Walmart workers speaking at the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas, on Friday said the megastore’s staffing problems and poor pay were hurting the company’s image and contributing to lagging sales.

Their statement comes after a week of rallies across the country by labor activists, union representatives and workers in cities such as Chicago; Dayton, Ohio; and Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The demonstrators have taken aim at the plight of the company’s low-wage employees and the burden they say Walmart’s staffing policies place on working mothers.

On the floor at the shareholder meeting, Walmart worker and shareholder Charmaine Givens-Thomas, a member of activist group OUR Walmart, linked staffing shortages at Walmart stores to the company’s performance. Walmart has reported declining sales for five consecutive quarters, as well as up to $3 billion per year in losses due to stocking problems.

‘Backrooms are piling up because there aren’t enough people to get things on the floor,” Givens-Thomas was quoted as saying in a statement from OUR Walmart. ‘We struggle to deliver the customer service we pride ourselves on. And without excellent service, sales suffer.”

A study released Friday by Lake Research partners found 25 percent of Walmart’s ‘most loyal” customers were shopping there less because […]

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As most experts and layman enthusiasts will tell you, there’s no one, single explanation for the past 30-plus years of growing economic inequality. Its drivers are multiple and separating one from the other is often quite complicated. Low taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations, the gutting of labor unions, the increased mobility of capital, technological gains, overly protective intellectual property law; the list goes on.

In fact, here’s another one to add to the list: privatization. According to ‘Race to the Bottom: How Outsourcing Public Services Rewards Corporations and Punishes the Middle Class,” a new study from In the Public Interest, a think tank focused on how privatization affects the economy, the routine practice of outsourcing government functions is another important reason why the middle class is shrinking as those at the very top reap more and more of the fruits of our economy. To explain how that is – and why it’s important that people committed to economic justice push back against the practice – Salon recently spoke with ITPI research and policy director Shar Habibi. Our conversation is below and has been edited for length and clarity.

I think the general perception is that privatization/government outsourcing really kicked off under […]

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There is no mention of climate change in the 2012 Texas GOP platform and the Environmental Protection Agency is identified as an agency that should be abolished. The 2014 temporary GOP platform, revealed this week, no longer calls for the EPA to be abolished, but rather demands the elimination of onerous environmental regulations. It also mentions climate change:

While we all strive to be good stewards of the earth, ‘climate change” is a political agenda which attempts to control every aspect of our lives. We urge government at all levels to ignore any plea for money to fund global climate change or ‘climate justice” initiatives.

With the announcement of the EPA’s new rule for regulating the carbon emissions from power plants this week and the release of detailed studies from the IPCC along with the National Climate Assessment this year, climate change is emerging as one of the hottest political battlegrounds this summer. The Texas Republican Party, whose 2014 convention kicks off this Thursday, has now officially staked their claim as enduring climate deniers.

‘With the announcement of the draft EPA carbon rule this week, it’s clearly a hot topic,” Luke Metzger, founder and director of Environment Texas, told […]

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It’s official. Off-grid energy is moving from the eco-fringe to mainstream. Last month US investment bank Morgan Stanley announced that the off-grid era had arrived: falling prices for renewable energy equipment and rising prices for energy supplied by power companies are fundamentally altering the business model of the trillion-dollar electricity industry.

A key piece of the jigsaw came in another statement last month: Tesla Motors are now committing to a huge increase in battery production, bringing down the cost of energy storage capacity by over 50%. The power grid is like a giant battery and up to £500 per year of our energy bills is paying for the maintenance of that battery. Morgan Stanley calculates that Tesla’s batteries will only cost an off-grid household £350 per year, rendering the Utility company business model obsolete. “Our analysis suggests utility customers may be positioned to eliminate their use of the power grid,” says the Morgan Stanley report, Clean Tech, Utilities and Autos. “We expect Tesla’s batteries to be cost competitive with the grid in many states, and think investors generally do not appreciate the potential size of the market.”
Off-grid house in the UK An off-grid house with its own wind and solar […]

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Federal researchers examined the 29 states where renewable portfolio standards (RPS’s) have been in place for more than five years. They concluded that these standards, which require utilities to generate a certain percentage of power from clean sources, led to the development of 46,000 megawatts of renewable capacity up until 2012 – and that they raised electricity rates by an average of less than 2 percent.

(If you’re wondering why California’s green line extends above and below the zero-cost line, it’s because the researchers used two different methodologies – one suggested that the state’s ambitious standard resulted in net costs, while the other suggested that it actually resulted in net savings.)

The researchers, scientists at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, also examined other studies that have attempted to quantify the economic impacts of RPS policies: ‘A number of the studies examined economic development benefits annually or over the lifespan of the renewable energy projects, with benefits on the order of $1-$6 billion, or $22-30/MWh of renewable generation.” RPS’s can also help make electricity prices more stable, the researchers note.

And, as there’s more to life than electricity prices and economic development, it’s worth noting that RPS’s also contribute […]

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