Corporate Profits, Iraq War, and George Bush

Guest author, retired MAD Magazine editor, Al Feldstein writes:

Nearly 4000 innocent American G.I.'s have died... over 29,000 American G.I.'s have been wounded and maimed... and over a million Iraqis have been slaughtered, wounded or maimed in the Bush Administration/PNAC/NeoilCon's "War In Iraq"...which was started in order to stop Saddam Hussein, with the help of the French, the Germans, the Russians and the Chinese, from extracting Iraq's oil and marketing it outside of the control of OPEC and America's "Big Oil" Companies.

Here are this Quarter's results:

Exxon shatters profit records: Oil giant makes corporate history by booking $11.7 billion in quarterly profit; earns $1,300 a second in 2007.
http://snipurl.com/1ys6v

Chevron 4th-Quarter Profit Rises on Record Oil Prices : Fourth-quarter revenue climbed 29 percent to $61.4 billion, Chevron said. Price gains more than made up for a 1.6 percent decline in oil and natural-gas production.
http://snipurl.com/1ys6y

Shell Rakes in $8.5 Billion in Three Months: Royal Dutch Shell, the world's second-largest publicly traded oil company, today reported net income up 60 percent last quarter to a record $8.47 billion
http://snipurl.com/1ys70

 
In contrast...

When America was attacked by Japan at Pearl Harbor in 1941...and the U.S.declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy... President Roosevelt announced that no one was going to make any money out of that war!

He asked the Congress to pass two bills to fund that war: the "Corporate Excess Profits Tax" (which set 1940 as a benchmark and taxed all Corporate profits above that amount at hugely increasing tax rates...and the "Individual Progressive Income Tax" (which taxed individual incomes progressively over a base amount...increasing up to 95%.

There were no obscene Corporate Profits like those above... and no Corporate executives... no movie stars or sports figures keeping a major portion of their multi-million dollar salaries... as they do today.

Every Corporation and every Individual contributed to the funding of

America's participation in World War II.

Not like today.

Today...our Treasury has been ransacked...our National Debt has rocketed sky high...and the ordinary citizen is paying for this "Iraq War" and the War on Terrorism... while America's millionaires and America's Big Corporations are raking it in, enjoying their low taxes and stuffing their pockets.

How are you doing financially?

Incidentally, gasoline was about $1.00 a gallon in 2000...shortly before Bush entered office.

MAD-ly yours,
Al Feldstein