The price for a barrel of oil drops and the price of gas goes up. ...

More specifically, in the thirteen short weeks between the year's high of $3.083 per gallon -- during the week of August 8 -- and Election Day, average gas prices dropped by almost 80 cents per gallon -- 26 percent -- and then they did a one-eighty the very next week and crept back up in all but one of the six weeks that followed that. Altogether they rose 14.1 cents, or a bit more than 6 percent, after the election.

Coincidence? Well I've got this bridge, in good shape …

Conspiracy Fact: lowest gas prices of 2006 during election week …

Posted by Joshua Holland at 12:53 PM on January 5, 2007.

 ... best regards, Timothy Flanagan     Box 22 / Lake Oswego, Oregon 97034-0003   phone:  503.697.1670        ICQ#: 41518726
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Would also be nice if the rest of the country got the same relief. One would think with
the oil industry raking in record-breaking profits, they could ease up on the American
public. They have sucked billions out of our economy after having seven full years of
tax payments 100% refunded by this administration.

It is easy to become to simplistic in this discussion.  We must consider the complex relationship among
several factors: the cost of gasoline, oil company profits, taxes paid by by oil companies, and corporate
welfare doled out to oil companies and their subsidiaries by this administration.

Tim...
Here are some observations by experts.

"Over the five-year period 2000-2004, the government will spend more than $394 billion on corporate tax subsidies.
(Analytical Perspectives," Budget of the U.S. Government FY 2000, Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1999.)
...The oil and gas industry, for example, wins major subsidies through the tax code. When the need to encourage a transition to renewable fuels is clear, why does the Internal Revenue Code encourage more aggressive oil drilling, with its associated environmental harms, than even market demand would induce? What rationale is there for artificially biasing the market against conservation and efficiency? Tax escapes and credits to the oil and gas industry take more than $500 million from taxpayers annually."("Analytical Perspectives," Budget of the U.S. Government FY 2000, Table 5-2.)


"Industry report
Detroit Free Press, United States - 7 hours ago
... 7,000 gas stations around the country. Self-serve regular averaged $2.24 a gallon nationwide, mid-grade was $2.34, and premium was $2.44. Gasoline prices have been falling for about a month after rising from November through January. ...Gasoline prices are likely to rebound soon, Lundberg said, citing higher crude oil prices.... "I think, even if crude oil prices downward correct after their big bump on Friday from the attempted attack in Saudi Arabia, that gasoline prices will have to surge upward," Lundberg said Sunday."

"The profit increase the following three big companies in the industry achieved between July and September of 2005:

Chevron Texaco....294%
British Petroleum......165%
Exxon Mobil.............125%

And the price at the pump during this time soared.."

"Lower Gas Prices Now
by Rep. Bernie Sanders

The price of gas at the pump fluctuates daily, but it is now over 40 percent higher than when President Bush first took office.
...
Over the past four years, the five largest oil companies, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Conoco-Phillips, BP Amoco and Royal Dutch Shell have reaped over $205 billion in profits. Last year alone, oil companies earned $87 billion in profits -- an increase of almost 40 percent from 2003. For the second year in a row, ExxonMobil made more profits than any other company in America.

Now, the president would have us believe it would take "a magic wand" to immediately lower gas prices. Not only is this false, but unfortunately the president's own policies are directly contributing to the economic pain Americans are experiencing. Let me mention four approaches that I and other members of Congress are working on which would lower gas prices now:

1. For the past three years, the president has been awarding contracts to ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell to stockpile oil in our nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve [SPR] -- which is now almost completely full. If we released a very small amount of that oil into the marketplace, we could see an immediate reduction of gas prices. This is not a new or radical idea. It has been done by both Republican and Democratic administrations. The first time it was done by President Bush's father in 1991, prices immediately dropped by over $10 per barrel. The second time it was done by President Clinton in 2000, gas prices at the pump dropped by 14 cents a gallon in just two weeks. This is not rocket science. It's Economics 101. Increasing supply in the market will lower prices now, and that's what we should be doing.

2. At a time when the president touts the great advantages of globalization and unfettered free trade, he is strangely quiet about the role of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries [OPEC], an enormously powerful cartel which is expressly designed to control the production and sale of oil. While OPEC violates international free trade and competition agreements every day, costing American consumers billions of dollars, the president has not responded to a letter some of us have written urging him to file a complaint in the World Trade Organization to break up the illegal OPEC cartel.

3. The technology is now available to not only move our country away from fossil fuels and into sustainable energy, but to greatly increase energy efficiency in every aspect of our lives -- including transportation. Instead of driving vehicles which get lower mileage per gallon than we used to, we should raise fuel efficiency standards for automobiles and SUVs so that we do not continue to waste huge amounts of oil. If we raised average fuel standards to 45 miles per gallon for cars and 34 mpg for SUVs over the next decade, we could save consumers $80 billion a year at the pump, 1.3 billion gallons of oil a year, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by more than 1.5 trillion pounds a year. It's a win-win -- good for consumers and good for the environment.

4. Finally, Congress must rewrite the so-called energy bill recently passed by the House of Representatives and supported by the president. This legislation provides billions of dollars in corporate welfare to big energy companies and will actually increase gas prices by 3 cents a gallon according to the president's own Energy Department. Instead, Congress must pass legislation which emphasizes energy efficiency and sustainable energy, protects our environment and our national security and looks out for the interests of the average consumer rather than the CEOs of the oil companies.