Let's Play MASTER and Servant


This group controls us like puppets. I would like to give a special shout out to Exxon Mobil Corp. who recently rewrote the corporate record books when on Thursday posted their third-quarter earnings which soared to almost $10 billion and it became the first public company ever with quarterly sales topping $100 billion. Anglo-Dutch competitor Royal Dutch Shell PLC was much less greedy posting a profit of only $9 billion for the quarter.

That is 1 with 10 zeros: 10,000,000,000 and it isn’t sales but profit.

"Exxon is a good corporate citizen but it does not work for the welfare of the country," said oil analyst Fadel Gheit at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York.
“Exxon Chairman and Chief Executive Lee R. Raymond did not mention of the record results in the company's earnings release. Instead, he noted that the world's largest publicly traded Oil Company ‘acted responsibly in pricing at our company operated service stations, and we also encouraged our independent retailers and distributors to do the same.’”
Exxon’s revenue for Q3 was greater than the annual gross domestic product of some of the largest oil producing nations, including the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait even with lost production due to hurricanes in the Gulf coast. CIA GDP Site

These oil guys are the modern day equivalent of Robber Barons. “‘Robber Barons’: that was what U.S. political and economic commentator Matthew Josephson (1934) called the economic princes of his own day.” Robber Barons by J. Bradford DeLong UC Berkely 1998 Robber barons were the wealthy who fought hard for their wealth and usually got it by exploiting an idea or product and fighting labor, government and others to keep their wealth. Josephson used the term derogatorily to try and persuade government to intervene.

Exxon Mobile Corp and alike are similar to the Robber Barons of a century ago because they have found a method to control production and slowly squeeze a king’s ransom in profits from their product by tightly controlling supply. Big oil has consolidated into a few and thus controls the majority of oil refining capabilities in the US. Oil and gas companies carefully spin world events to raise and lower the prices on their product to squeeze the maximum profits. Big Oil fights government intervention in their cause by hardcore lobbying and greasing the palms of those in control. No big surprise…however these jokers have control over our economy. Our economy is closely tied to cheap oil. Gas runs the great American industrial machine. Anytime gas prices rise to rapidly the consumer suffers. I believe in a free market but when a small group holds the key to economic success I believe that our society will eventually crumble under the greed of a few.

Trickle down economics here kids…
If I use 2 tanks of gas a week and the cost of a tank of gas rises from $25 to $45 it means that my basic driving costs me an extra $160 a month. I am not just going to get a $160 dollar a month raise because the energy companies need more money so that is now an extra $160 I am not spending in the local economy. No longer am I spending this money to buy extra goods and services and such. The money just gets sucked up into big oil bank accounts who aren’t really investing back into the economy because we know that the average Joe Oilworker doesn’t get big pay raises when times are good but instead gets his standard 3-4% dole if he is lucky. So Utah has approximately 1,000,000 people who are old enough to drive (my best guess from US Census 2004 Estimate: 2,389,039) and it now costs us 45% more to fuel up that means that 45% of the money we used to spend on other businesses has disappeared from our economy. Using my personal #’s and divide them by 2 just to be conservative that means 80 million dollars goes missing each month from our economy or 240,000,000 from our Q3 local economy. Oil companies have us as hostages.