Speculators and our leaders are letting us down
The price for gasoline and heating oil this year reminds us all of how badly we are being served by the members of our national government.
From the president down to the republicans all screaming for spending cuts in the national budget, there isn’t a person doing anything tangible to punish or to otherwise intervene on the obscene speculation related to the price for a barrel of oil.
Barrel oil is going up everyday and with it, the prices we pay at the pump.
Most of us who consider ourselves average Americans know when we are being ripped off.
We know when speculators are pushing prices upward, especially when there are no shortages of oil in the world today despite the situation in Libya and elsewhere.
Speculators doing their thing unfettered have managed to hike the price for a barrel of oil from the low $70’s just a few months ago to $114 reached just a few days ago.
And frankly, there is no end in sight because the speculation has no end.
Only when oil has gone so high artificially that no one will buy it at that price will it collapse.
This could happen almost overnight as it has tended to do for the past few years.
It would be nice if the republicans so intent on getting rid of the deficit and cutting the national budget had a word or two to say about the rampant speculation the government is allowing which has led to this crippling rise in the price for barrel oil.
The republicans can’t do this because their best friends are oil interests – always have been, always will be.
Neither the president and his democratic cohorts or the republicans feel that anything can be done.
They shrug their shoulders and say there is nothing that can be done. That’s rubbish.
They should be held accountable but they aren’t.
In the end, we get what we deserve, what we’re willing to accept.
And that’s the way of the world.