>> I thought you said "in the last few years." Most of us, I presume, thought "few" meant, you know, 2, 3 or 4?

And it does. Go look at the numbers from 1990, 1995, 2000, and now. With all the public discussion on this, they're easily found. What you'll find is that:

(1) compared to the 80s, the real value of the profits are down.

(2) Oil is a cyclical business. Sometimes -- and again, in real dollars -- profits are way up. Sometimes, like now, they're not.

But you miss the point: all this hoopla about outrageous profits is just more posturing by people who dont understand economics. The oil companies may be making big profits but they're also having to deal with even bigger expenses -- and were they to cut their bottom line out of some kind of strange sense of generosity, it wouldnt make any real difference at the pump. It might drop the price a whole dime. And yet all we can do is look at these numbers and get outraged because we think that, were the oil companies not making so much, it might get us back down to 2.00/gallon gasoline. And it's not.

>> So long as they aren't intentionally dragging their corporate feet or propagandizing the public to protect vested interests, and are not starting unnecessary wars for profit and making all us poor taxpayers foot the bills, power to them.

And obviously, they're not. Like I said earlier in the thread, you have two sources right now that can be blamed for this: speculators and the White House. The latter started it all with an unecessary and hopelessly destabilizing regional war -- I mean, c'mon, reality check: if someone halfway around the world had been screwing around with your governments for decades just so it could benefi itself, wouldnt you start to get a little POd? IMHO, that's what's brought us 0911 and Al Quaeda -- not some strange "The US is an evil Satan! supposedly based on Muslim beliefs about our culture. It;s because we have been an evil Satam, propping up governments, taking down others, for no other reason than to keep control in the region. And when that control started to slip away, we started putting in "temporary" military bases in Kuwait, bases that the Kuwaitti  government has been asking us for years now to dismantle... and we respond by calling them ungrateful for having saved their miserable asses in Desert Stiorm 1, that they should be on their knees thanking us in perpetuity!

Right. We just needed to re-establish our control. When diplomacy failed, we moved on to guns and bullets. Now those arent working either, so I'm not sure what to expect next.

And th speculators? Well, when they pretty well destroyed the internet market and the housing market, they too moved on commodities, and as a result, not just oil is up, but so is food. Everyone talks about how the cost of oil is making the cost of rice to go up, and it's not so: it's speculators in Asia and New York and London who are playing this bubble game so they can make a few more bucks, even if it means food riots in Africa. Those are the guys who pushed the price of oil up by almost 100% in less than six months. Not the Saudis, not ExxonMobil. A bunch of guys in overpriced suits, the new generation version of the 1980s Masters of the Universe, as Tom Wolfe described them. And if we had any sense of moral outrage, we'd haul all of them up for crimes against humanity.

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