The recent increase in gasoline prices has provided politicians another opportunity to stand before the American people and feign concern over the issues that actually impact their lives. There has been a sudden and all too expected shift in the rhetoric being put forth by the Republican leaders in Congress, particularly after being chastised for unveiling an ‘economic plan’ that would further hinder the U.S. recovery and showing their true face of not caring if public sector workers lose their jobs and join the ranks of the unemployed. In attempting to show a modicum of compassion – a characteristic that has eluded the political right for some time – John Boehner vocalized his concern regarding how rising gas prices will affect the lives of many Americans: “it costs more to drive to work, to buy groceries, or just to get the kids to school, and at a time when the economy isn’t creating enough jobs”. Mitch McConnell echoed Boehner’s words by stating that the country needs to do more for the families currently feeling the pressure from rising oil prices. Any hope these two – or the GOP – had in salvaging their image as being for the working class in America was undermined when Boehner and McConnell unveiled the “America Energy Initiative” which would increase domestic production of oil while rolling back government regulations on the industry.
“Oil is a kind of original sin in American politics. It’s a big, messy (sometimes dirty) business, and it has touched everyone and everything in our political system.” – David Ignatius, Washington Post, 2000.
It will be interesting to see how the GOP plans to sell the oil industry to a population that believes, with just cause, all companies under the Big Oil umbrella are doing nothing more than finding ways to gouge consumers by inflating prices. In the “American Energy Initiative”, the GOP demands to see an increase in the production of domestic oil, which has garnered a response from the Obama Administration: “oil production last year rose to its highest level since 2003”. Though the Obama Administration has made progress in increasing the domestic oil supply while instituting better industry regulations, the GOP has fallen back on the standard to fabricate an argument based upon cherry-picked and/or falsified information.
During the photo-op disguised as a news conference, Mitch McConnell accused the White House of creating a series of new regulations and standards – due to the BP oil spill in the Gulf – that he believes threatens the success of the U.S. economic recovery. It is not difficult to realize that the economy the GOP are concerned with is different from the economy of average Americans, as can be seen in the recent vote against the Emergency Homeowner’s Relief Program.
Many GOPers have relied upon fear politics by comparing the current economic situation with that of 1970s America, which is more or less nothing more than an excuse to bad-mouth Jimmy Carter, though they fail to realize that the world economy is much more difficult to undermine with higher oil prices. The reason is that national outputs are not as oil-centric as they were forty years ago; moreover, lower inflation rates mean central banks will not be called upon to act aggressively to the changing economic environment. What is primarily ignored is that it takes a 10% increase in oil prices to decrease global growth by one-fourth of 1%. In order to reverse the progress made in the economic recovery (a 4.5% annual rate of growth), the price per barrel of oil would have to surpass the $150 peak reached in 2008. Even though it would be difficult for the rising price in oil to undermine domestic and international recovery efforts, the possibility remains, though it is not as dire as many would like to make it out to be.
Similar to the GOP attacks against actions taken by the Obama Administration, American oil companies never waste a crisis, real or imagined; they are currently devising ways to take advantage of the unrest in the Middle East to increase corporate profits and gouge consumers. At the end of 2010, long before the revolution in Tunisia, petroleum analysts and market speculators believed that oil was poised to surpass $100/barrel by the summer of 2011; it was believed that gas prices could reach far beyond $5.00/gallon in some parts of the country. Individuals well-integrated into that facet of the economy were not the only ones speculating on the high price of fuel in the not too distant future; AAA predicted gas prices to be well over $4.00/gallon by the summer of 2011, and, in his book “Why We Hate the Oil Companies”, former President of Shell Oil Jeff Hofmeister declared that the national average for gas will reach $5.00/gallon by 2012.
The spike in oil has not surprised anyone researching or affiliated with the oil industry; it is something that was expected to occur in the short-term, without any inkling of unrest in the Middle East. The people in the Middle East and North Africa have become the scapegoat for what the industry had planned all along; the revolutions – the people’s calls for democracy in authoritarian states – have been deemed ‘uncharted territory’ by the oil industry, in that the uncertain future has caused the futures and commodity’s markets to fluctuate heavily. By blaming the actions of the people throughout the Middle East and North Africa, the oil companies are attempting to unite the American people against individuals that want to instill democracy in their own countries; they are reinforcing autocracy over democracy and striving to drag the American people with them in perpetuating this concept throughout the world. The GOP and leaders in the oil industry want the American people to turn their back on the democracy in action occurring in the Middle East and North Africa; they want the American people to develop the same individualistic, ‘me-first’ attitude that has dictated the lives of the political right-wing for generations.