The oil companies are even closing refineries because they can’t get rid of enough gasoline to justify running them, but still the corporate media dutifully report that the “shortage” of gasoline is driving up the price.
The truth is that oil companies and Wall Street banks are trying to carry through on their threat to take down Obama if he didn’t play ball. Indeed the media is playing up the potential damage to the economy if the price of gas actually goes up as much predicted. The really scary news stories quote unnamed sources as promising $6.00 gas by mid-summer or EVEN HIGHER!
The problem is that these are exactly the same stories they ran this time last year. It’s true that gasoline is a bit higher than this day last year and has just jumped by 40 cents recently, but still is below the last year's high. The thing about commodity price increases is that they eventually get incorporated into the economy, and cease to have any real effect. The prices of consumer products that ran up last year with these “promises” of high gas prices were even coming down again as the price slid below $3.00/gallon briefly.
That’s not to say there aren’t millions of people suffering, but it’s not really from the price of gasoline. The suffering comes from depressed wages and from national policies that only favor the 0.1% of Americans. If the minimum wage were $14/hour like it was in from 1938 until 1980 (when adjusted for inflation), and skilled factory jobs paid $63/hour like they do in Germany, we wouldn’t be worried about $5 gas that much.
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