Gas Pains No Joke. Drivers Steer Their Anger to Bush and Corporate Cronies

by Mike Hall, Jun 29, 2006

Tired of being gouged at the gas pump, angry drivers in the Washington, D.C., area tomorrow will pump up noise over outrageous gas prices and the Bush administration’s failure to act on $3-plus a gallon gasoline.

Armed with empty gas cans, the drivers will bang out their message at noon in Lafayette Park, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. The cacophonic chorus will protest the Bush administration’s cozy relationship with Big Oil and its out-of-touch disconnect with the pain of working families forced to shell out $50, $75 or more to fill up at Exxon, Chevron, Texaco and other petroleum profiteers.

If the driver is a minimum wage worker earning $5.15 an hour—a wage Republican leaders in Congress have refused to raise since 1997—a $60 fill-up translates into more than 11.5 hours of work, about a day-and-a-half’s wages.

Community and union members have staged similar events in other cities, and tomorrow in Cleveland, activists will be banging out the same message in front of U.S. Sen. Mike DeWine’s (R-Ohio) office.

Jos Williams, president of the Metropolitan Washington (D.C.) Council, says drivers are fed up with pouring money into the bank accounts of Big Oil companies and into the pockets of their executives, while the Bush administration fails to act:

Oil companies are making staggering profits, but President Bush has done nothing to give regular working people a break on gas prices. It’s time to start working for the people of the United States and end this marriage to Big Oil.

As America’s drivers are pumping more of their paychecks into their gas tanks, oil companies are recording record profits. In the first quarter of 2006, Exxon turned an $8.4 billion profit. Meanwhile, former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond got $69.4 million in pay in 2005, his last year on the job, along with a cash payout of $98.4 million. (Find out more about Raymond’s platinum parachute and other CEO pay outrages at the AFL-CIO’s Executive PayWatch).

The bang-on-the-can protesters will call on Bush to demand a special windfall profit tax on the oil companies and repeal of special tax breaks to Big Oil, with those revenues going to relief for the nation’s drivers.

Print This Article | E-Mail This Article |Comments (0)