Russ McBee

The majority of US corporations are evading (or at least avoiding) paying their fair share of income taxes: Two out of every three United States corporations paid no federal income taxes from 1998 through 2005, according to a report released Tuesday by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress. While $2.5 trillion ...

Following a speech in Missouri yesterday, President Bush engaged in an exceedingly rare question-and-answer session with employees of the company where he was speaking. Among other topics, he repeated his threadbare spin of ethanol as a viable fuel source: ''As you know, I'm a ethanol person,'' he said, explaining his belief that it can help ...

I'm not one to automatically trust the word of any OPEC minister, but this quote from Chakib Khelil, Algeria's energy minister, bears some consideration: Opec's president on Monday warned oil prices could hit $200 a barrel and there would be little the cartel could do to help. [...] Mr Khelil blamed record oil prices on the weak dollar and ...

China's state-owned oil company, PetroChina, held its IPO today on the Shanghai stock market. The debut raised $9 billion in one day; since this offering was only a tiny fraction of PetroChina's total stock, the company ended the trading day with a market capitalization of over $1 trillion. That's $1,000,000,000,000. This represents ...

This article provides an in-depth survey of the current state of international arms trading. A couple of choice quotes: Vast government subsidies are sought after in the pursuit of arms trading. US and European corporations receive enormous tax breaks and even lend money to other countries to purchase weapons from them. Therefore tax payers ...

Well, this certainly isn't a good sign: Venezuela and Iran are forging closer oil ties in hopes of reducing their dependence on the United States, inking a $4 billion deal to develop a block of the lucrative Orinoco Reserve in Venezuela. According to Venezuelan Oil and Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez, production at the Ayacucho 7 block should ...

This Bloomberg article (via Andrew Eder) goes into quite a bit of detail about TVA's current and past nuclear program. This part caught my eye (although I don't know how these estimates were derived): Investment banking consultant Gary L. Hunt, president of Global Energy Advisors in Sacramento, California, estimates the cost of building a ...