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That video is shameful.
Anyone on here saying paying $5 a gallon is ok is really out of touch.Comment -
Pelosi in that video makes me sick....then again she makes me sick all the time.Comment -
Newsflash guys, neither party has your best interests at heart, its like one big giant game of football, you think that's shameful(the Obama video), look at this quotation from the Republican debate.
"Santorum also hit back against criticism during Wednesday night's debate that he voted for former President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind education reform plan despite supposed ideological objections to the measure.
"It was against the principles I believed in, but you know when you're part of the team, sometimes you take one for the team, for the leader, and I made a mistake," Santorum said at the time. "You know, politics is a team sport ... Sometimes you've got to rally together and do something.""
Therein lies the ultimate problem, which should be obvious to everyone. Politics should not be a team sport, you should have the courage of your convictions, and you should not just go along with something because "Hey, that's what the leader says." If you disagree with something why would you vote for it? Just because its party of the President's agenda doesn't make it part of yours. But that's what scares me about Santorum, if he thinks like that, how can I trust that the rest of his party doesn't think like that and will just go along with him. Because, while I agree with a lot of ideas of the Republican party, I specifically do not agree with a lot of the ideas of Rick Santorum. But, since in his mind politics is a team sport, how can I trust that the ideas of the party that I do agree with, won't take a back seat to his radical ideas that I don't. Same with Romney, I mean, if I actually knew what his ideas were from day to day. With Obama, I am not happy, but at least with him I know what I'm getting(unlike Romney) and he doesn't have ideas that literally scare me, that might just be gone along with if Republicans have a majority in all the houses, even if I know that the majority of Republicans don't agree with his ideas.Comment -
As long as it is Chevron, I don't care about the price.
Even though it is too high, we all need it, and have to pay it.
If gas gets over $5 a gallon, that is when I will start looking to ride a bike around.
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Buy a bike if you cant afford gas. Or take a bus.
3.85 here.Comment -
Looking at charts
Waiting for the right time to short oil
Should top out soonComment -
difference between obama and bush is the latter manipulated gas prices by buying up millions of barrels of oil from private refinaries in 2002 (causing the price of barrel of oil to double overnight) and then invading iraq, taking 1.3 million barrels of oil per day offline.
not only did bush help his buddies in the oil industry become richer, but helped opec realize that americans would pay $4-5 for gas. which is why they have publicly said they would do everything in their powers (cutting production) to keep oil prices artificially high.Comment -
i drive by the cheaper no name brands all the time too. i stick with chevron, shell, mobil and other top tier gas even if they are 20-30 cents more. the cheaper gas returns lower mileage and performance anyways and leave gunk in your engine.Comment -
That's simply not true, all the gas companies get their gas from the same refineries, the only difference is the detergents that they use in the gas. For a good read on this check out, http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Business/s...1#.T0nx0PHy81s One of the relevant sections, "In the past, there might have been more of a difference between different brands of regular unleaded, but these days the EPA requires that all gas contain a minimum amount of detergent to keep car engines clean."Comment -
keyword.... minimum. it's like comparing tap water to evian water. i never drink tap water cause it tastes awful and makes me sick.
chevron, shell, mobil all meet a higher standard as outlined at toptiergas.com.
but i am speaking from my own experience using arco and other no name brands... and i always got lower mpg and sluggish performance so saving a couple of bucks isn't worth it to me.Comment -
Only went up 4c overnight. Sunday = 4.29Comment -
Fcking went up 6c overnight! 3.75.Comment -
Olympic Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue in Los Angeles, California February 21, 2012
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QUIK STOP #5126 (DISCOUNT AVAILABLE) - QUIK STOP
$4.05
SAFEWAY (DISCOUNT AVAILABLE) - SAFEWAY
$4.06
SAFEWAY (DISCOUNT AVAILABLE) - SAFEWAY
$4.06
CIRCLE K - CIRCLE K
$4.09
MODERN MARKET
$4.15
TOWER MART 124
$4.19
PASTOR'S AUTO CARE - VALERO
$4.23
CHEVRON - CHEVRON
$4.23
CHEVRON - CHEVRON
$4.25
VALERO - VALERO
$4.25
Next
Glad I filled up my tank when it was $3.85 a gallon a little less than a week ago.Comment -
Placita - feminineComment -
Why are gas prices surging to levels unseen since the 2008 oil spike while the oil companies reporting record profits? Much of the problem is actually created by Wall Street traders here in the USA who gamble on oil prices and powerful multinational companies that manipulate the supply and demand by stockpiling oil when the price is low and expected to rise in the near future. And yes, so far this practice is perfectly legal.
Bart Chilton, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal agency that regulates commodity futures and option trading in the United States, says a very few number of players control too much of the market, allowing them to push the price of gas higher and higher. The American public knows very little about the oil speculation industry because a conservative majority on the CFTC has refused to implement the mandates from the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act to curb abuses and provide transparency.
One of those players is the petrochemical multinational Koch Industries. Although oil extraction is a small part of the Koch’s oil business the company has major control over every other part of the market as its core venture is shipping crude oil, refining it, distributing it to retailers, then speculating on the future price. The company actively trades about 50 types of crude oil around the world and has trading operations in London, Geneva, Singapore, Houston, New York, Wichita, Rotterdam, and Mumbai.
When future oil prices are expected to rise–which means when demand is expected to exceed supply–big banks and companies like Koch start buying up oil and storing it in massive containers both on land and offshore to lock in the oil for sale later at a set price.
In 2008, Fortune magazine reported that Koch Supply & Trading leased the 2-million-barrel-capacity Dubai Titan that year, the third supertanker the company has leased, because the demand for oil storage was so high that Koch and other big investors who could not secure storage on land have resorted to leasing supertankers and using them as floating oil tanks.
Koch was one of the companies that lobbied aggressively against President’s financial reform bill-–mentioned above–particularly on provisions related to transparency in the energy trading market. Representatives from the company’s lobbying firm even argued that moderate levels of the toxic chemical dioxin should not be designated as a cancer risk for humans at an EPA hearing last summer.
When we look at the money Koch has spent on lobbying to influence laws and regulations in Washington in recent years–from $857,000 in 2004 to $20 million in 2008–it is not surprising that Koch’s lobbyists and officials have successfully fought to preserve the industry’s tax breaks and credits, and defeated all attempts by Congress to regulate environmental hazards and transparency requirements.
At the beginning of February 2012, Koch and about 300 other-–invitation only–individuals pledged approximately $100 million to defeat President Obama in the 2012 elections at a private meeting in California. And now at the end of February 2012 we are seeing a distinctive rise in the oil prices at the pump. I will not speculate any further as I have the utmost trust in the intelligence of our readers to connect the dots and fill in the blanks.Comment -
You Republicans want someone to blame for the high gas prices .. look to the very people that you are voting into power... they are all financed by the guys making the biggest amount of money from all of this .... and you sheep are buying the bullsh!t and voting them into power ... doing EXACTLY what they want you to do. Wake up - do the research and think for yourself ....
Koch Brothers Flout Law Getting Richer With Secret Iran Sales
In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.
“I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova- Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.”
She immediately notified her supervisors in the U.S. A week later, Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries dispatched an investigative team to look into her findings, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its November issue.
By September of that year, the researchers had found evidence of improper payments to secure contracts in six countries dating back to 2002, authorized by the business director of the company’s Koch-Glitsch affiliate in France.
“Those activities constitute violations of criminal law,” Koch Industries wrote in a Dec. 8, 2008, letter giving details of its findings. The letter was made public in a civil court ruling in France in September 2010; the document has never before been reported by the media.
Egorova-Farines wasn’t rewarded for bringing the illicit payments to the company’s attention. Her superiors removed her from the inquiry in August 2008 and fired her in June 2009, calling her incompetent, even after Koch’s investigators substantiated her findings. She sued Koch-Glitsch in France for wrongful termination.
Obsessed with Secrecy
Koch-Glitsch is part of a global empire run by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, who have taken a small oil company they inherited from their father, Fred, after his death in 1967, and built it into a chemical, textile, trading and refining conglomerate spanning more than 50 countries.
Koch Industries is obsessed with secrecy, to the point that it discloses only an approximation of its annual revenue -- $100 billion a year -- and says nothing about its profits.
The most visible part of Koch Industries is its consumer brands, including Lycra fiber and Stainmaster carpet. Georgia- Pacific LLC, which Koch owns, makes Dixie cups, Brawny paper towels and Quilted Northern bath tissue.
Charles, 75, and David, 71, each worth about $20 billion, are prominent financial backers of groups that believe that excessive regulation is sapping the competitiveness of American business. They inherited their anti-government leanings from their father.
Abolishing Social Security
Fred was an early adviser to the founder of the anti- communist John Birch Society, which fought against the civil rights movement and the United Nations. Charles and David have supported the Tea Party, a loosely organized group that aims to shrink the size of government and cut federal spending.
These are long-standing tenets for the Kochs. In 1980, David Koch ran for vice president on the Libertarian ticket, pledging to abolish Social Security, the Federal Reserve System, welfare, minimum wage laws and federal agencies -- including the Department of Energy, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency.
What many people don’t know is how the Kochs’ anti- regulation political ideology has influenced the way they conduct business.
A Bloomberg Markets investigation has found that Koch Industries -- in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle East -- has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism.
The ‘Koch Method’
Internal company documents show that the company made those sales through foreign subsidiaries, thwarting a U.S. trade ban. Koch Industries units have also rigged prices with competitors, lied to regulators and repeatedly run afoul of environmental regulations, resulting in five criminal convictions since 1999 in the U.S. and Canada.
From 1999 through 2003, Koch Industries was assessed more than $400 million in fines, penalties and judgments. In December 1999, a civil jury found that Koch Industries had taken oil it didn’t pay for from federal land by mismeasuring the amount of crude it was extracting. Koch paid a $25 million settlement to the U.S.
Phil Dubose, a Koch employee who testified against the company said he and his colleagues were shown by their managers how to steal and cheat -- using techniques they called the Koch Method.
Refused to Falsify
In 1999, a Texas jury imposed a $296 million verdict on a Koch pipeline unit -- the largest compensatory damages judgment in a wrongful death case against a corporation in U.S. history. The jury found that the company’s negligence had led to a butane pipeline rupture that fueled an explosion that killed two teenagers.
Former Koch employees in the U.S. and Europe have testified or told investigators that they’ve witnessed wrongdoing by the company or have been asked by Koch managers to take what they saw as improper actions.
Sally Barnes-Soliz, who’s now an investigator for the State Department of Labor and Industries in Washington, says that when she worked for Koch, her bosses and a company lawyer at the Koch refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas, asked her to falsify data for a report to the state on uncontrolled emissions of benzene, a known cause of cancer. Barnes-Soliz, who testified to a federal grand jury, says she refused to alter the numbers.
“They didn’t know what to do with me,” she says. “They were really kind of baffled that I had ethics.”
Koch’s refinery unit pleaded guilty in 2001 to a federal felony charge of lying to regulators and paid $20 million in fines and penalties.
Corporate Cultures
“How much lawless behavior are we going to tolerate from any one company?” asks David Uhlmann, who oversaw the prosecution of the Koch refinery division when he was chief of the environmental crimes unit at the U.S. Department of Justice. “Corporate cultures reflect the priorities of the corporation and its senior officials.”
Koch Industries declined to make either Charles Koch, who lives near corporate headquarters in Wichita, or David Koch, who lives in New York, available for interviews.
Melissa Cohlmia, Koch’s director of corporate communications, said in an e-mailed statement that the company has developed a good relationship with environmental regulators and now complies with all rules. Cohlmia says the company has learned lessons from past mistakes, including the improper payment scheme that Koch outlined in its letter filed in French court.
‘Steps to Correct’
“We are proud to be a major American employer and manufacturing company with about 50,000 U.S. employees,” she wrote. “Given the regulatory complexity of our business, we will, like any business, have issues that arise. When we fall short of our goals, we take steps to correct and address the issues in order to ensure compliance.”
Cohlmia says Koch fired the employees and sales agents involved in the illicit payments and strengthened internal controls.
Regarding sales to Iran, she wrote, “During the relevant time frame covered in your article, U.S. law allowed foreign subsidiaries of U.S. multinational companies to engage in trade involving countries subject to U.S. trade sanctions, including Iran, under certain conditions.”
Koch has since stopped all of its units from trading with Iran, she says.
Lobbying Washington
The Koch brothers have vaulted into the American political spotlight in recent years. Koch Industries has spent more than $50 million to lobby in Washington since 2006, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan group that tracks political donations. The company opposed derivatives regulation and greenhouse gas limits.
The brothers have backed a foundation that has trained thousands of Tea Party activists. The Tea Party, a popular movement whose name stands for Taxed Enough Already, has grown into a potent force in national politics. Sixty representatives of Congress, out of a total of 435, identify themselves as Tea Party members. Virtually every Republican candidate for president -- including Texas Governor Rick Perry and Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann -- has solicited the group’s support.
Integrity and Compliance
Koch Industries’ political action committee, KochPAC, donated $50,000 to Texans for Rick Perry last year for his gubernatorial campaign, according to the Texas Ethics Commission. It has also donated to support Bachmann’s congressional campaigns, Federal Election Commission records show.
The company tells all of its employees around the world that its top two values, which it calls Guiding Principles, are integrity and compliance. Koch Industries and its subsidiaries have won 436 awards for safety, environmental excellence, community and customer service and innovation since January 2009, Cohlmia says.
The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration has recognized several of the company’s units for their commitment to the workplace, the company says. Koch Industries has also supported charitable causes in Wichita and beyond, including the Kansas Special Olympics and Big Brothers Big Sisters. The company has also helped enlistees in the U.S. Army Reserve.
Koch Industries has donated millions of dollars to the Nature Conservancy, the Red Cross, the Salvation Army and victims of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
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Wow, have the Koch bro's changed their ways or is that a smoke screen? As far as the oil,
I would guess the latter.Comment -
Decent gas prices out there now, good job obama.Comment -
victory for Obama
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$1.08 a gallon today after using my Kroger points.Comment -
This thread sure is full of idiots..
Lets attack Obama for gas prices. Then when they do drop, instead of giving him praise, they'll attack him for some other idiotic thing.. I'm not a big fan of either party, but republicans make me want to bang my head against the wall..Comment -
When can we use betpoints for gas?Comment
