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flyinphil wrote:
I have not heard anyone speak of a reduction in taxes CID. The current issues are record profits being reported by the gas companies. The cost per barrel price, coupled with those profits does not substantiate the prices at the pumps. Simple math really.
Price per barrel is one factor. The other is the limited capacity of the refineries that turn the oil into gasoline.
The amount of oil coming out of the ground is not the sole determinant of the price of gasoline, which is an oil product. Oil and gasoline are not the same thing.
Read the study. Supply was manipulated, and there was collusion offsetting the benefits of competition.
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Last edited by corporate joe on Tue May 15, 2007 5:27 am, edited 1 time in total.
The 3 most important things to remember when you're old:
1) Never pass an opportunity to use a washroom
2) Never waste a hard on
3) Never trust a fart
corporate joe wrote:
"The combined first-quarter 2006 revenue of Exxon, Chevron and ConocoPhillips totaled $191.5 billion. This is more than the individual gross domestic products of 189 different countries -- Chile, Denmark, Peru and Venezuela among them"
Revenue numbers are meaningless, although they are more dramatic sounding when used by the tree huggers to assail capitalists.
Making huge profits is not (and never has been) illegal.
Again with the categorization and simplification. Tree huggers and capitalism... This is what this is about. The mean little tree huggers complain that fuel prices are too high, and they are preventing the nice capitalists from making their fair money. In every single post you show us your simple mindedness, and every time someone sets you straight, you disapear for a while and then come back with more of your extremists simplified views that no one cares for.
As for profit it becomes a problem when EXXON argues that prices have risen to meet an increase in cost. If prices had risen only to offset the increase in cost, the profits would remain the same (higher prices, higher cost means stable profit). The fact of the matter remains that profits are sky-rocketting exponentially at the detriment of other sectors of our economy because of ILLEGAL practices. Profit is not illegal, how oil companies are making theirs is.
Again there is something fundamentally wrong when world economy is suffering because of the illegal practices of the oil companies, all at the detriment of the honest working man. When scrupulous companies go above governments, the environment and the honest working man, when they violate market laws and stop at nothing to maximise profits (including starting wars) and start becoming more powerful than nations, I think it's fair to say this is not free market anymore.
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The 3 most important things to remember when you're old:
1) Never pass an opportunity to use a washroom
2) Never waste a hard on
3) Never trust a fart
sold my car two years ago(we now have one car in the family), sold my beloved honda nighthawk last month. now i cycle everywhere and the oil companies can go fuc@ themselves. if everyone did this, demand would plummet and prices would drop. my$.02
sold my car two years ago(we now have one car in the family), sold my beloved honda nighthawk last month. now i cycle everywhere and the oil companies can go fuc@ themselves. if everyone did this, demand would plummet and prices would drop. my$.02
As for profit it becomes a problem when EXXON argues that prices have risen to meet an increase in cost. If prices had risen only to offset the increase in cost, the profits would remain the same (higher prices, higher cost means stable profit). The fact of the matter remains that profits are sky-rocketting exponentially at the detriment of other sectors of our economy because of ILLEGAL practices. Profit is not illegal, how oil companies are making theirs is.
Wow you would be an easy shareholder to keep happy if you expect profits to remain the same. If the oil companies raise prices because their costs are increasing then profits should still increase if demand for fuel continues to go up.
If everyone figures that gas is over priced then maybe it's time for everyone to form a co-op then they can drill themselves some wells install some flow lines to their own refinery and start produceing their own fuel. What could you stand to lose?
mcrit wrote:Well, looks like the only way to solve this is for the government to step in and regulated prices.............
why should they?
A) they can't, because the major oil players are supra nations, not forced to abide by any country's rules, so no government on his own can dictate their behaviour
B) we base ourselves and our freedoms on a free market economy, yet a sector in this economy is playing above market laws and violating them left and right, all while the remainder of the economy (therefore our pockets) suffer.
I invite everyone with an opinion to read the study http://policyalternatives.ca/documents/ ... e_2007.pdf or at least browse through it and check for yourselves how thorough the analysis is, and how complex this whole issue really is. A lot is at stake, and something has to be done to make sure fair play is maintained, as our whole market/economy/society/value system is based on fair competition, and we can't let anything compromise that.
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Last edited by corporate joe on Tue May 15, 2007 10:56 am, edited 2 times in total.
The 3 most important things to remember when you're old:
1) Never pass an opportunity to use a washroom
2) Never waste a hard on
3) Never trust a fart
I find it mildly amusing that it's OK for a worker to jump arround and get as much as he/she possibly can from an employer. which by the way is a common thread on here. But should that employer make a huge profit due to good business skills, shit house luck and sometimes because Daddy helps then it is gouging. Probably not quite apples to apples but the principle is much the same. Untill we vote with our feet there will be no change.
I always wonder why the heck the Canadian gov't got out of the gas biz. If they were still in the game they would be making great gobs of money and still be able to start price wars, thereby helping all the disgruntled consumers while still making profit. But as we all know that would just be way too logical
""As an indication of how much control the oil industry has over retail gasoline prices, Hamilton points to a study he did, looking at the price of gas approaching Election Day. His results are truly disturbing.
The oil industry has been a solid backer of Republicans for many years, giving 80-90 percent of its campaign contributions to GOP candidates--particularly during the two Bush terms. What Hamilton discovered is that this support hasn't just been limited to campaign contributions. In fact, the oil industry appears to have clearly tried to minimize voter anger at Republicans late during the election cycle by pushing prices at the pump down just ahead of the voting. In the period 2000-2006, Hamilton found that each non-federal election year--2001, 2003 and 2005, gasoline prices didn't decline during the month of October, but each of the election years--2000, 2002, 2004 and 2006--they fell, with the most dramatic drop coming in October 2006--a period when crude oil prices were rising sharply. Each time, gasoline prices rose again quickly right after the election was over.""
---------- ADS -----------
The 3 most important things to remember when you're old:
1) Never pass an opportunity to use a washroom
2) Never waste a hard on
3) Never trust a fart
Which country is willing to pay more for oil than we are?
Which country is the principle financer of the Iraq war through the purchase of treasuries?
Which country was the first to receive oil contracts from Iraq?
Which country's state owned firm overbid by 2 billion dollars cash for one of America's largest oil companies, Unical?
Which country has the fastest growing economy in the world?
Which country could surpass global oil consumption by 10 million barrels/day if its citizens lived the quality of life that *you* do today?
Which country has 1 billion more citizens than the United States?
Which country has the largest foreign currency reserve, over 1 trillion dollars, on the planet?
Which country has the largest United States currency reserve?
Do you think it is a coincidence that all of a sudden,*now*, we are being bombarded with global warming fears and conservation from the media (not invalidating the threat)?
Which country do the automobile manufactures open up factories in, when they close their factories in North America?
Which country does the United States have the largest trade deficit with?
Which country's leader visits Bill Gates before he meets the President of the Unites States when he visits America?
Which country is buying up energy assets globally at a significant rate?
Which country would easily soak up our lowered demand for oil resources?
In a nutshell - China. Aside from that, what stops us in Canada from producing our own refined crude and selling it for .25/litre domestically. Are we all that stupid and cowed, if Venezuela can do it, WHY CAN'T WE If I hear someone say because of free trade, I'm gonna scream.
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You will never live long enough to know it all, so quit being anal about it..
I was watching CNN the other day, and a "professor" stated that it's actually good to have higher prices because it creates less demand, people aren't willing to drive so much and conserve on gas.
And in proper societies, like europe, the automakers make and *sell* fuel effiecient cars.
here they make all kinds of cars, but the ones they sell are minivans, trucks and suvs...
Also, the americans aren't pro "green," we are, we deserve to pay high gas prices and drive our suvs and support our beliefs for a green earth.
fogghorn wrote:In a nutshell - China. Aside from that, what stops us in Canada from producing our own refined crude and selling it for .25/litre domestically. Are we all that stupid and cowed, if Venezuela can do it, WHY CAN'T WE If I hear someone say because of free trade, I'm gonna scream.
Well, if you have cheap gas you will just have a population that's even more addicted to it, less incentive for anyone to buy fuel efficient cars and could end up like Iran. They have even cheaper gas than Venezuela, but they can't refine enough of it themselves and actually have to import gasoline (so much for being one of the top oil producing countries). Yes, they are building more refineries, but thanks to the cheap gas, demand is rising faster than ever. Even with the new refineries, they may not be able to produce enough gas of their own.
And by the way, who's going to build the refineries to produce enough gas to make it cheap? Husky just went and bought a refinery in the US because they couldn't get enough refining capacity up here or it was too expensive to build. Encana cut a deal with Conoco for similar reasons. Refineries aren't cheap, make very little money themselves and no one wants one in their backyard either.
There are other ways around this than us being robbed and screwed at the pump. Why don't we go with something along the lines of rationing. You get x amount at a nice low price, then it jacks up progressively as you use more. A system like that could be easily put in place. Instead, the dreaded global warming canard gets drug out, and the supra national oil companies laugh all the way to the bank - at our expense. People think they are paying high prices to somehow combat co2 emissions and not one cent of that extra payolla goes toward cleaning up the environment - what a crock of shit that one is.
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You will never live long enough to know it all, so quit being anal about it..
Every single year since 1967, gas prices have risen across Canada in the Spring, culminating with a big jump along about Victoria Day. That's when the dirt bikes, the RV's, the motorcycles, the lawnmowers, the outboard motors, the night time "cruises" and motor vehicle trips to the cottage all start-up again. They then play "silly buggar" with the prices all summer long, ending with a drop again sometime before Christmas. That's also the time when all of the aforementioned "toys" are put away and certain other uses of motor vehicles gets curtailed again. The "drop" is actually where they wanted the price in the Spring anyway, but first they have to drive it up. When the Fall comes and they drop the price back down again to the new price, most Canadians are stupid enough to be happy with the new "lower" price again. This shit makes me laugh every single year and folks.......the EXACT same thing will happen again next year.
Canada produces enough of it's own oil to supply it's own needs and it's been that way for a long time. They can't do that because we have no oil pipeline that goes all the way to the east coast. Therefore, the people in the Maritimes burn Venezuelan oil and it's been that way since before 1957. Since that makes a surplus in the west, an agreement was signed with the Americans a long, long time ago to satisfy their needs if we had a surplus. Having stated that much, Canadian oil companies would sell their oil locally or internationally for the "present daily price" of a barrel of Texas crude, which is the benchmark for all oil sales after OPEC prices are taken into consideration. So if anyone is expecting some sort of cheaper gas from some supposed Canadian oil company, you better give your head a shake. To make a buck, they'd stick it to you just as quick as any Arab or American oil firm because they got a whole shit load of shareholders who are looking for a bigger share dividend every stinking year. When you can afford to have 1000 shares in Imperial Oil and drive a Bentley, you aren't too concerned about pump prices for that Bentley or how "Joe Canuck" feels about gas prices..........or does someone think that oil companies are owned by one person or only sell their shares to Americans?
I'm not looking for a discount - I'd be happy to buy at a world-competitive price.
I'd be overjoyed, in fact, because right now we're all paying a 20 cent per liter "I Am Canadian And I Am Stupid" Tax at the pumps, compared to what I pay if I drive across the border to the USA (see original posting).
I don't think the oil companies in the USA are losing money! They can sell gas at Cdn$0.86/liter and make billions of dollars of profit.
So, why do Canadian companies have to charge that extra 20 cents per liter?
Obviously they don't have to - but they do, because Canadians are really dumb.
If I hear someone say because of free trade, I'm gonna scream.
