-
1 of 10
-
2 of 10
-
3 of 10
-
4 of 10
-
5 of 10
-
6 of 10
-
7 of 10
-
8 of 10
-
9 of 10
-
10 of 10
The oil-gopoly is ruining America
Archive
Comments
Story
Shadowy financial wizards – oli-gopolists – have pulled off the biggest heist of all time, to the tune of $35.9 billion last year.
We call this group of wizards ExxonMobil Corp., who made the largest profit ever last year, making more than $1,300 a second – just wait. One freakin’ second?
Not even the lawyers suing Motiva and Equilon charge by the second! These two companies are joint-venture fronts for Shell Oil Co., Chevron Corp. and Saudi Refining Inc., which are fronts for our biggest players, ExxonMobil, Conoco-Philips and BP Amoco PLC. The lawsuit – Madani v. Shell – represents 23,000 gas station franchise owners, who allege that through collusive price-fixing methods, Shell and its subsidiaries overcharged – get this – those owners to the tune of a $250,000 each. Did I mention that only covered the years 1999 to 2003?
With no choice but to pass on the “savings at the pump,” the rest of America is now footing the bill for unethically high prices.
The oil companies are screwing us. Not just U.S. citizens, but everyone around the world. Here’s how it went down. When Chevron and Texaco formed a post-NAFTA “joint venture,” they realized that instead of driving profits down to undersell themselves and gain customer loyalty through quality, they realized they controlled everything, and could charge whatever prices they wanted to gas station franchise owners – the franchisees’ profit margins are so low that more than one robbery a month can bankrupt them. Why else would they invest more than $1,000 on Plexiglass booths in crime-ridden areas? If trickle-down economics worked, these gas station owners would be filthy rich too.
Instead, the wizards decided to bite the hands that fed them.
And they won’t be the last to attempt to bring down the oil cartel, the biggest unchecked monopoly on the face of the earth.
So now we live in the era where gasoline production is at an all-time high, and oil exploration is also big business. If you look up the average pump price in western or eastern United States prior to 1999, it was half what we pay now. Right now, my cheap gas is $2.69 a gallon, and I’m relieved, because I ran my credit card debt up $3,000 over the last three years, since gas is now so expensive that normal Americans can’t pay in cash – they put it on the card. Perhaps a significant chunck of our national credit card debt – $14 trillion and rising – could be owed to gasoline prices.
Putting it on the card has been a great policy for short-handing America. We’ve almost tripled our national debt under Bush, and allowing these collusive profiteers to gouge our fat wallets makes it so that we are paying most of our money to the people who hold our credit ratings and future lives in hock.
Remember those days when gas was affordable, and still profitable? That was the era of “the almighty dollar,” which is now a reputation in decline. Too many imports and not enough exports have made our dollar weak, and since the price-per-barrel is set by Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) in U.S. dollars, it’s no wonder that gas and everything else is overly expensive. Tell your senator it’s time for sanctions against Shell, Texaco, Exxon, BP and all the rest of the refineries’ middle-men.
These are the companies that’ve not only made our gasoline, but our winter heat, our milk, our meat, our health care, our automobiles, our education, and practically every other necessity so expensive that we calmly accept debt as a way of paying for dinner – that’s Congress for you, making Americans’ lives more complicated.
Who else is done with this idea of paying hidden fees at every step? All of our interest payments every month go to the over-fat wallets of Fortune 500’s beneficiaries. These guys are so rich they don’t know what else to do with their money, but buy their own designer islands, build underwater hotels, and make Dubai the richest nation on earth, partly from the island-and-hotel racket, but also from having an indoor ski resort.
Rumor has it that Dubai is building a Wyoming island for our Dictator-in-Vice Cheney, and public record has it that Dubai is now the home for the multinational corporation Halliburton.
Imagine all the interest these companies are making off our interest, since we now go in debt to pay for their profits – subsidies are a wonderful economic motivator, right? Maybe for Dubai, yeah, but the United States is going broke at the seams.
Just Google Madani vs. Shell, and you’ll definitely want to learn more. Apparently, this lawsuit challenges the idea that these joint ventures that have been selling us out were supposed to save us $800 million a year through “synergy” and “cost-effectiveness,” by eliminating competition. What happened, of course, is that gas prices have doubled, and geopolitical instability is the best excuse market apologists have for high prices.
If you’re not angry yet, then either you are not paying attention – not to me, but the outrages of the oil companies raping our wallets at the pump—or you might be one of them lucky rich fellers that done got tax cuts from some good ole buddies.
Michael McLaskey
