Thus Spake The Profit
by Oliver St John
There's civil unrest in Nigeria. There's unrest here over Iran, and things are anything but civil. Venezuela hates our imperialism with a flaming passion. We all know about Afghanistan and Iraq. Even Canada has taken to treating us rather like the embarrassing don't-drink-and-dance relative at a wedding reception.
That really just leaves Saudi Arabia in terms of major oil exporters to the US, and even the Saudis are running hot and cold. It is thus no wonder that the price of oil - and therefore the price of gasoline - are skyrocketing. The devastation of oil facilities by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita then expedited the process.
In a separate feature, we will be discussing how you too can be more energy efficient with gasoline, natural gas and electricity.
However, what I would like to highlight today is the obscene profits made by the oil companies in the wake of these disasters both man-made and natural.
ExxonMobil recently had a change of personnel at the top; their former CEO parted ways with the company and received a $400 million retirement package. Let's look at that number again, shall we? $400,000,000.00. The average annual salary in the United States is $39,795.33. It would therefore take Average Joe a little over ten thousand years to earn an amount equal to Lee Raymond's retirement package. This was by no means an isolated incident for Mr. Raymond, either. In 2005, he earned a total of $51.1 million. For those counting, that's about $6,000 an hour... which means that for six and a half hours' work, Mr. Raymond made Average Joe's annual salary.
It's not as though ExxonMobil couldn't afford this, of course; their profit in 2005 amounts to $36 billion, the largest in American corporate history. And while Exxon is the largest oil company - indeed the largest company of any kind - in the United States, the slightly smaller fish are well worth a fry too. Chevron and ConocoPhillips made $14.1 billion and $13.5 billion in profits respectively. The combined revenue of these three countries is so large as to exceed the GDP of most countries - the figure would in fact rank among the top 20 countries' GDP.
Here, then, is the more nefarious question: are the oil companies taking advantage of us? Almost a quarter of oil production facilities in the Gulf are still out of commission since Katrina, and it is hardly as though the companies do not have the resources to rebuild them. The oil companies are certainly making no move to bring prices downward or to increase the supply in any way - with the possible exception of pressure on the government to open up the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge for drilling.
Recent Congressional sessions on price-gouging have introduced a number of notions, ranging from business as usual to completely dismantling the oil companies into smaller units. As yet, though, there has been no visible effort to help the public see a little of that money come back to their own pockets.
The combined profits of the three companies named above could buy every man, woman and child in this country 70 gallons of gasoline. Remember that next time you fill your tank. Remember that next time you're looking for a new car. Remember that when you turn on the news and see American blood shed for Exxon's profit.