$120 Oil

What's wrong with these people??? All of them. The ones in Washington. In the Bush administration, in the House, in the Senate. In the regulatory agencies. These people.

Crude oil futures spiked over $110 a barrel today before closing a few pennies lower. Analysts are now talking about $120 a barrel oil like it's perfectly normal. Meanwhile the economy is tanking and inflation is rising. Higher food prices, higher gasoline prices, higher transportation prices. And sky-high heating oil prices for those of us who have the misfortune to heat our homes with oil.

Why doesn't someone do something?? Why are speculators allowed to bid up at least a third of the crude oil price -- because it's a hedge against the tottering stock market and the moribund financial markets and the swooning dollar?

Capitalism and free markets are all very well -- until they affect the average person's ability to live comfortably -- or even survive miserably. This crazy oil speculation has reached the point where someone has to clamp down on it. Pass a law if necessary that speculation won't be allowed in essential markets when prices reach a certain impossible level. Like now.

Sometimes it seems like the Bush Administration really does want to build a fence around the United States -- not just to keep the illegal immigrants and would-be terrorists out -- but to keep Americans in --- unable to go to Europe or Asia or even Canada and find out how much people in other countries dislike our government. And - since we elected it - us. The dollar has fallen so low against other currencies it now costs nearly twice as much to hop over to London or Paris as it did a few years ago. And if $4 gasoline becomes a feature of the summer driving season -- Americans will be almost literally chained to their homes. Those same ones which have lost so much value because somebody didn't stop the housing speculation and the perhaps criminally creative mortgage industry before the bubble burst.

The other night I heard an economist say what we really have is a financial recession. Not an economic recession. Meaning the overly greedy financial markets brought their current paralysis on themselves by giving people mortgages who should never have gotten them. And then slicing and dicing those risky loans into securities so complicated not even the financial geniuses who rate those securities had the foggiest notion of what was in them. So one day the mortgage market imploded. And started taking the rest of us with it.

All because nobody did anything to stop it.