of the world's foremost economists, is this years host at the Reith Lectures. Hosted by Sue Lawley and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Sach will argue over five talks that the world is in a period of turbulent transition and that the biggest challenges need to be navigated by broader and deeper global co-operation. In this first lecture, Bursting at the Seams, Sachs outlines that the 21st century will be marked by severe natural resource limits, the rise of new economic powers and the threats of failed states. These are tectonic changes with the potential to unleash global-scale upheavals, he says. Global cooperation of an unprecedented depth and scale will be needed, but we are not yet prepared for such cooperation. A transcript of the first lecture follows below. |
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 17th April 07 - Chuck Collins, The Morning Call
When it comes to the exorbitant pay of America's corporate chief executive officers, everyone likes to quote Louis Brandeis, who said ''sunshine is the best disinfectant.''
But if you still have an infection after sitting in the sun for 15 years, maybe it's time for some stronger medicine.
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was concerned enough to issue new regulations last July requiring broader disclosure of top management pay and perks. SEC Chairman Christopher Cox quipped that if these CEOs ''are forced to undress in public they'll pay more attention to their figures.''
In the coming weeks, the full picture of 2006 executive compensation will come into focus. But preliminary reports indicate that total compensation packages will continue to gush to top managers.
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 12th April 07 - Joel S. Hirschhorn, The Progress ReportAmericans have always accepted a certain level of economic inequality as the inevitable consequence of an open capitalist society where some people through their own efforts do better than others. The presumption is that there is fairness in the marketplace and economic system. What a quaint, outdated belief.
Do most Americans really believe that the game is not rigged by rich powerful elites to preferentially benefit them? As certain as the law of gravity, the game IS rigged, and more than ever. |
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