Reports

Chevron’s 2008 Annual Report to its shareholders is a glossy celebration heralding the company’s most profitable year in its history. Its $24 billion in profits catapulted it past General Electric to become the second most profitable corporation in the United States. Its 2007 revenues were larger than the gross domestic product (GDP) of 150 nations.

What Chevron’s Annual Report does not tell its shareholders is the true cost paid for those financial returns: the lives lost, wars fought, communities destroyed, environments decimated, livelihoods ruined, and political voices silenced. Nor does it describe the global resistance movement gaining voice and strength against these operations.

It is difficult to evaluate an administration after only 100 days. George W. Bush, who ended his two terms with one of the lowest grades of any U.S. president, received quite positive evaluations after his first three months in office. The Obama team is still bringing people on board and identifying its priorities. Still, the crises facing the United States and the world require immediate and comprehensive action. And, as no less an authority as Aristotle once put it, well begun is half done.

To address our nation's economic crisis and maintain our nation's fiscal health, the United States desperately needs new sources of federal revenue. Without additional revenues, we as a nation will either have to shortchange long-overdue investments in infrastructure, health, energy, and economic opportunity or leave an unsustainable debt to generations ahead.

The incredible firestorm over the $165 million bonus payout at failed insurance giant AIG has dramatically revealed the depth of the public anger at private companies that enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. Congressional action to recoup these bonuses through taxes would be a positive step, but merely undoing the AIG bonuses will leave in place tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies for banks and corporations that routinely overcompensate their executives. This report includes a chart that identifies key taxypayer subsidies for executive excess and the various reforms now pending in Congress that speak to these problems.

This report provides an overview of the recently enacted American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 — also called the “Economic Stimulus Package.” Its primary objective is to provide federal funds and tax breaks so as to stimulate spending and foster economic growth during this time of deepening recession.