I DON’T know if anyone really noticed this, but during this latest round of gas price increases, there were some strange happenings. Mobil first went up 10 cents: $3.06 to $3.16. This isn’t the weird part. Normally, if Mobil goes up, Shell follows and vice versa. There is almost never a price difference at all, which is, of course, fishy. I expected to see Shell’s price go up the next day, but they didn’t budge, and they didn’t budge the next day, either — to my great surprise. So, Mobil goes back down 10 cents from 3.16 back to 3.06 matching Shell. The next day (three days after the initial Mobil hike), Shell goes up eight cents to 3.14, and Mobil does the same: $3.06 to $3.14. This is where we are now on the price.
I have a friend who used to work here in antitrust and I discussed this issue once, and apparently our upstanding service station proprietors are allowed to look at the prices of their competitors, but as long as there is no collusion, the fact that the two and only two gas stations almost never have any price difference at all is perfectly ok.
You just have to love big oil. They get tax breaks from the savage Washington Republicans. They use the American military as their own personal commando unit (nice to have a big oil CEO as vice president). They kill the electric car — a great documentary by the same name — and create enough confusion on the issue of destroying the Earth so some idiots aren’t sure if it is really happening. Correct that. Big oil is really just destroying human ability to live on the Earth. After the Earth purges humans, it will recover for a couple million years like some wino a day after an epic Bacardi 151 bender, and the process of human evolution can start again. I could continue, but there might be something new and important on Britney’s hair or Anna Nicole Smith’s corpse in the news.

JEFFREY C. TURBITT
Dandan, Saipan