OBSCENE OIL PROFITS

Lynching the oil companies used to be a national sport only a few years ago; it has now become the exclusive pastime of a power elite in and around the Carter administration, and of course, of the mass media, which have good reason to be appalled and indignant: ABC's profits on investment in 1978, for example, were 57.6643% more obscene than Exxon's, and 71.42857% more obscene than Mobil's. The fact is that the "windfall profits" tax is an excise tax which does not even depend on profit, whether windfall (whatever that is) or not; that the oil companies cannot sneeze without government permission, so that they are being punished by those whose orders they follow; that their return on investment is much smaller, and their market concentration negligible, in comparison with the media monopoly; that US government price fixing policy forces them to buy $40 spot oil for the DoE entitlement mix, and to sell $25 contractual oil abroad at whatever markup they can get, which means that the DoE makes the US taxpayer pay the difference to OPEC; that the oil companies could make more dollars by buying US government bonds than by drilling for oil; that their know-how, distribution net and technical facilities are a major national asset.