"Oh, yawn..." Atlas shrugs blithely, "I've no time for such things." Oil jumps over $75/barrel...

[bridgit]

'NEW YORK — Oil jumped more than a dollar on Wednesday after a steep drop in U.S. gasoline stocks fanned concerns the world's top consumer could face a shortfall during the peak summer driving season.
Plagued by a string of unplanned outages, U.S. refiners have drawn down inventories to keep up with growing gasoline demand, helping push oil prices up near record peaks.

U.S. light crude rose $1.03 to $75.05 a barrel. Global benchmark London Brent crude settled up $1.23 to $76.76 a barrel, after falling 76 cents the previous day.'

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/energy/2007-07-18-oil-prices_N.htm

[Initech]

1. Unplanned outages? I call bullshit!!!

They've been planned and big oil damn well knows it. They clearly took a page out of the Enron book - shut down supplies to drive up demand. And yet nobody finds anything suspicious about this.

[AndyA]

2. I agree, like clockwork the refineries shut down in the Spring for maintenance.

That would be like Macy's closing their stores for inventory the week before Christmas. This is bullshit! Unplanned my ass. And it happens year after year.

[Initech]

3. Yup, and nobody does anything about it either.

I'll tell you who the real criminals in this country are - the oil executives and the politicians who let them get away with their crimes.

[AndyA]

4. And one of the worst offenders is JAMES INHOFE (R-OK).

You'd think after all the oil industry in Oklahoma for decades, this state would have great education, health care, and infrastructure. But no, just like a used condom, the oil companies got rich and slowly moved their headquarters out of state, leaving us tossed aside literally like a used condom.

Now there's an effort to force them to clean up some of the messes they left behind, and they have a huge advertising blitz in the state telling us all how wonderful they are for cleaning up hazardous waste that they left behind, which they should have cleaned up decades ago anyway. Fuck them!

But the fact is, they used us and left us. And our politicians allowed them to do it.

Thanks James Inhofe, Tom Coburn, and John Sullivan. Worse representation would be IMPOSSIBLE to find, unless George Bush himself became a Senator.

:scared: :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared: :scared:

[bridgit]

5. sadly yup, "nobody finds anything suspicious about this"...

:shrug: