[Leica] Re: Small cars

[msmall at aya.yale.edu (Marc James Small)]

At 01:55 PM 4/27/06 -0700, Ted Grant wrote:

>What really tick's me off are all the oil company owners, not mentioning 
>names and executives who are laughing all the way to the bank ripping us 
>off 
>going doing so.


Ted

First, Canada has been a lot more reasonable about opening oil fields than
has the US in recent years, so you guys are getting wealthy of the woes in
the US, as you are an oil-exporting nation, though I've not yet heard of
the Dominion applying for membership in OPEC.

Second, the media makes much of gross profit but ignores the reality that
NET profit for the oil companies is not increasing.  The bif five oil
companies own very few of their wells:  during the Carter Administration,
the US allowed most Middle Eastern nations to nationalize their oil fields,
so that Exxon or BP or whoever has to buy oil at the price set by the
controlling nations.  These oil comanies have to buy oil supplies to
replace that which they have sold, so it LOOKS like they are making a bunch
of money but they are not, as they have to reinvest most of the money being
made in new oil.  Thus, they have humongeous GROSS profits but the net
profits are not increasing and several oil companies are experiencing
decreasing net profits.

There are a slew of answers to this but they all boil down to opening new
fields, especially those in the US and Canada such as ANWR, building a
SHITLOAD of new refineries, taxing imported petrochemicals at a level to
encourage domestic production and, of course, re-establishing the oil-shale
processing infrastructure built up under the Carter Administration and then
axed at the tail end of that Administration.  

There is more to this, but that "windfall profit" and "excess profit" stuff
is just so much BS.  The oil companies are not hurting but they are not
making in actuality anything on the nature of what we are being told.

Marc

msmall@aya.yale.edu 
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