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  2. OILigarchy: Obscene?

OILigarchy: Obscene?

By grrlscientist on October 26, 2006.

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The petroleum giants were raking in money hand over fist while all of us were sweating blood over gasoline prices that had reached $4 per gallon in many parts of the country -- all during the so-called "gas shortage" caused by Gulf War 2.

Exxon Mobil Corp. on Thursday said its profit rose to $10.49 billion in the third quarter, making it the second-largest quarterly profit ever recorded by a publicly traded U.S. company.

The world's biggest oil company said its net income amounted to $1.77 per share for the July-September period, up from $9.92 billion, or $1.58 per share, a year ago.

We all are paying for this increased cost of gasoline, whether we have a vehicle or not. Not only does the price of gasoline affect how much you pay at the pump, but it also affects the cost of everything that relies upon transportation at some point anywhere it its marketing, between its point of origin and the time when it comes into your possession.

Someone remind me again as to why oil companies are so heavily subsidized by the government when renewable fuel resources don't get nearly that much? Why, according to the rethuglican agenda, do large corporations deserve welfare while unemployed, underpriviledged people do not?

Cited story.

More information about oil companies and their government subsidies.

Image source.

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cultural observation
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Unemployed, underpriviledged people cannot afford lobbyists.

From the aforementioned article:

The roster of those receiving government financing over the past year certainly includes some of the country's largest oil and gas companies. In Baku, financing for the pipeline will assist two U.S. oil giants, Unocal and Amerada Hess. In Indonesia, where Bush promised increased U.S. financing to secure support for his war on terrorism, OPIC loaned Unocal $350 million to develop an oil and gas field. In Russia, OPIC provided 116 million in loan guarantees to Marathon Oil and Royal Dutch/Shell for a project off Sakhalin Island, and Ex-Im pledged $300 million for several other private oil projects. And in Nigeria, the export bank provided $135 million in October to help a subsidiary of Halliburton -- the company where Cheney served as CEO -- expand a natural-gas production facility. Over the past decade, the two agencies have provided $32 billion in loans and guarantees for corporate energy projects. Intent on expanding oil reserves beyond the Middle East, President Bush has nearly doubled the Export-Import Bank's authority to assume debt, to $100 billion. "Obviously, the U.S. government is looking at alternative sources of oil to diversify our consumption," says Bo Ollison, a spokesman for the agency. "We are part of the strategy."

$4 a gallon? That's an outrage, I've never heard anything so horrific.

I had originally intended the preceding comment to be humourous, and I included references to playing the world's smallest violin in pseudo-html style. The posting system evidently took it to be actual html, albeit nonfunctional, even though I specifically used coding to prevent that, and despite it working just fine in the preview after a couple tries.

Just for the hell of it, I'll try again.

<world's smallest violin>$4 a gallon? That's an outrage, I've never heard anything so horrific.</world's smallest violin>