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Hernando Today

Speculation Cause Of Pump Pain

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By FRANCES EARL

Call to Patriots

Published: June 25, 2008

As of Tuesday, United Airlines has laid off 1,400 employees and will, in the next two or three months, furlough 950 pilots. Would you now feel safe flying United since a lot of those "furloughed" are the guys who do the maintenance to insure your safety in the air?
Well, don't worry about it, folks, since you can no longer afford to fly anyway! This ongoing failure of our economy, the drastic rise in food prices is all tied to the price at the pump.
So how did this happen? Well, President George Bush and Sen. John McCain say the answer is to drill for offshore oil, and Gov. Charlie Crist has jumped right on board.
Following are a few facts about the spot we find ourselves in:
The oil industry already has leases on more than 39 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico but has never even begun drilling. They are now trying, before Dubya leaves office, to obtain the right to yet more offshore leases because they know no Democratic president would allow this to happen. Building an oil rig is now estimated to cost about $1 billion, so why would the oil giants want to cut into their out-of-sight profits to move forward on drilling anyway?
Are the outrageous prices, worldwide, the result of supply and demand? For the answer to this price gouging, look to the Commodities Futures Modernization Act (Enron loophole), included in a farm bill passed very soon after 9/11. This act removed all regulation from commodities speculation. I will give you a simplistic version of commodities trading since my space is limited. Speculators in commodities estimate the future prices of their investments — if they prove right, the make a ton of money — if wrong, they lose big time. Their continued estimates of ever increasing prices of oil have raised the price we are now paying at the pump since all control/regulation has been removed. Supply and demand, according to research done by Sen. Bill Nelson, shows that the price of crude should now be no more than $55 per barrel, leading to prices at the pump of about $2.28 per gallon, not over $4. Sen. Nelson has introduced legislation, S.3134 that would ban all unregulated speculative trading in oil futures.
Where did this "Modernization Act" come from? It was heavily lobbied for by Phil Graham, Charlie Black and Grant Berman, all part of John McCain's campaign staff. McCain was against it in 2002, but has flip-flopped and is now for it. I have received e-mails from U.S. Rep. Ginny Brown-Waite, who apparently is supporting granting more leases for off-shore drilling also.
One thing I will grant these people is that they all stick together with their view of "sticking it" to us.
No. 1, McCain is now, once again, claiming he can get you a reduction in gas for this summer by eliminating the gas tax for two months. There is no bill in Congress asking for this and this is a total falsehood, period. His support of more leases to drill in the Gulf, assuming the oil companies did, in fact, begin immediately to drill, would "maybe" lower your gas prices by cents, not dollars, and that would not happen for 10 years or more.
Sorry, but we will all be living in cardboard boxes under bridges way sooner than that! They think we are fools!
More on McCain: He voted against investigating the levee collapse in Katrina. He voted against the Fair Pay Restoration Act, which guaranteed that a woman doing the same job as her male counterpart would get the same pay.
I watched him on TV say, "I really didn't love America till I was deprived of its company." Why don't we see this in the newspapers? Why does it just disappear off the radar?
Our glorious administration has spent $500 million in support of an Arab-speaking TV station that instead of supporting the U.S. is asking for the death of Americans and praising the most radical Islamist thinking. Nobody checked up on this? This was our tax money.
And, did you know that our wounded troops have been given a drug, Chantax, and told it will help them stop smoking? What they were not told was they were being human guinea pigs for Pfizer and psychosis and suicidal tendencies were strong side effects. Some are now dead!
Bush has been compared by some to Hitler, but even Hitler did not experiment on his own troops! Think of this when Brown-Waite tells you she supports the troops; think of this when you go to the street corner and yell slurs at those across the street who really do support the troops. Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know. The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities!

Frances Earl, former vice chairwoman of the Hernando County Democratic Executive Committee, can be contacted at fearl@tampabay.rr.com.

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