Corporate Conquistadors
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- Written by Corporate Europe
- Category: Analysis
Very interesting report on the many ways multinational companies both drive and profit from environmental destruction ... and participate in the climate negotiations.
Why Sharing is a Common Cause for All
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- Written by STWR
- Category: Analysis
Given that a call for sharing is already a fundamental (if often unacknowledged) demand of engaged citizens and progressive organisations, there is every reason why we should embrace this common cause that unites us all.
Across the world, millions of campaigners and activists refuse to sit idly by and watch the world’s crises escalate, while our governments fail to provide hope for a more just and sustainable future. The writing is on the wall: climate chaos, escalating conflict over scarce resources, growing impoverishment and marginalisation in the rich world as well as the poor, the looming prospect of another global financial collapse. In the face of what many describe as a planetary emergency, there has never been such a widespread and sustained mobilisation of citizens around efforts to challenge global leaders and address critical social and environmental issues. A worldwide ‘movement of movements’ is on the rise, driven by an awareness that the multiple crises we face are fundamentally caused by an outmoded economic system in need of wholesale reform.
JOIN THE GLOBAL CALL
TTIP or Climate
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- Written by Attac/Aitec
- Category: Analysis
Trade liberalization policies and the extension of investors’ rights strengthened the international division of production systems, gave predominance to investors’ rights over environmental law and democracy, and ignored climate requirements.
In a recent article on trade liberalisation versus climate justice, both French associations make clear you cannot have both!
Global Wage Report
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- Written by ILO
- Category: Documents
ILO's New Global Wage Report:
Wage growth around the world slowed in 2013 to 2.0 per cent, compared to 2.2 per cent in 2012, and has yet to catch up to the pre-crisis rates of about 3.0 per cent. Even this modest growth in global wages was driven almost entirely by emerging G20 economies, where wages increased by 6.7 per cent in 2012 and 5.9 per cent in 2013.
By contrast, average wage growth in developed economies had fluctuated around 1 per cent per year since 2006 and then slowed further in 2012 and 2013 to only 0.1 per cent and 0.2 per cent respectively. “Wage growth has slowed to almost zero for the developed economies as a group in the last two years, with actual declines in wages in some,” said Sandra Polaski, the ILO’s Deputy Director-General for Policy. “This has weighed on overall economic performance, leading to sluggish household demand in most of these economies and the increasing risk of deflation in the Eurozone,” she added.
The Road to Dignity by 2030
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- Written by UN S-G
- Category: Documents
The somewhat disappointing synthesis report of UN's Secretary-General on the post-2015 development agenda.
The Psychology of the World Bank
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- Category: Analysis
It is now more than 25 years ago that the World Bank declared it had a dream: a world free of poverty. And because it was and remains a dream, poverty is still with us.
But the dream had some nasty consequences: it buried all research and all theories on development economics. In its World Development Report of 1990 the WB started to build its new knowledge. The title of the report was ‘Poverty’, but in fact it concerned the new economics, the new state, the new social paradigm.
World Development Report 2015: Mind, Society and Behaviour!
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- Category: Analysis
The World Bank published this week its newest World Development Report: 'Mind, Society and Behaviour'.
In a most cynical way, the World Bank now reduces poverty to a 'cognitive tax' that makes it impossible for poor people to think rationally and take adequate decisions. This report gives a 'theoretical' justification for sanctioning the 'non-deserving' poor and implicitly also for repressing resistance. A must-read.
The latest newsletter of Global Social Justice explains what is happening and how this new reasoning is a logical consequence of the World Bank's earlier thinking on poverty and development.
Is Climate Justice Movement Ready to Scale-Jump our Policies?
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- Written by Patrick Bond
- Category: Analysis
Bond argues that climate change movements, organizations and communities are not yet strong enough to shape climate negotiations. He also suggests that Latin American counterpower is vital to that struggle:
Global pessimism and local optimism: that’s how to quickly explain Climate Justice (CJ) ‘scale politics.’ Or, better: paralysis above, movement below.
The combination is on display again this week, in Lima, Peru, at the twentieth annual United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ‘Conference of the Parties’, the ‘COP20’ (actually, ‘Conference of the Polluters’ is more accurate). So it is opportune to re-assess global environmental governance as a site of struggle, one that has proven so frustrating over the past two decades.
It is time again to ask, specifically, can hundreds of successful episodes in which communities and workers resist local greenhouse gas generation (‘Blockadia’ is Naomi Klein’s term for the newly liberated spaces) or seed local post-carbon alternatives, now accumulate into a power sufficient to shape climate negotiations?
Read more: Is Climate Justice Movement Ready to Scale-Jump our Policies?
Climate and Post-2015 Development Agenda Talks Share the Same Path
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- Written by Diego Arguedas Ortiz
- Category: Analysis
The international community’s post-2015 development agenda will depend, in key aspects, on whether the delegates of 195 countries meeting now at the climate summit in the Peruvian capital reach an agreement to reduce global warming, since climate change affects all human activity.
Climate change’s effects on agriculture, health, poverty reduction or housing among vulnerable segments of the population mean progress in the search for a solution to global warming will have a major impact on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), said experts consulted by IPS at COP20.
Read more: Climate and Post-2015 Development Agenda Talks Share the Same Path
Latest news from the EU-FTT Front
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- Written by Peter Wahl
- Category: News
At the today’s AGM of the German campaign the director of the tax department in the MoF, Mr. Sell, made a briefing.
Here are the main messages:
LUxLeaks: Half-hearted response from EU Finance Ministers
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- Written by Sven Giegold
- Category: News
The finance ministers of France, Germany and Italy today sent a joint- letter to the EU commissioner for economic and financial affairs and taxation Pierre Moscovici calling for new EU legislation on aggressive tax planning, through base erosion and profit sharing (BEPS) (1).
Commenting on the initiative, Greens/EFA economic and finance spokesperson Sven Giegold stated:
Read more: LUxLeaks: Half-hearted response from EU Finance Ministers
