Caught the news tonight, and it drew my attention in when it was starting talking about the stock market and other financial news. Amazing news in that the Dow went up by 200 point, but the NASDAQ fell. That was, in large part, due to news that Facebook didn't meet projections with their first quarterly report since going "public." I put that in quotes because the way it was done makes it so it isn't really a public stock. But that is a different rant.
Part of their financial report was to state that the price of a gallon of gas is on the rise. Up 17 cents over the last month. I have a couple of issues here. Let's start out with the fact that this is about the first time since it started rising again that they have reported on it. Yet every time it went down even a penny from one day to the next we heard about it. Why is that? Some may begin to think that there is some control being exerted by the oil companies, and I almost agree. I'm just not convinced that unbalanced coverage like this equates to the oil companies controlling things.
The other issue? The whining that these oil companies continue to do. We apparently subsidize these oil companies for what reason I can't remember. There was a story about that a couple of months ago because a couple of senators were attempting to get the subsidy revoked. And I think that is a great idea considering what was broadcast tonight. Oil giant Exxon/Mobile recorded a record profit of $8.4 billion for the quarter that just closed. That's right, 1 quarter of the year, 3 months! They made a profit like that while they continue to raise prices and state that they don't make money on the gas. This is just the kind of crap that is killing this country! Why do we continue to either fund these companies or give them tax incentives?
Of course, there is a limit to how much senators are going to push for this. And that is even more true during an election year. Considering that the sitting president is a Democrat, you will be hard pressed to find a Democrat that would not support this as they want to win the election to retain "control" of things. And you will be hard pressed to find a Republican who will not support this because they want to win the election to gain "control" of things. The problem is that there will be a lot of talk about how they want to end this subsidy, but it will be pushed back until the election is over because a lot of the funding for these elections comes from the same oil companies that they are claiming to oppose. Once the election is over, the winning party will not want to talk about the subsidy while the losing party will want to talk about how much the other party is stalling. And this kind of talk will happen for just over 3 years when the next election year comes up and things start all over again.
That is just my opinion on why it will never change. And you can apply this to just about any large business, they all contribute large sums of money to campaigns. They also throw elaborate private parties for these representatives. And why are they private? So they can influence their vote in favor of their needs. Again, just my opinion.
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