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	Inequality is a Choice by Joseph Stiglitz The Great Divide   It’s well known by now that income and wealth inequality in most rich countries, especially the United States, have soared in recent decades and, tragically, worsened even more since the Great Recession. But what about the rest of the world? Is the gap between countries narrowing, as rising economic powers like China and India have lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty? And within poor and middle-income countries, is inequality getting worse or better? Are we moving toward a more fair world, or a more unjust one?   These are complex questions, and new research by a World Bank economist named Branko Milanovic, along with other scholars, points the way to some answers.   Starting in the 18th century, the industrial revolution produced giant wealth for Europe and North America. Of course, inequality within these countries was appalling — think of the textile mills of Liverpool and Manchester, England, in the 1820s, and the tenements of the Lower East Side of Manhattan and the South Side of Chicago in the 1890s — but the gap between the rich and the rest, as a global phenomenon, widened even more, right up through about World War II. To this day, inequality between countries is far greater than inequality within countries.   But starting around the fall of Communism in the late 1980s, economic globalization accelerated and the gap between nations began to shrink. The period from 1988 to 2008 “might have witnessed the first decline in global inequality between world citizens since the Industrial Revolution,” Mr. Milanovic, who was born in the former Yugoslavia and is the author of “The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality,” wrote in a paper published last November. While the gap between some regions has markedly narrowed — namely, between Asia and the advanced economies of the West — huge gaps remain. Average global incomes, by country, have moved closer together over the last several decades, particularly on the strength of the growth of China and India. But overall equality across humanity, considered as individuals, has improved very little. (The Gini coefficient, a measurement of inequality, improved by just 1.4 points from 2002 to 2008.)   So while nations in Asia, the Middle East and Latin America, as a whole, might be catching up with the West, the poor everywhere are left behind, even in places like China where they’ve benefited somewhat from rising living standards.   From 1988 to 2008, Mr. Milanovic found, people in the world’s top 1 percent saw their incomes increase by 60 percent, while those in the bottom 5 percent had no change in their income. And while median incomes have greatly improved in recent decades, there are still enormous imbalances: 8 percent of humanity takes home 50 percent of global income; the top 1 percent alone takes home 15 percent. Income gains have been greatest among the global elite — financial and corporate executives in rich countries — and the great “emerging middle classes” of China, India, Indonesia and Brazil. Who lost out? Africans, some Latin Americans, and people in post-Communist Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, Mr. Milanovic found.   The United States provides a particularly grim example for the world. And because, in so many ways, America often “leads the world,” if others follow America’s example, it does not portend well for the future.   On the one hand, widening income and wealth inequality in America is part of a trend seen across the Western world. A 2011 study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that income inequality first started to rise in the late ’70s and early ’80s in America and Britain (and also in Israel). The trend became more widespread starting in the late ’80s. Within the last decade, income inequality grew even in traditionally egalitarian countries like Germany, Sweden and Denmark. With a few exceptions — France, Japan, Spain — the top 10 percent of earners in most advanced economies raced ahead, while the bottom 10 percent fell further behind.   But the trend was not universal, or inevitable. Over these same years, countries like Chile, Mexico, Greece, Turkey and Hungary managed to reduce (in some cases very high) income inequality significantly, suggesting that inequality is a product of political and not merely macroeconomic forces. It is not true that inequality is an inevitable byproduct of globalization, the free movement of labor, capital, goods and services, and technological change that favors better-skilled and better-educated employees.   Of the advanced economies, America has some of the worst disparities in incomes and opportunities, with devastating macroeconomic consequences. The gross domestic product of the United States has more than quadrupled in the last 40 years and nearly doubled in the last 25, but as is now well known, the benefits have gone to the top — and increasingly to the very, very top.   Last year, the top 1 percent of Americans took home 22 percent of the nation’s income; the top 0.1 percent, 11 percent. Ninety-five percent of all income gains since 2009 have gone to the top 1 percent. Recently released census figures show that median income in America hasn’t budged in almost a quarter-century. The typical American man makes less than he did 45 years ago (after adjusting for inflation); men who graduated from high school but don’t have four-year college degrees make almost 40 percent less than they did four decades ago.   American inequality began its upswing 30 years ago, along with tax decreases for the rich and the easing of regulations on the financial sector. That’s no coincidence. It has worsened as we have under-invested in our infrastructure, education and health care systems, and social safety nets. Rising inequality reinforces itself by corroding our political system and our democratic governance.   And Europe seems all too eager to follow America’s bad example. The embrace of austerity, from Britain to Germany, is leading to high unemployment, falling wages and increasing inequality. Officials like Angela Merkel, the newly re-elected German chancellor, and Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank, argue that Europe’s problems are a result of a bloated welfare spending. But that line of thinking has only taken Europe into recession (and even depression). That things may have bottomed out — that the recession may be “officially” over — is little comfort to the 27 million out of a job in the E.U. On both sides of the Atlantic, the austerity fanatics say, march on: these are the bitter pills that we need to take to achieve prosperity. But prosperity for whom?   Excessive financialization — which helps explain Britain’s dubious status as the second-most-unequal country, after the United States, among the world’s most advanced economies — also helps explain the soaring inequality. In many countries, weak corporate governance and eroding social cohesion have led to increasing gaps between the pay of chief executives and that of ordinary workers — not yet approaching the 500-to-1 level for America’s biggest companies (as estimated by the International Labor Organization) but still greater than pre-recession levels. (Japan, which has curbed executive pay, is a notable exception.) American innovations in rent-seeking — enriching oneself not by making the size of the economic pie bigger but by manipulating the system to seize a larger slice — have gone global.   Asymmetric globalization has also exerted its toll around the globe. Mobile capital has demanded that workers make wage concessions and governments make tax concessions. The result is a race to the bottom. Wages and working conditions are being threatened. Pioneering firms like Apple, whose work relies on enormous advances in science and technology, many of them financed by government, have also shown great dexterity in avoiding taxes. They are willing to take, but not to give back.   Inequality and poverty among children are a special moral disgrace. They flout right-wing suggestions that poverty is a result of laziness and poor choices; children can’t choose their parents. In America, nearly one in four children lives in poverty; in Spain and Greece, about one in six; in Australia, Britain and Canada, more than one in 10. None of this is inevitable. Some countries have made the choice to create more equitable economies: South Korea, where a half-century ago just one in 10 people attained a college degree, today has one of the world’s highest university completion rates.   For these reasons, I see us entering a world divided not just between the haves and have-nots, but also between those countries that do nothing about it, and those that do. Some countries will be successful in creating shared prosperity — the only kind of prosperity that I believe is truly sustainable. Others will let inequality run amok. In these divided societies, the rich will hunker in gated communities, almost completely separated from the poor, whose lives will be almost unfathomable to them, and vice versa. I’ve visited societies that seem to have chosen this path. They are not places in which most of us would want to live, whether in their cloistered enclaves or their desperate shantytowns. Visit the related web page
	Worldwide protests call for freeing journalists and Greenpeace activists held in Russian prison by Greenpeace International   December 18, 2013   Russian Parliament passes Amnesty Bill to grant Freedom to Greenpeace Arctic 30 protestors, and Pussy Riot band members as Russian Amnesty Law Passes.   With a vote of 446-0 in the Russian parliament, the passage of an amnesty bill came as a welcome relief to the international Greenpeace team known as the "Arctic 30," and two jailed members of the Russian protest music group Pussy Riot, all expected to be released.   The amnesty is timed to boost Russia"s image ahead of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, due to start in less than two months. An amendment to the amnesty law on passed Wednesday morning extended the amnesty to suspects in cases of hooliganism, which includes the Arctic 30, arrested aboard the Greenpeace ship the Arctic Sunrise in September. The Greenpeace activists expressed relief, though Arctic Sunrise captain Peter Willcox said: "There is no amnesty for the Arctic."   Ana Paula Maciel from Brazil is one of the people who was seized in international waters when the Greenpeace ship Arctic Sunrise was boarded by armed Russian commandos nearly three months ago. Reacting to today’s developments, she said:   “I’m relieved, but I’m not celebrating. I spent two months in jail for a crime I didn’t commit and faced criminal charges that were nothing less than absurd. But now at last it seems like this saga could soon be over and it may not be long before we’re back with our families. Right now my thoughts are with our Russian colleagues. If they accept this amnesty they will have criminal records in the country where they live, and all for something they didn’t do. All because we stood up for Arctic protection.”   22 November 2013   The United Nations-backed International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea today ordered that Russia release the Greenpeace ship and its crew that it seized in September following a protest over oil drilling off its coast.   The Arctic Sunrise – an icebreaker operated by the environmental group and which flies the flag of the Netherlands – was boarded by Russian officials on 19 September, brought to the port of Murmansk Oblast and detained.   Last month, the Netherlands instituted arbitral proceedings against Russia under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, claiming that that the arrest and detention of the vessel and its crew by Russia violated the treaty.   By a vote of 19 to 2, the Tribunal’s judges today ordered that, pending arbitration, Russia “shall immediately release the vessel Arctic Sunrise and all persons who have been detained…”   The Arctic Sunrise was used by Greenpeace International, a non-governmental organization, to stage a protest against the offshore ice-resistant fixed platform ‘Prirazlomnaya’ in the Barents Sea.   October 5, 2013   Thousands of people are today taking part in an emergency day of solidarity protests around the world to demand the release of 30 people imprisoned in Russia after they were detained aboard a Greenpeace ship in the Arctic.   Peaceful events are taking place on every continent, in more than 135 locations across 45 countries. There are also protests planned across Russia.   This week, 28 Greenpeace activists, and a freelance photographer and a videographer, were charged with piracy by a Russian court following a peaceful protest against Arctic oil drilling at a Gazprom oil platform in the Pechora Sea. If convicted, the offence carries a maximum 15 year jail term. Lawyers acting to defend the thirty have appealed against their detention.   Since the seizure of the Arctic Sunrise ship in international waters two weeks ago, one million people have sent letters to Russian embassies demanding their immediate release. Greenpeace International Executive Director, Kumi Naidoo, has described the events in Russia as the most serious assault on the group’s environmental activism since the bombing of the organisation’s flagship, Rainbow Warrior, in 1985.   Kumi Naidoo said: “The activists were taking a brave stand to protect all of us from climate change and the dangers of reckless oil drilling in the Arctic. Now it’s imperative that millions of us stand up with them to defend the Arctic and demand their immediate release. Gazprom, Shell and the other oil companies rushing to carve up the Arctic and destroy its fragile environment must see that we are millions and we will not be bullied and intimidated into silence. We stand as one, in countries across the world, demanding the release of these thirty brave men and women.” Those arrested hail from 18 different countries.   Mikhail Fedotov, the chairman of an advisory panel on human rights assigned to oversee the judicial process in Russia, told the Interfax news agency that there was "not the slightest basis" for the piracy charges. "This is not justice, it"s a reprisal," Fedotov said.   Lawyers for the 30 have filed appeals against the decision to hold them in detention, according to reports, but they could remain in jail for weeks more.   “Our activists have been charged with a crime that did not happen, they are accused of an imaginary offense," said executive director Kumi Naidoo. "An effort is underway to intimidate us, but our peaceful passionate campaign will not be silenced."   In the wake of the incident, that took place in the Pechora Sea on September 18, Greenpeace released photos and video of the events as they unfolded and has said the footage makes it self-evident that the activists were not only peaceful but were the victims of threatening, and dangerous manuevers by the Russian Coast Guard and the agents who boarded the Arctic Sunrise.   An assault on the very principle of peaceful protest, by Jess Wilson.   It is bitterly ironic that as the world celebrated Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday as International Non-Violence Day, 30 non-violent, peaceful protestors sat locked up in jail cells in Russia. Yesterday, 13 activists and one freelance videographer were formally charged with piracy, and today the remainder. Now all 28 activists and crew, plus a freelance photographer and videographer, have been unjustly charged with piracy simply for trying to — as Gandhi once famously said — be the change they want to see in the world.   At Greenpeace, we subscribe to the same set of beliefs that Gandhi lived; non-violence is at the absolute core of all of our work to defend the planet. His teachings have inspired civil rights leaders from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr to the Dalai Lama and Rosa Parks, and for more than a hundred years now, peaceful activists everywhere. To this day, the head of Greenpeace International, Kumi Naidoo, quotes Gandhi virtually every time he speaks: “First they ignore you; then they ridicule you; then they fight you; then you win.”   He would say that since they’re fighting us, we’re one step closer to winning.   But the fight to protect this planet from those that would exploit it has never been a fair one. Year after year, campaign after campaign, courageous activists all over the world choose time and again to put their personal liberty on the line to give voice to the voiceless, to even the playing field, to force governments to act where they have failed, and to speak truth to hugely powerful forces. They do this because the political system is disempowering; because they are tired of greed dictating our futures and industry controlling our governments; because time is running out and they feel they have a duty to act.   They act peacefully, and with the courage of their conviction. They are always non-violent. They bend rules when they feel they are unjust and they push boundaries to expose injustices and get important issues put on the table. There is often a legal response, and our activists take full responsibility for their actions. But never before has a reaction to a peaceful protest been so disproportionate, so wholly absurd as this one.   In the last 13 days since the Arctic Sunrise was seized, legal and human rights experts all over the world have risen up, unsolicited, to denounce these preposterous charges; over 60 NGOs and hundreds of influential people all over the world have spoken out in support of the activists, and more than 800,000 letters have been sent to Russian embassies. Countless individuals from every conceivable walk of life have joined the cry to free the Arctic 30 because they know as we do that these charges are bigger than 30 people — they are an assault on peaceful protest, on the value of non-violence, on democracy everywhere.   http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/climate-change/arctic-impacts/free-our-activists/ http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/multimedia/slideshows/Arctic-30-Global-Day-of-Solidarity/ Visit the related web page
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