That would seem to be the line of the executives of the oil industry.
(Whine, whine, whine) "It's not our fault that we are making so much money." (Whine, snivel) "It's not our fault that we, personally, are being paid millions of dollars." (Whine, whimper) "The money is just falling into our laps. We're the victims here."
Meanwhile, crude oil has hit $135 a barrel. No doubt that those oil executives are going to be seeking some counseling for all of the angst they are enduring as victims of the market.
Worse was the foul canard that the oil executives like to hand out, that "this wouldn't happen if we could drill fifty feet off the beaches in Miami" and so on. (Yes, the Republicans like to focus on ANWAR, but the Republican governor in Florida, some guy named Bush, was instrumental in extending the ban on drilling anywhere near the Florida coast.) It's all bullshit.
Oil is a world commodity. There is no way to extract oil off the beaches of California and keep that oil only for the US.
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Damn those guys. I loved the part where they talked about "regular people." As if they have a clue what regular people are.
They really don't control the market - economics isn't some mystical force that these guys control like some kind of money Jedi. It really is a supply-and-demand issue, with a couple of added wrinkles.
1. Oil demand is at record highs. China, India, and Russia are using oil like never before.
2. The price of oil is in dollars.
3. The dollar has been repeatedly devalued by the fed's interest rate cuts.
When you combine the lessened purchasing power of the dollar with the increased global demand for oil, it's pretty much a lock that prices will be sky high.
The prices may be sky high, but that doesn't explain what ExxonMobil and the others are doing with their vast profits. The oil companies, far from seeking to open new refineries, have spent the last couple decades buying up refineries and closing them.
Some of the reason for the prices are due to demand. A fair amount is due to the same sort of speculation shenanigans that drove up western electricity prices so high at the start of the century.
Meanwhile, the oil companies want our pity because they are being forced, forced to make record profits?
Spare me.
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