IN REGARD TO BP'S NEWS RELEASES ON THE ALASKAN OIL PIPELINE SHUTDOWN
These self-serving statements by a company that is a member of an industry that has historically shafted the American public are to be taken with a grain of salt.
We are seeing, yet again, an industry that is attempting to pull the wool over our eyes with misleading and deceptive statements as to the reasons for the obscene price increases for their product.
We saw this a couple of years ago, when many of the states deregulated the electricity industry (at the behest of that industry) with the claim that deregulation would result in increased competition by the companies providing electricity, supposedly resulting in lower prices for electricity. The result was increased electricity prices in most of the nation. In the Pacific Northwest, which had the lowest electricity rates in the nation before deregulation, the price of electricity skyrocketed. There was NO competition by the electricity companies. It came to pass, as reported in the news media, that deregulation resulted in price fixing, price gouging, and a movement by the electicity companies to reduce supply and at the same time claim that tremendous increases in demand led to the increased rates for electricity. Those of you who bothered to follow this fiasco read the transcripts of tapes, reported in the national news media, made by California electric companies executives, in which they bragged and laughed about how they were purposely reducing the supply in order to create a demand crisis that would allow them to drastically increase prices under the rubic of the much chanted phrases of "supply and demand" and "let the market determine the price".
For those of you who follow, for whatever reason, the prices of building materials, the same type of thing happened with OSB (oriented strand board), also called waferboard, a couple years ago. The price went from about $8 for a 4x8 sheet to over $18 a sheet. The industry claimed that the reason was that 2 or 3 waferboard plants had burned down and 2 or 3 others had to be shut down for refurbishing to modernize them. It then came to pass that those 4-6 plants produced about 2-3% of the waferboard in this country and the whole thing was an industry contrived price gouging of the American public.
I could give other examples, but I think that I've made my point.
As I have said before, the economic theory of supply and damand market pricing only works when supply is not manipulated by those who are supplying the product or service. And such manipulation is rampant in this country, in industry after industry. If you don't believe me, take the time to read the history of the enactment, and reasons for, the antitrust laws that this country has enacted since 1890.
Talk is cheap people. But it is better that you walk the walk and take the time and energy to inform yourselves before you voice your uninformed opinions.
