... but this annoyed me. I was online this morning and caught a headline: "Exxon Mobil Shatters US Record For Annual Profit." They reported a profit - profit - of $45.2 billion dollars for 2008.
This, while thousands of companies are struggling and drowning, causing millions of people to lose their jobs because their employers can't afford to pay them anymore.
Is it just me, or is there something extremely unbalanced about all this?
They always claim that the price of gas at the pump is so high because of the price of crude oil.
How exactly does the price of crude oil going up have to make gas jump to $4.00 a gallon or more while companies are posting profits of 45 billion dollars? If you're making that much money, it wouldn't seem you'd have to be so hair-trigger effected by a fluctuating crude oil market. Oh, but God forbid you'd lose a billion or two in pocket-lining profit. I don't go and ask my boss for a raise every time my home heating bill goes up (and wouldn't get it if I did). So who eats the cost? We do - the ones least able to afford it.
To add insult to injury, the article seemed to imply that "poor Exxon", despite their record-breaking profit, actually was suffering from the recession as much as the rest of us, as their net income dropped 27 percent in the fourth quarter. In other words, without the horrible economy, they'd have made much more.
I'm having a hard time feeling bad for them.
My home heating bill went from a monthly budget amount of $76.00 in 2007 to $112.00 in 2008 - an increase of 67%. I ate that loss. My 4th quarter profits were about zilch. Over the course of 2008, my expenses just about matched my income.
So I ate a 67% heating cost increase, and broke more or less even for the year. Exxon passes on to me their loss due to higher crude oil prices, and posts an obscene profit.
That's a business enterprise. This is my life. When did we start agreeing to let our very lives take a back seat to corporate greed?
And yes, I do realize that this is just capitalism, it's how we operate. It's all about the profit, and we're not supposed to 'criticize' companies for doing what the society is set up to let them do.
My point is that maybe, just maybe, "the way we've always done it" doesn't mean it's the "best way to do it," when the majority of the populace of the country is suffering to just survive, while CEOs of oil companies earn $21 million dollars cannibalizing the world.
Capitalism (at least the way we do it) encourages the "look out for number one" mentality that I think the world had better grow out of if we'd like to see anything better in our future.
The problem isn't dependence on foreign oil. The problem isn't dependence on any oil. The problem isn't "out there" at all, not the economy, not the crude oil market, not the countries of the Middle East. Just like the problem wasn't coal when the big companies exploited workers who desperately need a job, any job, enough to sell their soul to the company store to feed their children in their shoddy shacks with newspaper on the walls to keep out the snow. (I'm not just exercising creative writing; my mom grew up in coal camps; I heard the first-hand stories).
Or any number of other scenarios, there are plenty.
If we buy that tripe, then the 'next big thing' will be solar power or wind power, which someone somewhere will find a way to exploit, and in 15 or 30 or 50 years, we'll be in the same boat over another commodity. And we'll let it happen as long as we continue to believe the problem is something out there in the world, that we have to find something to replace it with to fix it.
The problem was never out there.
The problem is inside of us. The problem is short-sighted personal greed with no regard for anything or anyone else. The problem is not a 'me first' attitude, but a 'me-only' attitude. Until we learn that we're not only responsible for ourselves, we're responsible for each other, we're doomed.
Reducing dependence on oil, pursuing alternative energy sources, reducing the carbon footprint, all the green catch-phrases that are starting to make me gag over their growing fakeness of sincerity - those things are important, but for far different reasons. They aren't going to fix us. It's putting a bandaid on a broken leg.
Until our mentality grows up, we're going to continue to make the same mistakes over and over, and continue to blame it on something outside of us - something it never was.
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