Senator Dickhead Durbin (Communist-IL) accused oil companies last week of "windfall profits" while consumers paid the price. President Bush suspended the Federal requirement that several Additives be mixed with gasoline before it could be sold in certain parts of the country.

The drive- by media is touting this as a "SUSPENSION OF ENVIRONMENTAL RULES" and other nonsense, but, as we will see, a complete scrapping of this "additive" requirement is long overdue.

For those of you who went to public schools and were "educated" by the teachers union, adding a cumbersome process to a market delays the rapidity with which market changes can be adapted to. In this case, the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT is also limiting supplies of gasoline and thus raising prices.

How? When certain additives are put into gasoline, it cannot (by Federal law) be sold anywhere else in the US since it is possible, but prohibitively expensive to remove those additives. This means there are then X gallons suitable for the midwest, Y gallons for the Southeast, Z gallons for California, etc. Gasoline (not to be confused with oil) is then locked to a certain region. When supplies run down, the market must wait for the additives to be mixed in at one of this country's idiotically low number of refineries, causing bottlenecks and high prices?

Why are additives required? Good question. And there's a simple answer: Greed & bribery. It is no coincidence that agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland is headquartered in Illinois, gave $15, 450 to Dickhead Durbin's Senate campaign and recieved his support for a bill that would both require and subsidize (with your tax dollars) grain-based additives being put into gasoline, setting in motion the aforementioned market scenario.

Read this article. Durbin's support of these legislative measures resulted in a...WINDFALL (para. 6, sentence 2)...again...WINDFALL. Windfall. Windfall. Windfall. Windfall. Windfall for Archer Daniels Midland.

Does Ethanol help the environment? Nope.

A study by scientists at Cornell University and the University of California at Berkeley, released this summer, found that the production of ethanol uses up more energy than the use of ethanol saves. The controversial study was widely criticized by corn-state researchers and corn-grower lobbyists.

AND....

Even more damaging, the EPA's own attorney admitted to the judges that because of its higher volatility, putting ethanol into the nation's fuel supply would likely increase smog where it was used. One of the judges, on hearing that the EPA was actively promoting a substance that could in fact diminish air quality, wondered aloud, "Is the EPA in outer space?"

Does ethanol help wean America away from towelhead oil? Nope. General Motors has begun marketing Ethanol (orE85) fuels for its products, BUT...

What GM left out of its ads was that the use of this fuel would likely increase the amount of smog during the summer months (as the EPA's own attorneys had admitted in 1995) -- and that using E85 in GM products would lower their fuel efficiency by as much as 25%. (USA Today recently reported that the Energy Dept. estimated the drop in mileage at 40%.)

So why the fuck are you paying for it? Ask your politicians.


BTW, I left out the origins of the Ethanol programs from the Arab oil embargoes of the 1970's for brevity...