Blasting Big Oil

Another front on which “conservatives” have joined forces with the Democratic berserkers is in placing the blame for gas prices on the oil companies. Not on government, God forbid—it has spent us into oblivion, causing the dollar’s devaluation, and, consequently, the prices of all commodities to rise. No sirree. Like Obama and Clinton, dittoheads lay in to “Big Oil.”

Do me a favor; leave off that bogus bugbear.

Exxon Mobil and the rest have done a smashing job of bringing a product to market despite the fact that they’ve not been allowed to build a refinery for 25 years. Who has outlawed drilling in the arctic tundra or off the coast of California and Florida?

Not one nuclear power plant has been constructed since Three Mile Island. That’s due to the energetic efforts of your government and the environmental antediluvian interests it heeds. But chiefly government. Why? Because it has a duty to say “no” to the anti-civilization lobby. (McCain is a pinko to rival all pinkos when it comes to understanding energy.)

To the list of our government’s energy infractions, Pat Buchanan, in Day of Reckoning, adds the tearing down of “great dams like Hoover and Grand Coulee.”

Reduced supply and increased demand means higher prices. Cheer a Democrat-led attack on oil companies and you’ll be penalizing their ability to bring gas to market. Lines around the block will ensue.

Writing in the New York Times, Ben Stein deconstructed the “Us vs. Them” myth of oil ownership, also a component in the demonization of “Big Oil”:

“First, Exxon Mobil, like all the other gigantic integrated energy companies in this country, is owned not by a cabal of reactionary businessmen holding clandestine meetings in a lodge in the Texas scrublands (as Oliver Stone so brilliantly illustrated in “Nixon”).

Exxon Mobil, in fact, is owned mostly by ordinary Americans. Mutual funds, index funds and pension funds (including union pension funds) own about 52 percent of Exxon Mobil’s shares. Individual shareholders, about two million or so, own almost all the rest. The pooh-bahs who run Exxon own less than 1 percent of the company.

When Exxon Mobil earns almost $12 billion in a quarter, or $41 billion in a year, as it did in 2007, that money does not go into the coffers of a few billionaire executives quaffing Champagne in Texas. It goes into the pension and retirement accounts of ordinary citizens. When Exxon pays a dividend, that money goes to pay for the mortgages and oxygen tanks and in-home care of lots of elderly Americans.

So, Mr. Obama, which union pension plans — and which blue-collar workers who benefit from them — will be among the first you would like to deprive of the income that flows from Exxon’s rich dividends?

When Mr. Obama or his Democratic rival, my fellow Yale Law School graduate Hillary Rodham Clinton, go after the oil companies and want to take away their profits, they are basically seeking to lower the income of the ordinary American. Why do that? It’s just cutting off one end of a blanket and sewing it to the other.”