There is this "economic murder" at the pump when oil companies and their retailers cabal to raise the prices of gasoline sky-high that "kill" the household budget of barely surviving poor consumers. While there are natural causes that disrupt the law of supply and demand which trigger prices to rise, most often than not jacked up prices are "artificial" due to price manipulation and malicious trade practices.

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by jczart

     With the price of gas soaring sky-high, "economic murder" is committed at the gas pump, according to poor helpless consumers who cried their heart out in protest but can do nothing to prevent this perceived pricing anomaly as oil companies and retailers dominating the market cabal in jacking up the prices of gasoline at will.

     An old-timer named Jack, a dismayed gas consumer, complained about his agony in coping with the rising prices of fuel. He confided to me right after he barely filled up the tank of his 2007 Toyota Matrix car with $56 worth of premium gasoline at a nearby Shell gas station paying $4.71 a gallon. He estimated that this full gas tank would hardly last a week if he will use his car every day on a regular basis.

     As of the day this article is written, gas prices per gallon in El Cajon City, Southern California, where Jack and I live, are as follows: Average, $4.44; Lowest, $4.31, and the Highest at $4.71 is almost reaching the $5.00 a gallon mark this early part of the year.   This highest retail price of gasoline tells it all.

    Since prices of gasoline per gallon are unlikely to go down for at least a month from now -- and could still even go up -- I did the numbers for Jack and his wife Eunice so that they could see clearly the reason for their budgetary torment: The couple, who live alone by themselves in a rented two-bedroom apartment, would pay a total of $224 [$56 x 4]  for their gasoline consumption this month  if they would just drive around town for errands and/or driving to and from work.

    However, I assured Jack and his wife, and put their doubts to rest that they would still pay more than just $224 at the gas pump this month when he and his wife visit friends out of town and spend a weekend with their families as they normally do. Their gasoline consumption would rise in tandem with the price of gas per gallon as this continues to gallop sky high and create an ugly gaping hole in their pocket.

     Thus Jack moaned with frustration as he tells his friends of his encounter with the third kind [a shocker] at the gas pump " that this sore experience in the gas pump had "killed" their regular household budget at least for this month of February.   If Jack and his wife have to literally stay alive for this month of February as they screamed "economic murder" at the gas pump, out of desperation, my guess is that in fact they might not survive at all.

      There's a strong possibility that this admirable and friendly, soft-spoken, elderly and in poor health couple -- they are now physically weak at their late 80s, sickly and barely surviving just a little bit above this country's poverty line-- may not make it.     

       "With our meager income and medical problems to attend to, we have to live on a very tight budget," 

Jack, a jobless retired engineer, bellyached his predicament. His elderly spouse has a menial job that pays a minimum daily wage, with a little social security to boot but still not enough to pay the monthly rent.

     "When our total income is summed up, those standard Federal and State aid requirements do not make us eligible to receive any housing benefits and food stamps," Jack griped.

They are just an iota over and above the Poverty Guidelines for food stamps. For example, the poverty guideline starting from the year 2009, was $903 per month ($10,830 per year) for a single person, plus $312 per month for Jack's wife. To be eligible for food stamp, their monthly income should not be more than $1,215 [See   SNAP -- Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ], although   obviously it doesn't make any difference at all if their monthly gross income is only a couple of hundred dollars more over the poverty line.

       In our conversation, I did not press this income issue on Jack to avoid the ignominy of further embarrassment, but my suspicion is that in spite of their financial difficulties, Jack and his wife are too proud to beg the government for any pecuniary assistance gratis et amore.

     But other than pride, there could also be some political reasons behind this mulishness or resistance to receive charity or to be subjected to public entreaty like those economically disadvantaged are under Obama's controversial social amelioration program for the underprivileged.   I know that Jack and Eunice are both die-hard Republicans who did not vote for Obama. As a matter of principles, like Jack and his wife, there are also millions of poor Americans who believe that they have no reason to thank Obama for his socialistic welfare program of redistributing the wealth of the rich to all the suffering poor across the country.

      In effect, this senior couple, like millions of their kind, has barely enough for their basic necessities; the little money they have mostly goes to pay for their elongated list of medicines they can't survive without. To them the medications that their primary care physician had prescribed for their advance age so that they may live longer, are no doubt just as important as their basic need of a roof over their head, clothing on their back, and food in their stomach.

     I know a little bit more about Jack's personal background that his other friends don't. In life, Jack has a proud core value of our American freedom of choice. In his younger days, he was one of those young activists that marched down the streets nationwide during those earlier protests at the conclusion of WWII against Big Government encroaching into the problems and turmoil of Indochina [under the US-France Mutual Defense Act ] , until it ended in the decisive defeat of France by Vietnam in The Battle of Dien Bien Phu in May 1954.   Jack recalls the objectionable stigma of a people's choice to be free from foreign domination in this war which was notoriously known in Europe and to local anti-war protesters as the decade's "Dirty War" [ First Indochinese War ] that disgraced France supported by the United States while at the same time this nation was then confronting Russia, China and later on North Korea in Gen. Douglas MacArthur's military grand design to nuke China [see MacArthur wanted to drop nuclear bombs in Manchuria ] to end the war that just broke out in the Korean Peninsula .

      Notwithstanding all these popular sentiments in the United States and Europe against foreign domination, ironically Jack eventually ended up fighting the Vietcong guerillas and the Regular North Vietnamese Army, then attempting to free their country of U.S. occupation in what is now known as the long-drawn-out and bloody Vietnam War.     

      Jack believes that a person fighting and dying for freedom anywhere as the cliché goes -- from Vietnam to Iraq and now in Afghanistan -- is a genuine blue-blooded American. He believes, lives with it and ready to die for it. The freedom of choice that true Americans have is sacred to him.   To him to have a choice is a providential gift from above, which is much larger than life itself. I do agree with Jack that the Bill of Rights is nothing without our individual freedom of choice. We both agree that this is the only cogent reason why patriots die in war and in peace as they struggle for liberty and freedom on this planet.

     Thus buying a "premium" gasoline no matter how costly it is [although it reportedly makes car engines last longer and perform better] illustrates the strong-headedness of Jack's belief on his own freedom of choice to buy any kind of gasoline he wants. He sticks to this belief even though friends like me argue against the impracticality of his gasoline choice [he could run his car with cheaper gasoline and save a few dollars], and even survived ridicules with good grace when embarrassed because of his stubbornness when sometimes he has to defend the oddity of his choice.  

      But strange enough for me to know that people like Jack are resigned to this grim reality " that oil companies and their retailers commit this "economic murder" at the gas pump with impunity and nothing they could do to stop it.   But yes, there is. With determination and sacrifice, millions of strong-willed people like Jack all over the country could break a powerful gasoline pricing monopoly and stop this economic murder at the gas pump. When Shell gas stations and their retail outlet-subsidiaries are singled out in a nationwide boycott, Shell suppliers and their retailers will be forced to lower their prices or else close down to avoid losses.

     When under this pressure of nationwide boycott Shell choses to stop their loss of revenues and lower their prices at the gas pump, the other competing giant oil companies will scale down their gasoline prices even lower than that of Shell once consumers shift their gasoline purchases to Shell because of lower prices.   We are talking of a free market system that is free of distortions.

      However, for this consumer nationwide boycott in solidum to succeed, the Federal Government should step in to prevent any existing conspiracy of big oil companies to raise the prices of gasoline at the level they want in order to satiate what the general public believes as an organized mutual greed of oil and petroleum companies for profit. "The real cause of our problems is oil company Greed as illustrated by huge profits."   [ Al Bender in Oil Company Profits Behind High Gas Prices]

     There are of course natural causes of supply and demand that trigger the spiraling of prices out of control as what happened in the oil crisis of 1973 when OAPEC

[Organization of Arab Petroleum Producing Countries] declared an oil embargo following the Arab invasion of Israel.   It disrupted oil supply worldwide. High demand in the wake of short supply pushed prices up and it exploded in the gas pumps so to speak, not only in the United States but all over the world.

      But generally, jacked up gasoline prices are most often than not, "artificial". Sen. Dianne Feinsten [D-California] had called on the Federal Trade Commission to protect consumers from "malicious trading schemes" of oil companies.   The idea is for the Federal Government to use its power in seeing to it that our free market system is operating freely without any contrived distortions "without the use of the coercive power of the mighty oil industry in preventing and disrupting competition to protect their self-interest -- a free market system that is constantly monitored to prevent the temptation of fraudulent pricing or illegal price manipulation and malicious trade practices.

     There are many ways to stop this "economic murder" at the pump.   And this is just one of them.

Authors Bio:

Author .. writer, columnist. Published editorials, essays, feature articles, novelettes and short stories. Has degrees in literature and journalism, masters in development economics and in civil law [M.A. Economics and LLM], journalist, lawyer, Finance Attache, ASEAN specialist, retired diplomat and former deputy permanent representative to the United Nations.