Full Circle

It is not the American consumer that is the victim of "Big Oil" when he goes to fill up and sees the numbers on the pump price sign whiz by like the hundredths-of-a-second digit on the clock in the final minute of a basketball game (the Chevron station where I go jumped a dime a gallon yesterday - six cents between lunch and dinner).  It is the American consumer that is the victim of the entity that wants to scapegoat (and nationalize) "Big Oil" for the predictably disastrous results of its own environmentally extremist energy policies:

Gasoline prices are through the roof and Americans are angry. Someone must be to blame and the obvious villain is “Big Oil” with its alleged ability to gouge consumers and achieve unconscionable, “windfall” profits. Congress is in a vile mood, and has dragged oil industry executives before its committees for show trials, issuing predictable threats of punishment, e.g. a “windfall profits tax.”

But if there is a villain in all of this, it is Congress itself. That venerable body has made it impossible for U.S. producers of crude oil to tap significant domestic reserves of oil and gas, and it has foreclosed economically viable alternative sources of energy in favor of unfeasible alternatives such as wind and solar. In addition, Congress has slapped substantial taxes on gasoline. Indeed, as oil industry executives reiterated in their appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on May 21, 15% of the cost of gasoline at the pump goes for taxes, while only 4% represents oil company profits.

To understand the depth of congressional complicity in the high price of gasoline, one must understand that crude oil prices explain 97% of the variation in the pretax price of gasoline. That price, which has risen to record levels, is set by the intersection of supply and demand. On the one hand, world-wide demand has accelerated mainly due to the rapid growth of China and India.

On the other hand, supply has been curtailed by the cartel-like behavior of foreign national oil companies, which control nearly 80% of world petroleum reserves. Faced with little competition in the production of crude oil, the members of this cartel benefit from keeping the commodity in the ground, confident that increasing demand will make it more valuable in the future. Despite its pious denunciations of the behavior of U.S. investor-owned oil companies (IOCs), Congress by its actions over the years has ensured the economic viability of the national oil company cartel. [emphases added]

And why wouldn't they?  Marxists of a feather agitate together, after all.

Maxine Waters' verbal slip last week was less a gaffe than simply moderately premature.  The political wind is all at the Democrats' backs despite their hard left buffoonery.  Indeed, in that sense they truly deserve PR-incontinent Barack Hussein Obama as their standardbearer, in that he's doing everything humanly possible to make himself maximally radioactive politically, and if he succeeds in upsetting Hillary, he will nonetheless cruise to victory in November, and bring a reprise of the Jimmy Carter era right into office with him.

He calls that "change"; I call it reactionary.

Perhaps I've reached a milestone in my life: I'm now old enough that a majority of the electorate is too young to remember what the day-to-day reality of the Carter years were like.  The anti-energy policies; the "windfall profit taxes"; oil and gas price controls and the shortages, and resultant long, miserable gas lines, they generated.  I was in junior high school, but I was starting to pay attention to current events, and my father had plenty to say on the subject.  I would surmise that anybody under the age of fifty never had to put up with the consequences of these Donk-imposed energy market distortions directly, and my precocious political awareness made me a decided minority among my contemporaries.

To anybody not eligible for AARP membership, they haven't personally felt the pain of the Dem energy policy agenda that Mac Owens articulates.  That and most Americans' abysmal ignorance of history and basic economics (as well as common sense - over which, as Ronald Reagan once reminded us, there is a great deal of overlap) provide a thick layer of insulation for the Dynamo-shutter-downers.  Thus do long-discredited socialist policy nostrums get endlessly recycled: eventually, the electorate turns over sufficiently that a majority of voters once again do not know any better.  The hell of it is we all have to learn the lesson anew.

Or, in the words of the noted philospher Rancid Crabtree, "If you stay in one place long enough just about everything will pass by twice."

For my money, I would rather pay four bucks a gallon at the pump than spend fortnightly afternoons waiting my turn to get at the damn thing.  Even better, why not "stop fulminating against IOCs and reverse current policies that discourage, indeed prohibit, the production of domestic oil and natural gas" so as to "create incentives for domestic producers to invest in exploration and to increase production" and "caused oil prices to tumble"?

Unfortunately that's not the world we live in.  At least until this generation gets a taste of Obamanomics, and vomits its Carteresque architect out of its electoral mouth.