Petrol Prices

"Everything that happens happens as it should, and if you observe carefully, you will find this to be so."

My goodness how people love to bitch about changes in the Market. I suppose if you were fundamentally ignorant of almost every single aspect of the economic activity of the world complaining is a lot easier than becoming informed. Being the helpful current affairs junky that I am, I have decided to break it down nice and simple like for you all. So there are these companies that retrieve, distribute and sell petroleum right? And they do this for profit. The largest companies are state-owned operations like Saudi Aramco and Petrobras, but the ones we Americans deal with the most are multinational companies. You see if state run companies ever tried the shady shit that the multinationals did it would be very obvious who could hold accountable. So what we see in the unprecedented rise in the per-barrel price of oil is almost entirely the work of the big five- Exxon Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, Chevron Texaco and Conoco Phillips. Now these corporations would also be able to be held accountable if they did anything too blatant to raise prices, but they are hardcore capitalists, and thus very wily. They know for a fact that the end of easily available oil is going to, in time, completely eliminate the market for their good and service. Consequently they are seeing that they get top dollar while the demand lasts. The occupation of Iraq, the political tensions with Iran and Venezuela, and MEND's continued actions in the Niger Delta have all played completely into their desire to get higher profits than any corporations in the history of Capitalism. So it really isn't that complicated, and as a result could be fixed relatively easily if the American consumer was keener on flexing its economic muscle than the traditional brainless bitching. As much as they destory the world and harm its inhabitants, I can't even really blame the oil companies for doing what corporations are designed to do- make money. Is it their fault that poor countries governments don't stop them and Western consumers are subserviant idiots being led by corrupt opportunistic leaders? I personally would argue that as much as they profit from these situations, it wasn't they that created them (although they played a large part).

"Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth." -Marcus Aurelius