Posted by: Silvia Swinden Posted 23 May 2013
http://bit.ly/10PlnB8
The European Commission is investigating BP and Shell for alleged oil price manipulation in spite of a British regulator giving the petrol market a clean bill of health only four months ago.
According to The Guardian ‘BP, Shell and the oil price reporting agency, Platts, all had their London offices raided on Wednesday by competition investigators who are concerned about collusion and manipulation of oil and biofuel product markets.’
The companies are suspected of rigging oil prices since 2002, during which time petrol prices increased by 80%.
Nobody gets surprised anymore when the first rule of the markets, that competition reduces prices and delivers quality, proves nonsense again and again. Very simply supposed competitors have learned that forming cartels to agree on price fixing benefits them and leaves consumers powerless. Banks do it (Libor scandal), car manufacturers do it, OPEC members do it, gas and electricity providers do it, even arms and drug dealers do it, indeed the European Commission might be looking at the small tip of a very large iceberg.
What makes this news doubly disturbing is that BP is now requesting help from the UK Government to put pressure on the US at the forthcoming G8 summit to reduce payments for the clean up and compensation bills after its 2010 mammoth oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, (lest it becomes subject to a takeover bid) notwithstanding the documented evidence that a number of the company’s blunders led to the loss of lives and livelihood as well as massive damage to the ecosystem. Needless to say that it is fighting tooth and nail through the US courts to have many of the claims declared fictitious.
Interestingly enough,Tony Hayward who resigned as chief executive of BP “for the good of the company”, claiming that he had been “demonised and vilified” (which did not prevent him from leaving with a handsome payoff in spite of presiding over a culture of lack of real concern for safety) is now chairing Glencore-Xstrata after the murkiest merger between a mining multinational and a financial corporation was ‘rescued’ by Tony Blair in his role as negotiator for JP Morgan with a reputed salary of £2.5million/yr. (The Independent)
Meanwhile, in the Real World…
No amount of declamatory noise about regulating Tax Havens, multinational corporations and Banks can hide from the austerity-bound general public that the system is rotten to the core and has to change. It is not a question of fixing some misbehaviour here and there form one or two companies. It is all designed to concentrate wealth and resources in fewer and fewer hands. The very people who now denounce the corruption (IMF telling Europe to invest instead of going for more austerity, the UK Conservative party Prime Minister posturing as a tough guy against Tax Havens and price rigging) are the main architects of this system of injustice and accumulation. Confronted with the real possibility of a complete breakdown of the system they are trying to bring it back from the brink with a rhetoric full of promises for a fairer structure, but knowing full well that banks and corporations will just press ahead, even if it is to make just one last million before the tide turns.
The old and well tested strategy of appropriating the opponent’s discourse, which the Argentinean thinker Silo qualified as ‘semantic brigandery’, in order to create a smoke screen as to one’s true intentions may work up to a point. It may relax a bit the population, feeling they are in good hands after all. Things are bad but something is being done. This lie is unsustainable in the face of a growing network of alternative Media which delivers not only better information but also alternative proposals. The ‘consumer’ of such media is not a passive recipient but an active participant, and money is not the main motivator to research and interchange information. Unlike in previous crisis there is a background of deep knowledge in some sectors of the population about how the system works, how money is created and how democracy is a purely formal exercise that obscures where real power resides: in the economic para-state.
This year’ G8 summit in June will be presided by the UK. One of PM Cameron’s buzzwords is ‘transparency’ which is a translation of the Russian ‘glasnosts’. Perhaps the collapse of the other half of the system is closer than we think…