Tehachapi News

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It is incredible how powerful the oil companies are and yet they claim they do not control the price of oil. They cry to Washington that after they have pumped oil from a hole in the ground, the oil has disappeared. How terrible. How strange. We need an “oil depletion allowance” they wail. Does the fish industry get a fish depletion allowance? Do the wind farmers in Tehachapi get an “unpredictability of wind” allowance? The McDonald’s worker who lost 17 days of employment last month with sore feet surely deserves a foot energy depletion allowance.
Oil companies control the politicians, the Supreme Court and strongly influence if, and where, we go to war. They dig up the oil, load it on their ships and usually deliver it all the way to the gas stations, which they either own or have tied up in iron-clad leases. Sometimes they dump millions of gallons of oil into the Arctic, kill all the fish, do not pay out the 2.5 billion dollar fine, and get the Supreme Court to forgive 80% of it 20 years later. But the Exxon Valdez is another story.
They then refine the oil in refineries that they say the government will not let them build. Magically 99.99% of the time during the last 100 years, the gas stations are stocked with plenty of gas. Lucky they are not in the tomato or lettuce business.
They pay lots of money to Washington using “campaign donations,” which are called “bribes” in the rest of the world, and so they skirt things like the “Monopolies Commission” and after all this they say that some screaming, sweaty guy, waving bits of paper on the floor of the Chicago Commodity Exchange “controls” their price of oil.
The truth is that the oil companies have the power to sell gas at whatever price their little hearts desire, just like the farmer chooses his selling price at the local farmers’ market. One easy solution is to have the oil companies be controlled by the State Public Utilities Commission. Check how much your cost per kilowatt  has gone up in the last decade compared to the “free enterprise” price of gas. But hold on a minute, how are kilowatts produced now? Buy burning oil, coal, nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, cow manure, geothermal and co-gen using grape vines.  My goodness, don’t tell me that the government controlled P.U.C. creates competition and low prices, and the free enterprise oil industry does not! Wake up America! You always need “balance” between government and private enterprise and right now, as we say in England, the oil energy world has gone “doolally.” We need to reduce our dependence on the American oil industry.
Mike Mackenzie