A Penny for Your Thoughts

Gasoline went up 1¢, a pretty penny, if you may, from this past Sunday. At this rate, how are we ever gonna break the $5/gal. barrier. The $5 barrier is getting to be something to cheer for. Perhaps classic symptoms of the stockholm syndrome if Big Oil has us hostage. But that's not so. Rather an economic symbiosis. That was sarcasm, btw. Soon, verily, verily, and all that, faster than you can say fill er up, we'll be paying $7-8 a gallon at the pump like the people in Europe are already. There's no law that says a gallon of gasoline won't jump to $6 faster than it took to jump in increments from $4 to $5. I was reading Karl Marx earlier, yes, that Karl Marx, and the gist of his manifesto-ing was that capitalism is overrated. I'm not a devotee of Marx but I do think that at least under a semi-Marxist market there would exist a gov't option oil company to reign in oil prices similar to the idea behind the defunct gov't option that was pulled from the health care insurance bill. And just why would a gov't option be constitutional with health care insurance but then not with the oil industry. In fact, we can kickoff a gov't option for gasoline supply by comadeering the Canada pipeline. Contrary to what Big Oil has been claiming, the pipeline from Canada neither opening more gov't land for drilling won't lower prices at the pump, they'll just have more inventory at their disposal to charge the same high or higher prices because oil prices are set by world oil prices according to Big Oil, not their local ties to the community. There's an irony with 'green energy' (sustainable energy) here locally, in that, Hawaii stopped growing sugar cane because it was getting to be unprofitable, however knowing that Brazil processes all of it's gasoline from domestic sugar cane, it's like we shoulda held on to the stock. I imagine the largest overhead with selling refined sugar was the transportation cost but Honolulu has it's own oil refiner and shipping cost wouldn't be that much of a factor.