Ham on Wry Award

Do you recognize this piccture from 1974-purchasing gas on either odd or even days in lines that stretched for miles, wondering if it would ever end?  I wrote about this topic last week, but, since first quarter profits have been released, I am revisiting it with a different emphasis.  This time the oil companies steal the limelight and earn the Ham on Wry award for the week or maybe even the month.

Exxon-Mobil earned a staggering 10,7 billion dollars in profits during the first three monthe of 2011.  You might be thinking that happened because oil prices skyrocketed during the same period or it had an astounding surge in production. Au contraire!  Those obscene prices occurred because of an arbitrary decision to raise gas prices when oil prices jumped.  Exxon-Mobil's earnings top all others, but BP raked in 7.1 billion dollars in profits the first quarter.  That particularly sticks in my craw, because BP has yet to pay for the total costs of oil clean-up and the incumbent losses of businesses along the Gulf Coast.  Added to that,dolphins are dying in large numbers and marine life has been adversely affected.  As Alaska learned after the Valdez spill, some of the effects can't be calculated for decades.  In my system, BP deserves the biggest "boo" of all; however, Shell, Conoco  and Occidental also realized profits of 6.9 billion, 3 billion, and 1.55 billion respectively.

Once again, ordinary citizens must pay for the rampant greed of giant corporations that couldn't care less about the effect of gas price hikes.  Please don't preach the value of laissez-faire economics and unbridled capitalism to me in a comment.  We have ample evidence of how trustworthy those systems have been in studying the econmic debacle that occurred in 2008 at the hands of unscrupulous companies, and, before that, we had Enron, WorldCom, etc., etc. etc.  American citizens have morphed into the proverbial frog that jumps in a pot of water, only to realize too late that the water has reached the boiling point, and it can't excape.  What are we to do?  It's up to us to figure that out, because I don't see a prince on a white horse coming to our rescue.  I'll deal with that whole question in another post.