← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · JoseyWales
Thread ID: 19692 | Posts: 13 | Started: 2005-08-17
2005-08-17 12:55 | User Profile
Yesterday, I was watching Lou Dobbs on CNN. I cant remember if it was on his show, slightly before or after but they did a brief story on gas prices. Over the last 2 years gas prices have gone way up, everybody knows that. However, many oil related stocks have seen gains over 50% and many of the oil company CEO salaries have seen gains in excess of 100%.
Pigs at the trough...
If anyone can find the story, id appreciate it.
2005-08-17 14:15 | User Profile
Suppose it costs 20-cents per gallen to pay for the labor and hardware to take it out of the ground and deliver it to the local gas station. When gas is selling for 120-cents per gallen, there's a lot of people making fat profits (including governments, some of that price is taxes). When gas is selling for 300-cents per gallen, there are a lot of people making real big mega-fat profits.
Recent mergers among big oil companies have killed a lot of competative pressure for lower prices. Bush's war on Iraq has lowered the oil supply as well as sent speculators crazy, pushing up the price of oil. And, I hear that India and China are using a lot more cars these days, pushind demand up.
2005-08-17 16:19 | User Profile
China is placing 10,000 NEW cars on the road EVERY DAY.
Where they used to ride bikes around the area of down town now they allowed only cars.
People are beggining to wear face mask, like in Japan, because of the fumes.
The problem with oil is bigger than people realizes not because of gasoline but because of the byproduct of oil and is going to hit them like a two by four.
2005-08-17 17:26 | User Profile
So does anyone have a url or something that talks about the salraries of big oil co's and how they have gone up over the last 2yrs?
2005-08-17 19:12 | User Profile
[QUOTE=JoseyWales]Yesterday, I was watching Lou Dobbs on CNN. I cant remember if it was on his show, slightly before or after but they did a brief story on gas prices. Over the last 2 years gas prices have gone way up, everybody knows that. However, many oil related stocks have seen gains over 50% and many of the oil company CEO salaries have seen gains in excess of 100%.
[/QUOTE] [u]Breaking News From Lou Dobbs[/u]!!!
Gas Prices Up!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! CEO Salaries Up Even More!!!!!!!!
I mean, omigod, how does he uncover this stuff?!
Executive compensation at most publicly traded companies is obscene. The problem is complex and multi-faceted. This one's probably over Lou's head.
2005-08-17 20:57 | User Profile
[QUOTE=SteamshipTime][u] Executive compensation at most publicly traded companies is obscene. The problem is complex and multi-faceted. This one's probably over Lou's head.[/QUOTE]
It's obscene alright, but I wouldn't say it's so complex.
Have you read Robert Monks on [URL=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0631222642/qid=1124312359/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/002-7237519-1448060]corporate governance[/URL]?
He does a pretty good job of dissecting the problem, which is basically inherent in the corporate legal structure.
First, the corporate form separates millions of relatively small investors from their money in exchange for limited liability. Since their shareholdings are usually only a small faction of the total outstanding stock, there is positive economic disincentive for stockholders to spend any time managing the company - they're interested only in stock price, with the stock market being a sort of legalized gambling casino. This complete lack of investor interest in corporate governance basically gives the hired help carte blanche to run amock and squeeze the corporation for more of its cashflow, much of which would otherwise flow to workers or stockholders.
And besides, most small to medium sized investors don't even know what stock they own on any given day, since the management of their money is turned over to a handful of big pension and other investment funds.
But the big pension funds are also disinclined to take an interest in corporate governance, since they're generally invested over the entire stockmarket and thus become proxies for the entire economy, rendering it impossible for them to "beat the market" since they are the market. When that's the case, there is no incentive to spend resources on corporate governance and the pension funds settle back into a passive, paper-pushing role.
The problem is inherent in the whole corporate legal scheme, and the antidote is to do away with (at least the routine) use of the corporate form in business.
2005-08-17 21:07 | User Profile
Moving now from natural disasters to what could be a disastrous trend for consumers in this country, as already sky-high gasoline prices continue to climb. Middle-class Americans are spending 40 percent more on gasoline now than a year ago. And while those soaring gasoline prices devastate family budgets, they're bolstering the huge profits of the major oil companies. You might want to know where all those profits are going. Bill Tucker tells us.
BILL TUCKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The sharp increases in gasoline prices are wallet-crushing, but for many Americans there's no other choice but to pay even as it hurts. BRAD PROCTOR, GASPRICEWATCH.COM: If you are a $10 to $15 an hour wage earner in this country, more than likely you do own a car and you drive to work. That's the portion of our economy right now that's really being waylaid. These people, their disposable income is being eaten up by the increases in gasoline right now.
TUCKER: The little guy is getting killed while oil companies bask in those dollars. Second quarter profits rose in eye-popping double digits. Here's a sampling. ConocoPhillips up 51 percent. Royal Dutch Shell up 34 percent. ExxonMobil up 32 percent. British Petroleum, up 29 percent. The paychecks of big oil CEOs, up 109 percent from 2003 to 2004.
The response from Democrats as well as Republicans has been silence, while keeping $6 billion in oil companies in the form of subsidies. Critics say Congress fiddled while energy burned, by failing to pass a meaningful energy bill.
MARK COOPER, CONSUMER FED. OF AMERICA: Given the magnitude of the economic and environmental and geopolitical problem that gasoline and oil imports presents, the response was embarrassingly weak.
TUCKER: And left the consumer defenseless.
(on camera): And in an effort to fend for themselves, buying patterns are starting to change, consumers telling gaspricewatch.com that they're buying gasoline in five to six gallon lots at a time hoping, Lou, that prices will come down before they have to go and buy the gas the next time.
DOBBS: And hopefully they have automobiles that five or six gallons will carry them much farther than most Americans.
TUCKER: Hopefully so. And many of these people as pointed out, don't have a choice, they have to do it.
DOBBS: Bill Tucker, thank you very much. [url]http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0508/16/ldt.01.html[/url]
2005-08-17 21:12 | User Profile
I knew i could count on you guys. thanks, thats it
2005-08-17 21:40 | User Profile
Walter,
I agree generally with everything you said, and there are also some distortions due to US tax policy that need to be discussed. I know you know the issues, and my only point would be that even your little summary is too much for the talking heads.
2005-08-18 06:31 | User Profile
[QUOTE=SteamshipTime]Walter,
I agree generally with everything you said, and there are also some distortions due to US tax policy that need to be discussed. I know you know the issues, and my only point would be that even your little summary is too much for the talking heads.[/QUOTE]
Well, yeah, I agree. My point is that the concept isn't too hard even for simple t.v. sound bites, but rather that the whole notion of doing away with corporations altogether is such dangerous heresy that the big media corporations will do every thing in their power to prevent that idea from getting any airtime at all.
I urge all interested in this subject to read the Robert Monks book on this subject. Monks is a corporate governance reform crusader. Unlike me, he accepts that corporations are just part of the economic landscape, and he seeks to reform them. I see no other way than to be shut of them altogether.
2005-08-18 09:31 | User Profile
The only blameable party is the idiotic, sheeplike American people itself, which has spinelessly allowed itself to become neurotically dependent on all these extraneous and entropic forms of industrial technology through its own lack of autarkic racial impulse and foresight.
Judeo-Freemasonry and its economic arm has had no trouble in fleecing this nation of pusillanimous down-bred herd-animals, which has allowed itself to degenerate so badly that its only aspiration is to breed, fornicate, be entertained, and consume like irrational animals for the benefit of the Talmudic financial elite.
I grow weary of hearing dim-witted monkey-proles complaining in a self-satisfied and ritualistic way about "the damned unreasonable gas prices". I want to say: "If you have a problem with it, cease the pusillanimous and ineffectual moaning, and [u]actively separate[/u] yourself from the hypertrophied military-industrial-financial Behemoth which forms the support of the present demoplutocracy. If you continue to reinforce your own enslavement by supporting the rootless globalist cartels and bankers with your measly capital in imitation of the rest of the lemmings whose lack of sense prevents them from seeing the insanity of their everyday exploitation, then good riddance to you and your kind when this society of soulless foundations finally and inevitably collapses!"
As far as I'm concerned, the conservative Amish societies are some of the only places of reason left in this nation.
2005-08-18 12:55 | User Profile
Walter,
I think you are correct. If anyone calls one of the talk radio idiots about transnational corporations and attempts to point this out, they are attacked as "corporation bashers", and therefore have to be socialists. After all, as they say, who would provide the jobs that corporations do? And furthermore, there is nothing wrong with these mega mergers- that Capitalism according to them. It isn't just the Left that has a kneejerk attitude, the (Neocon) Right is equally guilty of this. Of course, these talk radio host work for who? Big corporations.
I don't consider the corporate form to have anything to do with free enterprise.
2005-08-18 16:00 | User Profile
I hate to say " I told you so", I still have 530 gallons of gasoline to my credit (at $1.69 per gallons) from the 1,000 gallons that I bought when I knew that the price was going to go up.
Because I know also that the sh*t is going to hit this country I am now also prepared with food for three years and other goodies, read my past postings.
Start getting ready guys, I don't want to say again "I told you so".