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Our Workplace Press articlesRobbery at the Gas Pump and in the Super Market
The economy is starting into one of capitalism’s regular downspins. You would think that prices would moderate – or go back down.Not this time. Despite the burgeoning recession, prices are hitting new record highs.
What’s behind it is not a mystery. It’s speculation. Some of the biggest Wall Street investment banks are today speculating in oil and agricultural commodities, just like they were speculating in housing and mortgages yesterday.
With Wall Street flooding over 300 billion dollars into the commodities futures markets this year alone, up from almost nothing a few years ago, prices have jumped 65 per cent on corn, 91 per cent on soybeans, and over 100 per cent on wheat. A former top staffer for the Commodities Futures Trading Commission told CBS news that speculation may have doubled the price of oil.
Wall Street is not the only villain in this piece. The oil companies themselves have set up trading divisions, which do nothing but buy and sell oil, driving up the price on a barrel of oil with each sale – just like Enron did in the electric power markets a few years ago. Big agribusiness is doing the same thing with basic foods.
There is no shortage of oil today – the big oil companies don’t even bother to pump from many of their oil fields, and they shut down refineries. And neither is there any shortage of food in this country – the government pays farmers NOT to produce in order to hold down the supply.
Shortages? No, the problem is greed. Big companies cut back on production, plotting instead to make profit from financial speculation. High prices strangle the economy, people lose their jobs, and can’t pay for the food and gas they need. But the biggest companies in the country profit.
It’s greed, basic capitalist greed, which is taking a new, and more deadly form today. It’s the symptom of a system that long ago outlived its usefulness.