Windfall profits tax would help beleaguered motorists

By Wayne Madsen
McCLATCHY-TRIBUNE

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For the past eight years, U.S. oil conglomerates have reaped huge benefits from their campaign contributions to their two most powerful shills -- the president and vice president of the United States.

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney -- from the oil-producing states of Texas and Wyoming -- made the executive branch of the federal government into virtual puppets of the petroleum industry. As a result, American motorists often paid usurious prices at the gasoline pump.

Now it's payback time for Big Oil.

With Democrats solidly in control of Congress, there's no excuse for not enacting a windfall profits tax to recoup a part of the excess money the oil companies ripped from our wallets over the past eight years.

In the waning days of the campaign, the GOP's losing candidate, John McCain, tried to argue that Barack Obama favored redistributing the wealth -- recklessly charging that the one-time head of the Harvard Law Review was a full-fledged socialist and perhaps even a Marxist. The American people overwhelmingly rejected that ludicrous notion even as McCain's running mate was leading her campaign crowds in Big Oil's favorite mantra, "Drill, baby, drill!" The election results, however, show clearly that a majority of Americans have no problems redistributing wealth accumulated from price gouging rather than from honest labor.

As early as May, President- elect Obama outlined his intentions clearly, noting: "I think it is appropriate for us to impose a windfall profits tax on our oil companies." Voters endorsed that pledge on Election Day and, it is hoped, President Obama and Congress will redeem it long before the next spring dawns.

Obama also promised that what he takes away from Big Oil by way of a windfall profit tax will be returned to Americans in the form of a $1,000 Emergency Energy Rebate. That is the kind of wealth redistribution Americans direly need and definitely deserve.

After all, ExxonMobil broke its own quarterly profit record in the third quarter of this year -- reaping $14.83 billion. That good news for the world's largest oil company came as Americans experienced unprecedented job and home losses as well as skyrocketing prices in very sector dependent on energy costs.

ExxonMobil is a convenient whipping boy because of its size, but it is far from the only crude malefactor. Such U.S. companies as Chevron and Conoco Phillips and foreign oil enterprises such as the United Kingdom's BP, France's Total, Russia's Lukoil and Venezuela's Citgo all made huge profits and several had profit margins that surpassed ExxonMobil.

Although oil prices have dropped 57 percent from their July high of $150 per barrel to around $65 per barrel, Obama also has signaled that he would give sharp, new teeth to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to stop oil speculators from reaping huge profits at the expense of the consumer. And, if oil prices climb to price-gouging levels again, the windfall profits tax would kick in. This sounds like a necessary prescription to protect U.S. consumers from the corporate Simon Legrees that abound in a nation where profiteers lurk behind every boardroom door.

Obama's historic election as the nation's first black president will finally exact the retribution from America's greedy capitalists that progressives have fantasized about since the mid-1950s.

Big Oil has lost its grip on the White House. It is hoped Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Insurance and Big Banking will, too.

The victorious Democrats must seize this moment and use the bully pulpit of the Oval Office and their impressive gains in the House and Senate to begin hitting voracious corporations where it hurts most.

A windfall profits tax on Big Oil's ill-gotten gains is a great place to start. It would serve notice to other sectors to clean up their acts and start putting people before profit. With Obama's election, American consumers finally can look forward to the prospect of an era of fair treatment in the marketplace.

Madsen is a contributing writer to the progressive Online Journal (www.onlinejournal.com).