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.