Soaked At the Pump [View All]

From The Nation:

...Five big oil companies -- ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco, ConocoPhillips, BP and Shell -- now control 61 percent of the gas station pumps in America, and also roughly half of our oil refinery markets and domestic exploration and production. "It is no surprise that gasoline prices are skyrocketing as we approach Labor Day weekend," says Public Citizen's Wenonah Hauter. "This is what you get when you have a handful of mega-corporations dominating the market, and it is what we predicted when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) allowed massive consolidation of the oil industry in 1999 and 2000."

Public Citizen thinks Congress should hold investigative hearings into the Labor Day weekend gas price hikes. The FTC's own schizophrenic reports suggest someone ought to step up and mind the store. Consider the FTC's March 2001 study into a spike in Midwest gasoline prices -- which found that everything was OK and above-board even though the price spike was partly driven by "conscious (but independent) choices by industry participants" to intentionally withhold supplies. (Which industry participants? FTC says that's secret. But I'll give you five guesses.)

So the oil majors regularly pull this wide-eyed act with us, and pronounce themselves dismayed that it's summer again, and people are driving cars, and paying the oil companies more than ever before, isn't it awful? And then, to keep things murky, they also throw in some mumbo-jumbo about how this truck full of oil got a flat tire in Utah, and then there were six unusually sunny days in a row, and Mars is closer to Earth than it's been in 60,000 years, and Bob lost the keys to the refinery storeroom.

The "energy bill" before Congress, by the way, does nothing to help with any of this -- not in regulating the oil companies, not in demanding fuel economy of cars. It does, however, find billions and billions more of your tax dollars to give away to already-wealthy Big Oil. Why? Because Congress can...>>MORE

http://www.thenation.com/outrage/index.mhtml?bid=6