"While researching my third article for BusinessWeek online about the world’s oil situation in 2008, I asked for the most current report from Oil Movements. Because the oil industry is not transparent, Oil Movements tracks every tanker at sea, from both OPEC and non-OPEC oil countries, along with their cargoes’ final destinations. Anne O’Shea responded immediately to my request with their report dated May 8, 2008."
Mr. Wallace says that all classes of oil shipments, except one, have gone up since a year ago, including Middle East oil in transit and Non-OPEC oil in Transit."
Which class has gone down? The 4-Week Changes in Westbound Oil at Sea.
Mr. Wallace points out that "shipments of oil headed west have shown serious declines during the month of April, down 800,000 barrels per day in the week before the publication of the report." He goes on to give us the first line from under the Westbound Oil shipments chart: "In the west, a big share of any [oil] stock building done this year has happened offshore, out of sight."
Clearly impressed himself, he goes on,
"Oil Movements, the unimpeachable source for finding the real world situation on oil transits, is saying that oil is being hidden offshore, not declared in inventories? Yes, that is exactly what they are saying.
"That same week our refineries cut their production runs back to 85 percent, down from 89 percent a year ago, to trim more gasoline out of our stock reserves, to increase their profits per gallon."
What is going on? Hiding oil to drive up the price? To get tax breaks despite mammoth profits? To get Congress to open up ANWAR and the off-shore drilling?
Who ever heard of such a thing?
Well ... we have.
Remember Enron?
Mr. Wallace sure does: "Enron ... manipulat[ed] the California energy market, even forcing rolling blackouts across the northern part of their state apparently just for effect – to support their claim that there just wasn’t enough electricity to go around. Again, we now know that claim was untrue. It was Enron shutting down certain power generation plants, while placing bets on their unregulated energy futures market. The net cost to California consumers was almost $8 billion."
What did we do about it?
There were Congressional hearings in 2001, during which included "blasting certain Wall Street executives for using the media to sell the public on stocks in order to bid up the price – so their firm could divest of its shares without taking a beating. Meanwhile, other trusted advisors pushed stocks that were fundamentally worthless, because their affiliated banks had large loan agreements with those companies."
We know that is called cheating. Also, stealing.
We know that was stealing from us.
