Skip to main content

Earth Day: Scientists Say 75% of Known Fossil Fuel Reserves Must Stay in Ground

Adam Vaughan The Guardian (UK)
In its “Earth statement”, the group said that three-quarters of known fossil fuel reserves must be left in the ground if warming was not to breach a rise of 2C, the “safety limit.” Spelling out what a global deal at the UN climate summit in Paris should include, the group demanded governments adopt a goal of reducing economies’ carbon emissions to zero by mid-century, put a price on carbon and that the richest take the lead with the most aggressive cuts.

Unpaid Russian Workers Unite in Protest Against Putin

Andrew E. Kramer The New York Times
After months of frustration with an economy sagging under the weight of international sanctions and falling energy prices, workers across Russia are starting to protest unpaid wages and go on strike, in the first nationwide backlash against President Vladimir V. Putin’s economic policies.

Frances Fox Piven on Syriza and Greece’s Prospects for Fighting Austerity

Alexandros Orphanides In These Times
"I think that the effort by these institutions and the German banks to resist Syriza’s demands for a larger haircut, a larger reduction of the debt, will be greater because the model of Syriza is so promising: They have taken this strong political initiative, standing with the country’s social movements, but also allowing them autonomy."

The Recovery Fails to Deliver Rising Wages

Gregory N Heires The New Crossroads
The Economic Institute reports "2014 Continues a 35-Year Trend of Broad-based Wage Stagnation." Those at the top are the only ones to have a real increase in pay.

A Trade Rule that Makes It Illegal to Favor Local Business? Newest Leak Shows TPP Would Do That And More

David Korten Yes!
The document substantiates claims by opponents that the TPP is a corporate-rights agreement designed to facilitate the export of U.S. jobs, allow corporations to sue governments for enacting labor and environmental protections, make it illegal for governments to favor local businesses, and advance the colonization of national economies by global corporations and financiers.

Five Years After the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill, We Are Closer Than Ever to Catastrophe

András Tilcsik and Chris Clearfield The Guardian
Not far from the Deepwater Horizon accident site, Royal Dutch Shell is now developing the deepest offshore oil field in history. In the Caspian Sea, an international consortium is exploring the Kashagan oil and gas field, a mega-project that the consortium itself describes as an enormously challenging endeavour. And the hunt for Arctic oil takes place in some of the most inhospitable waters in the world.

Low-Wage Workers’ Struggles Are About Much More than Wages

Arun Gupta The Bullet
The success of the organizing is due to everything from the abysmal recovery from the 2008 economic crisis to Occupy Wall Street's role in shifting the national dialogue from austerity to economic inequality. But Fight for 15 is due primarily to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which initiated the campaign in 2011 and has poured tens of millions of dollars into growing waves of protest that are battering the image of the fast-food giants.