Economy

Most people think of downtown Houston, Texas as ground zero for the oil and gas industry. Houston, after all, serves as home base for corporate headquarters of oil and gas giants, including the likes of BP America, ConocoPhillips, and Shell Oil Company, to name a few.
Comparably speaking, few would think of Wilmington, Delaware in a similar vein. But perhaps they should. Utilization of the "Delaware Loophole" is far from the story of a few bad apples gone astray for the industry. Tax cheating in Delaware goes far above and beyond the Marcellus Shale. All of the oil and gas majors, with operations around the world, take full advantage of all Delaware has to offer.

More than 75 percent of the additional income generated in New Jersey went to the top 20 percent of households, with the richest 1 percent receiving the bulk of the increase. The bottom 40 percent lost income and everyone else experienced stagnate income or minimal growth that failed to keep pace with inflationary costs.
According to the report this growing divide has hurt the vulnerable the most, including single mothers, ethnic minorities and those with less education.

According to a new poll, Americans believe the government should be doing all it can to rebuild our nation’s manufacturing base, regardless of party affiliation.

Every year Alabama spends millions on subsidies to businesses. Are they worth it in terms of creating jobs?
Yesterday countrycat noted that Toyota is receiving millions in giveaways and incentives -- ultimately paid for by the rest of us -- to help them expand and, so the story goes, create jobs. Among those incentives is a break on utility rates:
In addition, the city will seek a $150,000 state site development grant and ask Huntsville Utilities to give Toyota an "investment initiative" credit worth $974,000.
Is anybody measuring the effectiveness of these giveaways in terms of creating jobs? How much public and communal money are we spending per job created? Is it worth it or are we getting taken to the cleaners? And when did utilities get involved?

In May, the European Commission said it was concerned that Google was favoring its own services in search, copying material from websites of competitors without permission, shutting out advertising competition and placing restrictions on the portability of online search advertising campaigns from its platform, AdWords, to the platforms of competitors. Commissioner Almunia told the company to offer changes or face a formal statement of objections with the risk of fines in the billions of dollars. In Europe antitrust penalties can be imposed before a court proceeding.
Besides the the European antitrust investigation, the Internet giant faces antitrust investigations by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and several states. Antitrust officials in Korea, India and Brazil are also looking into Google's business practices. A European deal could well serve as a blueprint for settlements with other authorities.

In what appears to be a depressing pattern of behavior, Senators Richard Shelby & Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III once again voted to protect the super rich at the expense of the rest of us.

Losing 16,000 jobs will be an economic blow for Oklahoma, but Republicans can't have it both ways. If they want to "right-size" government, to use the words of Gov. Mary Fallin, then that means people will lose jobs and their income will be pulled from the economy.

While the mendacious Mitt Romney raked in campaign cash from wealthy donors in Aspen on Monday and continued to hide information from the American people about the millions he has stashed in offshore tax havens, President Obama called on Congress to extend Bush-era tax cuts for the 98% of Americans who earn less than $250,000 per year. President Obama made clear that he views this election as a competition between two fundamentally different visions for the Country.

In stark contrast to Ronald Reagan, here in Virginia, Bob McDonnell and his fellow Republican'ts -- puppets of Grover Norquist's absolutist pledge against any taxes, anytime -- have refused to raise transportation revenues, despite the fact that Virginia needs $700 million/year more "just to fix its crumbling roads and bridges." And, of course, we need billions more if we want to go beyond just maintaining what we've already got.