What a Gas!

     Where I live (Massachusetts), the gas prices are obscene.   But that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.  With a reported national average of $3.639 (from GasPriceWatch.com), they’re obscene everywhere. Not for the first time — and certainly not for the last — I paid nearly $30 for a tank of gas.  The actual total was $29.00, at $3.659 or so a gallon, and I probably could have pushed the other dollar but I didn’t want to spill it on the ground as happened recently.   It shut off around $27.50 or so, but I’ve done the stop when it shuts off gag and the tank’s not full.  I’m not saving the extra fifty cents, first of all, and second I can usually get another dollar or so anyway.

     It’s gotten to the point where I can’t drive or walk past a gas station without taking note of the prices thereon.  And quite frankly, it makes me sick.  But what makes me sicker is thinking about the hearings held at the beginning of this month.  As I write, I’m two hours to MayDay.  Appropriately, if the information I found was correct, Congress called the Big Six Supermajors to accountability on 01 April… giving never-more-appropriate meaning to the term “April FOOLS Day.”

     I mean, honestly, if the Democratic Primary is politics’ version of Wrestlemania — as I fear it will turn out to be — then this was Slammiversary or King of the Ring.  But at least we know the WWE is not real and that people’s futures won’t drastically change with the outcome of Vince McMahon’s latest production.  The same can’t be said for what goes on in Washington, however.

     According gaspricewatch.com, where I found a chart of state-by-state tax rates and the national tax, the national average was actually $3.44 a gallon, with the highest being $4.25 in California and the lowest being $3.07 in New Jersey.  Even without the state taxes, given what I paid for my own gas, about eight and two thirds gallons worth, I still paid nearly twenty-seven dollars.  (In Massachusetts the state tax is $0.235/gallon.)  Then add to that the Federal tax of $0.184/gallon and you come up to the utterly-ridiculous rate of $0.419 in taxes alone, making my actual cost $26.36.

        The big oil companies were called to task for their price gouging by a congress that is all but guilty of a tu quoque attack, themselves being guilty of high taxes on gas and everything else.  (Then we are told, by the liberals and media, that the wealthy don’t pay enough for tax… when everyone pays too much, something this writer will deal with in an upcoming post, so stay tuned.)  Fortunately, the executives were smart enough to call their inquisitors on the point.  However, taxes only deal with part of the issue.  At a cost of $115/barrel – driven, we are told, by the “world market”, a convenient if truthful excuse – that in and of itself is nothing short of a crime against humanity.  But oil price is not set by ExxonMobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Chevron, British Petroleum and Total.  It is set by a cabal made up of the cartel of nations little more virtuous than the Colombian drug lords called the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC for short.  The only difference is that energy is legal, while drugs of that nature are, for the most part, not.  Between them and the speculators, it’s almost a difference between choosing the electric chair and being hanged.

        Not only that, but the most influential members of OPEC include Iran and Venezuela, run by a pair of terrorist-supporting America-haters in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez.  It also includes Saudi Arabia of questionable virtue and several other Muslim nations that have been less than friendly to the United States.  These nations, while they don’t totally control the price of oil, have major influence over it.  And like an ever-growing monster, they have extended an invitation to Canada (among others) to join. 

        And in this case, the Supermajors have a point.  They don’t control the price of oil… but they do have considerable influence on the price of gasoline.

        The Saudis say they can’t push any more crude oil.  They say they’ve opened a field of last resort which will “keep” the daily output at twelve and a half million barrels a day.  Are they telling the truth?  I doubt it.  What I believe is the truth is that they’re telling us what they’d like us to believe is the truth.  Whether or not it actually is the truth is entirely coincidental.

OPEC is, as I said, a cartel.  They’re businessmen just like your average insurance salesman.  They need to make a profit too.  Okay maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration… I wouldn’t want to demean the insurance salesman like that, considering I’d certainly trust the most dishonest insurance salesman light years before I’d trust the most honest member of OPEC.  Not only is it a cartel, but it has the most liberal tax-happy lawmakers in its back pocket.  The libs talk about big business and government being hand in hand.  Takes one to know one, guys.

     This is another casualty of the War in Iraq, folks.  Because of the war, the Iraqi oil industry is, de facto, nil.  Has been since about 2003 or earlier.  The problem is that it will not greatly improve the situation once it is fully back on line which may be years into the future.  With gas averages soaring toward the $4 mark – and it is not inconceivable that they will hit the $5 mark either – it’s going to be a long haul.  But honestly, what effect, if any, will Iraq coming back online in the world of Oil production have on the prices?

Probably not much.

The problem is that once we have the supply to finally meet the demand, the prices won’t come down.  The governments – to say nothing of the terror-sponsors who own the foreign oil companies, the fat-cat Supermajors who hand out half-billion-dollar retirement packages to senior executives, or the speculators who have driven the price of oil yet higher still – are too greedy.  Controlled by liberals, they will increase the taxes on gas and everything else every chance they get.

Case in point: Liberals constantly talk about “rolling back the ‘Bush Tax Cuts’” and they get cheered.  Why do people cheer them?  Is the phrase “rolling back the ‘Bush Tax Cuts’” a synonym for “raising taxes”?  They talk about “raising the tax on the wealthy”… when they really mean “raise the tax on everyone”.

     The Iraqi oil industry coming back online won’t do anything.  Forget not much.  It will do nothing.  The problem is greed.  Pure and simple.  Whether it’s the mullahs who own the oil drilling companies in the middle east or companies like Conoco-Phillips, British Petroleum or that ubercompany ExxonMobil or pols like Teddy Kennedy and Nancy Pelosi, it comes down to greed.  The amount of the supply is immaterial.  The question to the congressional panel about the taxes was and is subterfuge.  There are no plans to give us a break in the near – or, most likely, distant – future when it comes to gas.  The companies don’t want to give up their profits, and rightly so, but the government doesn’t want to give up its cash cow either.  It’s another liberal waste of time and the people’s money to have even held these hearings.

        This, folks, is essentially what liberals are elected to do: waste the people’s time and money doing things that have absolutely no real effect on anything.  It’s like an old Soviet-era joke: a man emigrates to the West sometime during the reign of Brezhnev.  He returns during the late eighties and sees an old friend.  He asks the old friend how things have changed under Gorbachev.  The friend goes and gets a bucket full of potatoes and an empty bucket.  He pours the full bucket into the empty one.  “But comrade,” the émigré says, “nothing has changed.”  “Ah,” the friend notes, “but think of the noise it creates!”  Same thing with all of these hearings against big business.  They’re little more than noise so the people on the committees can say they actually did something other than vote themselves raises and recesses during their terms in office.

        When it comes election time, if it’s a conservative that’s defending the seat, they conveniently tell the people how the incumbent forgot about them and instead focused on other things – such as supporting the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – or voted to aid companies like the SuperMajors and raise taxes on the middle and lower classes while simultaneously giving “tax breaks to the wealthy,” that holy grail of liberal jingoistic mumbojumbo.  They then promise to do everything in their power to make the rich pay their fair share and bring responsibility to corporate America.  Responsibility, of course, being defined as “from each according to his labours, to each according to his need.”  If that quote looks familiar, it should.  It’s a line straight out of socialism.  (On the aside, for the record, not only do I support the Bush Tax Cuts and think they should be made permanent, I don’t think they go far enough!)

If they are still in power, they glorify their own record – whether it actually involves voting or not – at the expense of whatever real or imagined adversary they stood up for and beg to be sent back, ostensibly to continue the fight.  They promise to stand up for whatever “right” the party or society thinks should be spread about whether it’s abortion, “civil rights”, gay “marriage”… whatever.  What they really desire to do is to go back and continue to waste time and the people’s money… while also attempting to get an ever-increasing slice of an ever-decreasing pie.  If they would just tell us this from the beginning, would it not waste a whole lot less time and energy?  Then maybe we could elect someone whose goal is to actually get things done in government and get out… the way it was meant to be.