While I'm in a good ranting mood, lets talk about Exxon, shall we?

What are you paying for gas right now? This morning I paid a little over $3.00 per gallon.

Does anybody need to tell you that gasoline, diesel and oil prices are through the roof? (And why is diesel so much more expensive than gasoline? The stuff needs less refining than gas!)

Why are prices so high? Is it because the major oil companies continually to forget, year after year after year, to switch over from making home heating oil in the winter to making gasoline in the summer? Every year, we hear how they miscalculated, and, in the summer time, when home heating oil is at a low, Exxon has an overabundance of the stuff because they guessed incorrectly about how much they would need to provide to consumers. So, instead of making gas, they made too much home heating oil. Therefore, there was a glut of one and not enough of the other.

The simple rules of supply and demand tell us that when a commodity is scarce, the price of that commodity is driven up, even when the scarcity is artificially created...even when there is no scarcity at all, but the manufacturers of that commodity claim that there is!

Whatever the reason for the elevated fuel prices in this country and around the world, Exxon is making a ton of money! Now, folks like Rush Limbaugh claim that, even though fuel prices are high, it is not Big Oil who is reaping the benefits. Rush and hismerry band of fathead idiots claim that Exxon has to charge higher prices to the consumer because OPEC is charging them more for a barrel of oil. So, all the extra dollars that Exxon is taking in is going right out of their hands again, and into the hands of the oil producing nations.

Rush tells us that we should not look at how much money Exxon takes in. Rather than that, we should be looking at how much profit Exxon makes. (Income and profit, Mr. Limbaugh correctly points out, are two very different things.)

Okay. Let's look at profit.

On February 1st, 2008, Exxon declared its profits for the last quarter of 2007, (That's October, November and December) to be...are you ready for this?...$9.92 BILLION dollars. That BILLION with a "b". And that profit, not gross income! Now, this is not some liberal media person pointing this out; this is Exxon declaring these figures!

$9,920,000,000 profit in just 92 days!

That comes out to:

$107,826,080 profit every day,

$4,492,753 profit every hour,

$748,792 profit every minute

and $12,479 profit every single second!!!!!

I don't know, what do you think?

Do you think it's time to nationalize the oil companies?

Comments:

The thing is that they had gas up to almost $4 a gallon, so now that it's a little over $3, people think they're getting a bargain! They are clever villains... But does nationalizing them make them government property? With the government we have now... more money into the Bush/Cheney pockets? Oh dear! I don't know if there is a solution... maybe we'll install some solar panels. It's pretty sunny most of the time in Cali...

YAY!
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