Is it Backwards Day?
As I was walking to Georgetown (to see “The Legend of Zorro”) this morning I looked down at the headlines on some of the newspapers that were in the vending machines on a street corner along the way, and imagine my surprise when I learned that Exxon and other big oil companies recorded historic profits for the most recent quarter!

You might wonder why was this surprising to me. Well, I don’t drive my car very often, maybe once or twice a month, so this should actually be more offensive to the people around the country who need their vehicles to get to work and have had to pay upwards of three dollars per gallon of gas when they went to fill their tanks. The “oil crisis” won’t personally affect me until the prices of food and other goods are raised to offset the collateral rising transportation costs, so until then I really couldn’t care less if gas prices go beyond seven dollars a gallon. But most other Americans have to care. Many people need to drive, and others just enjoy the sense of freedom that their vehicles give them. [We’ve loved our cars ever since Henry Ford first made the Model T available to the masses in the early 1900’s. And that love of the automobile spread farther and wider in the 1950’s, during the Cold War, when construction of the nation’s highway system became a priority because of the need to make it easier for military vehicles to be mobilized in the event of a war with Russia. This practical need also made it possible for the average American to get from starting point to destination, whether for a family vacation, a romantic weekend in the country, or a shopping trip to a cluster of outlet stores in the suburbs.]

From everything we’ve read in our newspapers and heard on our nightly news broadcasts, the oil industry has been going through tough times, primarily because of a little war we’ve got going on in the Middle East and the repeated damage done to refineries and pipelines caused by two of the (record-setting number of) hurricanes that have struck our Gulf Coast this year. Let’s not even get started on the ecological root causes of this particular aspect of the situation that I’m currently discussing here today.

Can you think of any other industry in which a corporation could go through what they’ve portrayed publicly to be a (very) rough patch and still end up with record-setting profits? If your C.E.O. informed you and your coworkers that the company you work for is having a difficult quarter or a bad year, wouldn’t you expect that the quarterly or annual report would demonstrate proof of this hardship by showing losses?

It seems to me that these big oil companies themselves haven’t actually been going through hard times at all. They’ve passed their difficulties directly to their customers. Is it a coincidence that the man in the White House was once an oil man and he still has many close associates who are in the oil industry? Why doesn’t the government step in and regulate these record-setting profits? If we’re really having an oil crisis, then shouldn’t it be considered treasonous for these companies not to absorb any of the hardship? The right-wingers who control the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of our government (yes, all three) love to talk about their “family values,” but they don’t seem to care that it’s getting more and more difficult for American families to pay for the gasoline they need to get to their jobs, nor does it seem to concern them that when transportation expenses increase, these same families will be having a much harder time putting food on their tables.

As you’d expect, your company would be reporting either minimal profits or no profits at all during bad times. But more likely, your company’s stockholders, employees, and the world at large would be notified that there was actually a deficit! Yes, as strange as it may seem, other companies that go through difficult periods will actually report that they’ve suffered losses, perhaps even record-setting losses. The last thing you’d expect would be for them to tout their “historic profits,” unless you work in the health-care industry, perhaps. But that’s another matter for another time…