NEWS: Enjoying Your Gas Rape?

POLITICS: Enjoying Your Gas Rape?

Gas prices are now over $4 a gallon. Shocking, isn’t it? Who would have thought having an oil man in the White House would lead to crazy high gas prices? Being a Californian, I never thought something like this would happen, especially after Enron and other energy companies completely raped my state state in 2001, while the president sat back and watched.

Later we learned energy companies had manipulated the market, starting with lobbying for deregulation in the late '90s and ending with using the new rules to anally fuck the entire state of California. Even though it was quite obvious what was happening at the time, the Bush administration did nothing, even as our state government (Democrats) begged for help.

Now the same is happening with oil. This isn’t a supply and demand problem. Anyone who believes that is a fucking moron. We are paying high prices due to speculation. Over the past decade there has been…wait for it...yep, the development of unregulated international derivatives trading in oil futures. That has led the rich to create an oil bubble, so they can make up for all the money they lost during the real estate bubble burst. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer.

Sure, they tell us it’s all due to the dwindling world oil supply. Of course, most of the sources of that information are the same guys who will profit from just such a situation. Much like the manufactured Social Security “crisis,” this is all about a certain group of people who are trying to make more money. And now, they are.

Oh, scary.

I bet.

See, those two assholes are making shitloads of money driving up the price of oil. They are speculators. They desperately want us to believe that India and China suddenly began sucking up all our sweet oil. But that’s just not true. Sure, oil use is going up, but it does not justify the insane rise in prices we have seen here in the US.

The first culprit is our dollar. What a giant, hideous turd our dollar has become. The Bush plan to fight our economic woes is to drive down the price of the dollar. He’s hoping that will stimulate exports and tourism, which will make everything A-okay. He’s obviously a fucking idiot. The devaluing of the dollar is part of the reason gas prices have been shooting up, which causes the price of everything, food, goods, to shoot up, was well.

On the supply side, we’re doing fine.

And yet, prices keep going up, up, up. I’m not saying prices shouldn’t be going up. They should. A bit. But doubling and tripling, and I get that 2001 California déjà vu feeling. This is rape, all over again.

Congress is going to start looking into this latest rise in prices this week, but I don’t expect much to happen. Our presidential candidates, like Hillary Clinton, are running around blaming OPEC. That shipped sailed a long time ago. Control of oil prices is now in the hands of Wall Street. In 2006, the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations issued a report on “The Role of Market Speculation in rising oil and gas prices.” What they found was a giant loophole in the regulation of oil derivatives trading.

And now those “few hedge fund managers” are taking advantage of that loophole while they can, while Bush is still in office and before Democrats gain a massive advantage in Congress. We’re in the middle of a greedy binge and it’s not going to stop until next year – because the only people who can do something about it don’t care.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission is mandated by law to ensure prices reflect supply and demand, rather than market manipulation or speculation. Right now, the CFTC is a no show, just like the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission sat on its ass during the California energy crisis. But you tend to not do anything about a crisis when it's all your fault. That’s how the Bush government works.

In January 2006 the CFTC changed the rules of oil futures speculation – and I know you’re not going to believe this, but the CFTC actually changed the rules so there is no oversight. Crazy, huh? The US government energy futures regulator made sure there would be no regulation. Who would have thought such a thing would happen under Bush? At this point, people within the US trading crude oil, gasoline and heating oil futures can avoid ALL oversight requirements by routing their trades through London instead of New York.

Huh. Shocking. When CFTC changed the rules in January 2006, the price of oil was $60 a barrel. Now it is up to $134 a barrel. There is now no way to actually detect price manipulation because daily reports are no longer required. From the 2006 Senate report:

Basically, you’re getting F’ed in the A, and there is nothing you can do about it. This is the point where I laugh at all the lower income idiots who voted to put an oil man in the White House and thought it would work out great. Fuck you. You deserve this.

It’s gotten worse as of late because now the hedge funds, banks and other investors are jumping in. Now these speculators are driving up the cost of oil. The market does not see a difference between a barrel of oil being purchased by a speculator and a barrel being purchased by a refiner, or some other user of petroleum. Basically, around 50% of the price of oil is due to pure speculation. But no one really knows, because Bush deregulated the whole thing. We have very high supplies of oil and high oil prices. How awesome is that? It’s like the diamond business - only we don't all NEED diamonds.

I am so not looking forward to dealing with this...

Well shit.

You know what my favorite thing about gas rape is? How they jack the prices waaaay the fuck up, and then drop them a few cents, and everyone gets excited about it. Like FUCK YEAH, GAS IS DOWN TO $3.40!!! When just a few months before you were like $3.40 FOR GAS? AAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

rape bulletin from italy.

1 liter = 0.264 gallons
1 euro = 1.58 dollars

1 gas liter at the average pump today = 1.51 euro

this all translates to:

1 gallon in italy = 5.7 dollars

it's not even anal rape, it's like having your dick cut off, and then being anally raped with it.

nuff said.

double post, sorry!

Yeah I atleast bring lube now when I go the pumps so i can atleast fake that it doesnt hurt as much.

When does Captain America appear to give Bush a solid right cross to his jaw?

Just the other day, I stopped at a gas station I don't normally use to fill up. All of the card-reader things on the pumps are taped over. Annoying? Yeah, sure. I walk up to the counter to use my debit card to fill up. "You know, there's a two-dollar charge to use your card, right?" "No, I didn't know that, asshole. Give me my card back and I'll go somewhere else." I hear this is becoming a common practice in a lot of stations...

It's actually $9 for a gallon. But still. Fuck.

To be fair; as someone who has worked in a small business, the credit/debit card companies charge a fee, sometimes a flat rate, sometimes a percentage of the sale, to the business owner. Sometimes the owners of the business will swallow this cost as a courtesy to the customers.

My guess is that as prices rise, people are filling up less with each transaction, thus the processing fees for credit/debit cards are becoming unprofitable for the owners to simply absorb.

The owner of the individual gas station is not benefiting from the inflated gas prices either. All the profits from these inflated prices are being funneled directly to big oil.

What's the tax per liter? I understand that Europe has much higher gas taxes than we do. You aren't as impacted by the higher price of crude oil as we are because the dollar (which is the currency used in the international markets) has lost so much value compared to the euro.
But you're still paying too much, even so.

I was pissed last night because I don't get out of work until 11pm, and I was running waaay low on gas (not enough to get home) and I went to the station that I usually go to (I'm doing the boycott of Exxon/Mobil), and they're still open, but shut the pumps off at night now. It's a fucking AUTOMATIC pump, why the fuck is it shut off? So I had to go up the street to the fucking Exxon station and put 3 gallons in so that I could get home safely, where they charged me more than $0.20/gallon more than at the Irving down the street. Fucking disgusting. And then I get back home, and gas is $0.22 a gallon cheaper that at the Irving in portsmouth! Fucking speculators.
The oil empires cry that their margin is only 9%...it's easy to have a low profit margin and high operating expenses when you fly a fleet of corporate jets, and your top-tier executives take up $5 billion just from their salaries and benefits. Seriously. When you pay your execs obscene salaries, you're going to have low margin. Scumbags.

IIRC, the retailers make about 8 to 12 cents per gallon in net profit, usually less than 10 cents.
Net profits for the oil companies are around 40 cents per gallon. Taxes, depending on your state, are usually between 40 and 50 cents per gallon.
Like it or not, FTR is right - speculation is driving up the price of crude more than anything else. It was also a big part of the housing bubble: the "flip this house" mentality.
And the decline in the dollar does hurt, because any economic boost from the increase in our exports is being offset by higher energy prices.
You can't completely rule out supply and demand as a factor - because speculation is driven by anticipated future demand - but you can't plausibly claim that supply and demand is the main issue any more.

Oh, no doubt at all. My post was really a response to the person I quoted, who seemed to be expressing ire at the stations for charging transaction fees on cards. I agree completely that speculation has driven up costs in both the oil and housing markets.

Again, I agree completely, and don't think I ever made such a claim

I always wondered, who the F is setting the price of oil barrels? And, kinda knew it was b.s. since obviously the ones setting it were the ones profitting from it.

So, how did this total deregulation, thus the exploitation of gas consumers' money (everyone's), of oil start and when? Was it the genius idea of having Bush in two terms of office? And, since the ones that can change it obviously won't because it was their fault to begin with (intentionally), what or who can stop it?

Ah, the gas station: that once mighty and blissful oasis at the corner of every intersection, Anytown, U.S.A.; where one could load up on Twinkies, windshield wipers, 2-for-1 packs of Camel Lights, and dreams; where pretty soon the phrase "Fill 'er Up!" would no longer refer to the declarative mission statements of industrious magnates, directing the wheels of Motor City's finest machines to Manifest Destiny; but rather, "Fill 'er Up?" -- now, a defeated and dejected, euphemistic expression from destitute 21st century drivers -- propositioning oral pleasure to passersby and other station patrons for just enough fuel to get home.

"I'll suck yo' dick"?

Indeed, Big Oil, we shall.

MORE ON THE REAL REASON
BEHIND HIGH OIL PRICES, PART II
by F. William Engdahl
May 21, 2008

As detailed in an earlier article, a conservative calculation is that at least 60% of today's $128 per barrel price of crude oil comes from unregulated futures speculation by hedge funds, banks and financial groups using the London ICE Futures and New York NYMEX futures exchanges and uncontrolled inter-bank or Over-The-Counter trading to avoid scrutiny. US margin rules of the government's Commodity Futures Trading Commission allow speculators to buy a crude oil futures contract on the Nymex, by having to pay only 6% of the value of the contract. At today's price of $128 per barrel, that means a futures trader only has to put up about $8 for every barrel. He borrows the other $120. This extreme "leverage" of 16 to 1 helps drive prices to wildly unrealistic levels and offset bank losses in sub-prime and other disasters at the expense of the overall population.

I got these cheeseburgers man...

Other things I've read and heard led me to believe that futures trading had a lot to do with the way oil prices have been going, but according to the minutes of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee Meeting for May (paragraph 11):

They appear to be specifically referring to Brent Crude (ie North Sea oil, though this is regarded as a benchmark) for the pricing of 2/3 of crude oil traded internationally), and I know they only refer to 'recent months'... but does this make them morons too? Eh, I don't really understand.

That was a rhetorical "you", not a reference to you specifically. Sorry.

Oh, and fuck the small business owners, too. (That is, fuck the ones who try to make a whole bunch of wrongs right by just tossing another wrong into the pile.) It's a debit card, there's no charge for using one. (At least not at the other thousand places I've used it.) Not that the law's always right (it usually isn't), but I think what the gas station owner tried to do constitutes a not very sly form of theft. (At least not as sly as the "hedge fund" (WTF is that?) assholes who are openly raping us, but still illegal never the less...)

is this why it takes so long to wait in line at the pump for people sitting inside their cars?

have they thought of 'self serve' as a good time to whack one off??

You didn't read anything I wrote did you?

There has always been a fee to use a debit or credit card, it's just that before now, gas station owners could afford to take it on the chin. Different kinds of businesses still get charged that fee, it's just that the goods and services they are selling haven't been so dramatically affected.

Before, when a person could afford to put twenty dollars into their gas tank at every transaction, then it was doable for the station owners. Now, if a customer can only afford ten bucks at each transaction, the business owners are now absorbing twice that fee for each twenty dollars worth of goods sold.

It sucks, and business owners don't like doing it, precisely because of the negative reaction of customers, but if they do it, it's probably that or get rid of credit/debit transactions at their station entirely.

This is why cash-only stations are, and have always been, significantly cheaper than stations that do accept plastic as a form of convenience for their customer. A debit card is not like using cash. It is like an instantly-verifiable check, and just like a check, there are fees associated with it's processing.

Don't like it? Start paying cash. It's the bank that's raping you on the transaction fee, not the gas station.