Robert Weisman president of Public Citizen, explains why the price of gasoline is so high and what todo about it.
Being a multinational oil company looks like good work if you can get it:
- Oil giant Chevron raked in $11.2 billion in profits from July through September.
- Exxon did even better, making $19.7 billion in profits over just those three months — its most profitable quarter EVER.
- In fact, the three top oil companies — Chevron, Exxon, and Shell — have more than tripled their profits compared to this time last year.
Again, we’re talking about profits. Not overall revenue. Sheer, unadulterated profits.
And it’s not like these companies, you know, pay Mother Nature for each barrel of oil they suck out of the ground. Or that they gave their rank-and-file workers mega-bonuses this year (unlike the excessive pay and stock options they lavish upon their executives.)
This is just plain old profiteering, pure and simple.
Big Oil is exploiting the global economic disruption and uncertainty caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine — along with recent cuts in oil production by OPEC that seem intentionally designed to destabilize things even further — to extract as much money out of all of our pockets as they can.
Meanwhile, oil prices fuel the inflation that is wreaking havoc on everyday Americans and the global economy. And the price of a gallon of gas is a major factor in how Americans vote, with Election Day right around the corner.
Today, President Biden publicly floated the idea of taxing Big Oil’s outlandish profits — something Public Citizen has been pushing the administration to do over the past year.
However, President Biden held out this kind of tax — known as a “windfall profits tax” — as a punishment only if oil companies don’t ramp up domestic production.
But ramping up domestic oil production is a bad idea for many reasons, including that more oil from U.S. lands will just be exported — as 29% of U.S. crude production currently is — denying any benefits to American consumers.
And the existential threat of climate change demands that human society move away from fossil fuels as quickly as possible, not that we let Big Oil extract even more oil out of the Earth and even more profits out of everyday consumers.
By the way, 80% of American voters — including 73% of Republicans — were in favor of a windfall profits tax on Big Oil even before President Biden’s announcement.
So there’s no need to manufacture counter-productive reasons to threaten to do something later that an overwhelming majority of Americans think we should be doing already.
It’s time to do some drilling of our own — deep into Big Oil’s overflowing pockets — by taxing the industry’s unjust, and unjustifiable, windfall profits and returning the money to the people.
Add your name as a citizen co-signer of our message to Congress:
Thanks for taking action.
For progress,
– Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen
Public Citizen | 1600 20th Street NW | Washington DC 20009 |
Progressives suggested a windfall profit tax at least a year ago. I signed and shared on social media.
YES!
As we all know many companies receive subsidizes from the Federal Government. Farmers receive subsidizes from the Federal Government. The big oil producers also receive subsidizes from the government in the form of tax write offs. These enormous companies have billions of tax write offs each years. Many of these write offs have been going on for over a century.
These big oil companies loudly complain with start up companies in the environmentally friendly world get write offs so that they might succeed but the big money people do not complain about the tax breaks oil producers receive.
Also…. These oil producers, big and small, have thousands of wells that are not economically viable so the producers abandon the wells. Walk off and leave them. They do not plug the wells or do anything to ensure these wells will not pollute the environment — mainly the ground table water. Once abandoned the responsibility to plug the well and clean up the mess around the well becomes goes to the states — the taxpayers — to a tune of millions of dollars. Some of the smaller producers go out of business or go bankrupted claiming they cannot be held responsible for the clean up. The oil producers make millions of these wells. The CEOs, Board of Directors and Stockholders receive a lot from the oil pumped from the ground and leave it to the taxpayers to clean up the mess.
Basically, in my simple view, a lot of what the oil producers are going is criminal and they all should be held accountable.
Diane,
I would like to change my e-mail address in my settings. How do I that – I couldn’t find a password to get into my account …
Thanks,
Judy Casey Colorado
>
Judy,
I am not sure. I suggest you resubscribe.
Diane
I don’t know if this works, but here’s what I found:
“If you are the user who want to change his or her email address. Simply login to WordPress admin and access your profile going users >> profile. And if you are administrator and want to change some of your author’s or other user’s email. Go to wp-admin >> users and edit your desired user.
Click on email address and write new email address there. Click on update below the form. Now WordPress will request you to confirm your email address. Do that and you are done by verifying your email you have changed your email Address.”
https://www.webfulcreations.com/how-to-change-wordpress-user-email-and-wordpress-email-address/
“If you are the user who want to change his or her email address. Simply login to WordPress admin and access your profile going users”
In think I now understand why WordPress is such a crappy platform: they can’t even compose a simple, grammatically correct sentence.
You are right about WP. Although I do like the Happiness Engineers who respond to problems.
And their software “engineers” (and I use the term laughingly) can’t produce simple, logically correct code.
Cheap foreign labor is the way of the web.
Diane,
Thank you for helping me learn the process for changing my e-mail address. I will give it a try,
Judy Casey
>
Corporate welfare vs the working class’s income safety net.
There’s a big difference between corporate subsidies and tax breaks and a working person losing his/her job (including medical – and some people are disabled on the job, can’t return to work, and rely on that safety net, too) and relying on unemployment benefits, SNAP, and possibly section 8 housing assistance.
The oil industry has benefited a lot more than the measly benefits that the working class relies on during hard times.
And corporate welfare is a mountain range that never stops giving to the rich, compared to the working class’s safety net, that is a mole hill, with term limits.
No pull quotes or links. Anyone interested may learn all about that on their own.
If the right wing extremists win, they are going after Social Security and Medicare. The GOP may try to squeeze concessions out of Democrats when they need to raise the debt ceiling.
While you’re at it, TAX CHURCHES TOO!!! :d
👍 X 💯
The IRS could call it an “Exercise Tax” (tax on Religious Exercise)
Not imaginative enough . Its time to Nationalize the Oil & Gas Industries. For starters doing so now would allow oil production to be increased in a Hot / Cold War with authoritarian oil regimes . Russia , Saudi Arabia , Iran and Venezuela . Fracked American Oil and Gas is only competitive when prices are high. The US Government does not have to make a profit . Fracking could be expanded till Russia was brought to its knees .
It may sound counter intuitive in a battle to lower Carbon but the only way to get there will be to incentivize Green Energy while controlling the price of Oil , Nat Gas and Gasoline . OPEC and the American Fossil Fuel Industry will use anger over energy prices to roll back Green Energy Initiatives by unseating Politicians who favor them every time . If the last nine months has taught us anything it is that Oil is an Albatross around the neck of Western Democracy .
https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/3536866-why-we-must-nationalize-big-oil/
I like that idea. Very smart. It would eliminate the need for a lot of the regulation required in addition to the taxes. Our country would be so much stronger, safer, and just. It would eliminate socialism for the rich in the most important sector of the economy.
It will never happen.
Donald Trump will be indicted for leading the Jan 6 insurrection or, what is more likely, Hell will freeze over first.
Well if Donald Trump had been indicted 18 months ago we would not be where we are would we. In fact if Mueller had not been selected to “land the plane ” ? .
Oil company execs have already admitted they manipulate their prices around elections to aid the RepubliKKKan party who they find most favorable to them (climate denial, tax breaks, free reign to pollute, deregulation etc). They’re less up front about their role in generating the millions of tons of toxic plastics destroying our oceans. They have set up disinformation networks to obfuscate the fact that only 5% of plastics are actually recycled. 95% winds up in Chinese landfills or our landfills or in the bodies of marine life. Scientists now believe Blue Whales ingest 10 million microplastic particles every day. You could tax them out of existence and it wouldn’t even begin to undo the damage they’ve done to our fragile planet.
The top five offenders for plastic waste in the ocean are China, Indonesia, Philipines, Vietnam and Thailand.
But countries like the US are hardly innocent because until very recently we were shipping some 45% of our plastic “recyclables” (sic) to China and my guess is a lot of it never even made it there but was simply dumped at sea.
Humans really are a rather stupid species.
If we somehow manage to avoid an all out nuclear exchange with Russia, we will poison ourselves over the longer term.
We are simply incapable of addressing — to say nothing of solving — these problems.
And it’s actually laughable that people like Musk think human colonies on Mars are going to act any differently. People there will be fighting even more over scarce resources. Probably from the second they land.
The system that allows Americans to be driven into poverty exists because of Republicans. A 2018 tweet from evangelical Lutheran, Ron Johnson, who is a Republican running in Wisconsin, shows (those who will listen) who the voter base is that elects a man with a plan to destroy Social Security.
The tweet, “All 5 Wis. Catholic bishops urged Sen. Baldwin not to block a judicial nominee because of his beliefs so why are she and her allies attacking him.”
Let that assumption about who has authority sink in, then read the following about the judicial candidate, Gordon Giampietro. He is orthodox Catholic. He attended Catholic University of America, was supported by the Catholic League and is a member of Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society. On radio, Giampietro made comments against calls for diversity, birth control and gay marriage.
TPM reported in 2010 that Johnson was on the Finance Council of the Diocese of Green Bay.
In 2017, Johnson beat Russ Feingold who as a youth was involved with B’nai B’rith. Christian theocracy is very powerful. Those who believe in democracy and fail to call out the axis of all three big power players, conservative Catholics, evangelicals and the Koch network, are complicit.
The following is a prominent political right wing Catholic’s quote, “Culture is the root of politics and religion is the root of culture.” It is frightening to know that powerful people don’t believe that those who want separation of church and state can, by definition, have culture. And, it is a very bad omen for those in minority religions.
The Unholy Trinity
The Nexus of Evil
Is hiding behind
The Righteous and Moral
And Christian, you’ll find
Conservative Catholics
Evangelists too
And network of Koch-lics
Are Trinity’s brew
The Cross that we carry
For Trinity’s sake
Is certain to bury
Democracy’s stake
More great poetry- until you resurrected political satire in the form of poems for us to read here at the blog, I thought it was a lost art. Nobody has ever done it better, IMHO.
Ads running in Ohio against JD Vance tell the audience how he donned a flannel shirt and grew a beard for the campaign to hide who he really is. I don’t doubt that his conversion to Catholicism in 2019, in a state run by conservative Catholics, was an additional part of the calculus to win a senate seat. Vance is backed by Peter Thiel.
Raw Story reported that Sen. Hawley wants Vance to win because he’s counting on him to oppose aid to Ukraine. Sounds like the Koch camp that allegedly doesn’t think democracy is a good idea.
Thanks, but I have a lot of great material from comments posted by you and others here.
All I need to do is a little rhyming.
It’s a two thousand year old problem, Linda, THE problem, from Constantine to Ferdinand and Isabella to Amy Coney Barrett.
Agree. Thanks for reading about Johnson and his role in the right wing political power axis of evangelicals, Koch, and conservative Catholics.
Reblogged this on Filosofa's Word and commented:
In Diane Ravitch’s blog today, she offers an EXCELLENT assessment for why we should implement a Windfall Profits Tax on the oil industry. For the record, I am 100% in agreement … oil companies are making record profits off of people around the globe and should be paying back. You know the Republican’s are against such a tax, for they are owned, lock/stock/barrel by the fossil fuel industries. Thank you, Diane, for this timely post!
Once again I would like to point out that windfall profits are profits that not the result of anyone doing anything except noticing that the fruit is now on the ground and easily pick up. As such, windfall profits taxes are fine things as they just tax economic rent and will not influence decisions made going forward.
The great risk here is that we 1) lower carbon based energy prices, encouraging people to use more of it, and 2) encourage investment in pumping oil out of the ground and processing it into usable carbon based energy. On their own companies know that investing in carbon energy is a fools errand. We need to make sure that the government does not make it worthwhile.
Agree with your first paragraph.
Please clarify the fools errand of Arab Sheiks. They, like the
oil companies, understand they have a product for which there is currently no substitute.
Battery-fueled cars in the northern climates will have to significantly improve to allow for the energy drain of heating the car.