Wall Street greed fueling high gas prices

From CNN, the only socialist serving in the US Congress, Vermont's Senator Bernie Sanders, weighs in on what's really causing those absurd gas prices:

But there's another reason for the wild rise in gas prices. The culprit is Wall Street. Speculators are raking in profits by gambling in the loosely regulated commodity markets for gas and oil.

A decade ago, speculators controlled only about 30% of the oil futures market. Today, Wall Street speculators control nearly 80% of this market. Many of those people buying and selling oil in the commodity markets will never use a drop of this oil. They are not airlines or trucking companies who will use the fuel in the future. The only function of the speculators in this process is to make as much money as they can, as quickly as they can.

And

Just last week, Commissioner Bart Chilton, one of the only Commodity Futures Trading Commission members looking out for consumers, calculated how much extra drivers are being charged as a result of Wall Street speculation. If you drive a relatively fuel-efficient vehicle such as a Honda Civic, you pay an extra $7.30 every time you fill your tank. For larger vehicles, such as a Ford F150, drivers pay an extra $14.56 for each fill-up. That works out to more than $750 a year going directly from your wallet or pocketbook to the Wall Street speculators.

So as speculators gamble, millions of Americans are paying what amounts to a "speculators tax" to feed Wall Street's greed. People who live in rural areas like my home state of Vermont are hit harder than most because they buy gas to drive long distances to their jobs.

More here.

So, this is capitalism? We're supposed to love it because we're a capitalist lovin' people? Well, not really. Any free market fundamentalist will readily agree that one of the few areas we need government intervention is to prevent monopoly, which essentially destroys the free market, rendering the laws of supply and demand utterly moot. You see a similar situation when too many speculators, or only a few speculators with shit loads of money, get into a particular commodity market. Supply and demand go out the window; the free market becomes a joke. The rational consumer is displaced by guys with money to burn, who run up the price of said commodity with their ability to outbid people who actually plan to use that commodity. That means that actual users have to pay far more for what they want than it's actually worth.

And that's not capitalism. That's no free market. Nonetheless, that's what's happening in the oil market right now. Speculators, investor middle men, are buying up eighty percent of all oil produced, which necessarily runs up the price, making it appear that there is a high demand, when, in fact, there is not. But the higher prices are certainly real, and these despicable middle men are pocketing the difference when they sell off what they had bought previously at lower prices. Like Sanders said, it's a "speculator tax" that goes directly into the hands of asshole rich guys.

And, like Sanders observes later in his essay, we could pretty easily put a stop to this simply by requiring that buyers take physical possession of the oil they buy, that is, keeping speculators out of the market, or, at least, minimizing their presence. But the "free market" lobbying forces, and stupid fucking Congressmen who don't even understand the economic system they think they champion, won't allow it. You know, because they're fucking stupid.

Really, this is all par for the course.

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