TWO FROM ZNET

First an essay from good guy journalist Greg Palast:

Secret U.S. Plans For Iraq's Oil


The Bush administration made plans for war and for Iraq's oil before the 9/11 attacks sparking a policy battle between neo-cons and Big Oil, BBC's Newsnight has revealed.

Two years ago today - when President George Bush announced US, British and Allied forces would begin to bomb Baghdad - protestors claimed the US had a secret plan for Iraq's oil once Saddam had been conquered.

In fact there were two conflicting plans, setting off a hidden policy war between neo-conservatives at the Pentagon, on one side, versus a combination of "Big Oil" executives and US State Department "pragmatists."

"Big Oil" appears to have won.

Click here for the rest.

Next, an essay on how great wealth isn't simply a result of hard work:

The Cavernous Divide

But to suggest that membership in the growing billionaires’ club requires only a combination of hard work and character traits ignores some dramatic shifts in global economic rules that explain the cavernous divide that has developed between the very rich and the very poor.

Tax rates have fallen on upper income citizens and corporations worldwide. Fifty years ago in the United States, the highest marginal income tax rate was 91 percent; today it is 34 percent. As recently as 1979, taxes on capital gains from the sale of stock, real estate and businesses were 35 percent; today they are 15 percent. Corporate taxes as a percentage of the US economy have shrunk from 4.1 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 1965 to just 1.5 percent in 2002. While corporate taxes have declined throughout the world, they have plummeted in the United States, leaving only Iceland among industrialized countries with a lower corporate tax burden.

Several of the wealthiest billionaires capitalized on public assets and made their fortunes by buying formerly public assets. This was the case with Mexican Carlos Slim Helu, the world’s fourth richest man, who used inherited wealth to buy a substantial share of Mexico’s privatized national telephone company. US billionaires Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Steve Ballmer of Microsoft, and Larry Ellison of Oracle would not be in Forbes’ top 20 billionaires had the US government not invested tens of billions of public dollars developing computers and the Internet.

Some billionaires’ fortunes rest upon paying their employees poverty wages. Such is the case for the Walton family (numbers 9 through 13 on the Forbes list.)

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