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Our Workplace Press articlesProfit and Speculation = Robbery at the Pump
Gasoline prices went through the roof last week. It was yet another sign that Big Business stops at nothing when it comes to amassing profit.
ExxonMobil made a startling 11 billion dollars in profit during just the first three months of this year – before this latest round of price gouging.
But even ExxonMobil was put to shame by the speculators – big financial players who have been buying up contracts for deliveries of crude oil, withholding oil from the markets to drive up prices, then selling the contracts, raking in hundreds of millions of dollars in a week.
We are living through a repeat of the housing bubble. While financial players drove up the price of housing in a mad speculative drive, Wall Street banks bought up mortgages, bundled them together, resold them – only to repeat this scam many times over, in a vast second wave of speculation tied to housing.
The collapse of the housing bubble left several million households in ruin, and many tens of millions more facing serious financial problems.
A few speculators may have gotten caught out, but the rest moved on to more fertile fields.
Crude oil, for example. Today, speculators are creating a new “bubble” in the oil markets. And we pay the price in higher costs for transportation, electricity, heat and even food, since petroleum goes into the fertilizers used in commercial farming, and into the diesel used to ship agricultural products.
That’s only the half of it. Speculative money has been pouring into basic agricultural commodities – wheat, corn, oats, soy, sugar, coffee – driving the wholesale price on some of these staples up four, five or even ten times what it was a year ago. Along with those high prices go higher prices for meat, milk and eggs, since animals feed on these same grains.
Some of the biggest financial interests are involved in this latest round of speculation, as are the oil companies and big agribusiness concerns – not to mention major industrial corporations, which would rather speculate than invest in production.
In this country, we are pinched every time we go to the supermarket or the gas pump. In some other parts of the world, speculation in oil and basic commodities is leading to starvation for hundreds of millions of people.
It’s unconscionable. And it’s the best that capitalism has to offer.