Corporate Plenty

Taxing the Environment: Corporate Tax Breaks to Promote Environmental Destruction

by Gawain Kripke and Brian Dunkiel

The industries most responsible for polluting the environment and depleting natural resources frequently benefit from special tax treatment in the United states. In stark contrast, tax benefits for clean industries are worth billions less than the tax breaks for polluters.

This coddling of polluters in the tax structure exists alongside a comprehensive set of federal laws that seek to maintain clean air, water, and soil and preserve species of plants and animals. It appears that one hand of government does not know, or has chosen to ignore, what the other hand is doing. MORE >>

Scramble for the Caspian: Big Oil Looks to Divvy Up Caspian Sea Oil Riches

by Pratap Chatterjee

"Happiness is Multiple Pipelines" reads the yellow bumper sticker on the car of Elizabeth Jones, the United States ambassador to Kazakhstan. Free copies of the sticker are available to visitors to the US embassy in Alma-Ata, the Kazakh capital.

Kazakhstan is the most important of the three key producers of oil in the Caspian Sea region. Kazakhstan, plus the other two main oil producers, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, are estimated to possess 150 billion barrels of oil and 14 trillion cubic meters worth of gas under the Kara Kum Desert and other sites. At average price levels for the 1990s, the value of the oil alone is more than $2 trillion. MORE >>

Staggering Inequality

by Robert Weissman

The world is wracked by enormous inequalities in wealth, income and resources. That is the fundamental, conclusion of the 1998 Human Development Report, an annual report issued by the United Nations Development Program.

The world's 225 richest people have a combined wealth of more than $1 trillion, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47 percent of the world's people (2.5 billion persons), according to the report.

The three richest people have assets that exceed the combined gross domestic product (GDP) of the 48 least developed countries. The 15 richest have assets that exceed the entire GDP of sub-Saharan Africa. And the wealth of the 32 richest exceeds the total GDP of South Asia. MORE >>

The Overspent American

an interview with Juliet Schor

Juliet Schor is an economist who has taught at Harvard University since 1984 and is currently Senior Lecturer and Acting Chair of the Women's Studies program. She is also Professor of the Economics of Leisure and Tilburg University in the Netherlands. Schor is the author most recently of The Overspent American: Upscaling, Downshifting and the New Consumer, and previously of The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure. She is a founding member of South End Press, the Center for Popular Economics, and most recently, the Center for the New American Dream. MORE >>