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One man's answer to big oil
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By Rey, Section Live Gripes
Posted on Fri Apr 28, 2006 at 09:04:50 PM PDT
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I'm just an ordinary retired guy in Virginia you never heard of who's had enough. It's time to do something about Big Oil.
Gasoline has been pushed to over $3 a gallon in most of the US this year due to the cost of oil. Every mile we drive or fly, every mile an 18-wheeler travels delivering goods, every watt of electricity generated from oil by the power company, national defense, medicine, every bit of plastic to wrap anything else in, each uses petrochemicals and cost more.
Everyone in the chain of manufacture and sales can pass the added costs along. The only ones with no one to pass the costs to are you and me. We are the ones the others pass them to. We reimburse everybody. Who do we see about this?
We can't expect anything but spin tokenism from the Bush-Cheney administration. Those families have been part of the oil industry since long before these men ran for office. We knew that all along.
We can't expect help from the best Congress money can buy. Someone can, just not us.
We can only do something about price gouging and excess profits ourselves. We can make intelligent choices. Here's who I'm not buying from.
Exxon-Mobil Corporation announced on April 27 that it had $86 billion income in the first three months of 2006, and that $6.9 billion was profit. There's probably a good reason for this. They may even be entitled to it. Wall Street was disappointed it was so little. I don't care.
Exxon-Mobil is the largest company in the U.S. as ranked on the Fortune 500 list. It's also
the largest publicly traded oil and gas company in the world. And it's the most profitable. Its operating profit in 2005 was $36.13 billion, an all-time record for any publicly traded company, replacing Wal-Mart as the world's largest corporation by revenue.
Who does Exxon-Mobil blame for high oil prices? Car makers. John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute notes that, referring to a recent Exxon Mobil ad that blamed auto companies for the rising price of gas, Chrysler chief spokesman Jason Vines said:
"Despite a documented history of blowing their exorbitant profits on outlandish executive salaries and stock buybacks, and hoarding their bounty by avoiding technologies, policies, and legislation that would protect the population and environment and lower fuel costs, Big Oil insists on transferring all of that responsibility on the auto companies."
Which could explain why US auto companies are losing billions while Exxon-Mobil is making them.
Exxon-Mobil is regarded by many environmentalists as an example of corporate irresponsibility and disregard for environmental concerns. The company has been a target of a number of campaigns by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and People and Planet.
In 1989 the tanker Exxon Valdez spilled approximately 10 million gallons of oil into the waters of Alaska's Prince William Sound, the most devastating oil spill of all time in U.S. waters. 34,000 people, most of them touched by the fisheries industry, were harmed by that spill. In 1995 a court fined Exxon $5 billion in damages. How much has the company paid? Zero. Exxon has been working the legal system all it can filing appeals and delays.
This is a bad corporate citizen, one of the worst. For window dressing they donate a smidgen of their monster profits to charitable causes. A little here for Little League, a little there for the opera company. It gives them something cheerful to blurt about in full-color, full-page magazine ads.
Expensive ads are a powerful influence on magazine and newspaper publishers not to take a hard look at a generous supporter like Exxon-Mobil. That's the American Way. You don't have a magazine. I don't have a newspaper. We have no reason to look the other way. Except that we were taught to turn the other cheek when we encounter abuse.
Abusive companies like Exxon-Mobil act like we have no end of cheeks to turn. I've reached the end, and now is when I stop supporting Exxon-Mobil. There's nothing special about their gasoline. There are plenty of other filling stations with fuel of the same quality. In fact the two best German car companies say other brands have better additives, but that's not the issue here.
The issue is that for the rest of 2006, none of the four cars in my family will be gassed up at stations selling Exxon-Mobil products.
I hope you do the same for a company you choose. I hope you send this email to everyone you know. If enough people in America have backbones, and that's a big IF, our monster corporations might learn there are limits to the corporate abuse we will tolerate.
Or maybe there aren't any limits for you? That's your decision.
Nothing is without fallout. It's unfortunate that filling station operators must suffer but ordinary people have no power except individual choice. We can support the operators with car repairs and other automotive needs.
You can expect to read newspaper stories attacking this idea, and the news channels will chatter. That's why corporations have public relations departments. Enjoy it; ignore it.
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