I know a little bit more about Jack's
personal background that his other friends don't. In life, Jack has a proud
core value of our American freedom of choice. In his younger days, he was one
of those young activists that marched down the streets nationwide during those
earlier protests at the conclusion of WWII against Big Government encroaching
into the problems and turmoil of Indochina [under the US-France Mutual Defense Act ] , until it ended in the decisive defeat of
France by Vietnam in The Battle of Dien Bien Phu
in May 1954. Jack recalls the
objectionable stigma of a people's choice to be free from foreign domination in
this war which was notoriously known in Europe and to local anti-war protesters
as the decade's "Dirty War" [ First Indochinese War ] that
disgraced France supported by the United States while at the same time this
nation was then confronting Russia, China and later on North Korea in Gen.
Douglas MacArthur's military grand design to nuke China [see MacArthur wanted to drop nuclear bombs in Manchuria ] to
end the war that just broke out in the Korean Peninsula .
Notwithstanding
all these popular sentiments in the United States and Europe against
foreign domination, ironically Jack eventually ended up fighting the Vietcong
guerillas and the Regular North Vietnamese Army, then attempting to free their
country of U.S. occupation in what is now known as the long-drawn-out and
bloody Vietnam War.
Jack believes that a person fighting and
dying for freedom anywhere as the clichà © goes -- from Vietnam to Iraq and now in
Afghanistan -- is a genuine blue-blooded American. He believes, lives with it
and ready to die for it. The freedom of choice that true Americans have is
sacred to him. To him to have a choice is
a providential gift from above, which is much larger than life itself. I do
agree with Jack that the Bill of Rights is nothing without our individual
freedom of choice. We both agree that this is the only cogent reason why
patriots die in war and in peace as they struggle for liberty and freedom on
this planet.
Thus buying a "premium" gasoline no matter
how costly it is [although it reportedly makes car engines last longer and
perform better] illustrates the strong-headedness of Jack's belief on his own
freedom of choice to buy any kind of gasoline he wants. He sticks to this
belief even though friends like me argue against the impracticality of his
gasoline choice [he could run his car with cheaper gasoline and save a few
dollars], and even survived ridicules with good grace when embarrassed because
of his stubbornness when sometimes he has to defend the oddity of his choice.
But strange enough for me to know that people
like Jack are resigned to this grim reality " that oil companies and their
retailers commit this "economic murder" at the gas pump with impunity
and nothing they could do to stop it.
But yes, there is. With determination and sacrifice, millions of strong-willed
people like Jack all over the country could break a powerful gasoline pricing
monopoly and stop this economic murder
at the gas pump. When Shell gas stations and their retail outlet-subsidiaries
are singled out in a nationwide boycott, Shell suppliers and their retailers
will be forced to lower their prices or else close down to avoid losses.
When under this pressure of nationwide
boycott Shell choses to stop their loss of revenues and lower their prices at
the gas pump, the other competing giant oil companies will scale down their
gasoline prices even lower than that of Shell once consumers shift their
gasoline purchases to Shell because of lower prices. We are talking of a free market system that
is free of distortions.
However, for this consumer nationwide boycott
in solidum to succeed, the Federal
Government should step in to prevent any existing conspiracy of big oil
companies to raise the prices of gasoline at the level they want in order to
satiate what the general public believes as an organized mutual greed of oil
and petroleum companies for profit. "The
real cause of our problems is oil company Greed as illustrated by huge profits." [ Al Bender
in Oil Company Profits Behind
High Gas Prices]
There are of course natural causes of
supply and demand that trigger the spiraling of prices out of control as what
happened in the oil crisis of 1973 when OAPEC
[Organization
of Arab Petroleum Producing Countries] declared an oil embargo following the Arab
invasion of Israel. It disrupted oil
supply worldwide. High demand in the wake of short supply pushed prices up and
it exploded in the gas pumps so to speak, not only in the United States but all
over the world.
But generally, jacked up gasoline prices
are most often than not, "artificial". Sen. Dianne Feinsten [D-California] had called on the Federal Trade Commission
to protect consumers from "malicious trading
schemes" of oil companies. The idea
is for the Federal Government to use its power in seeing to it that our free
market system is operating freely without any contrived distortions "without
the use of the coercive power of the mighty oil industry in preventing and
disrupting competition to protect their self-interest -- a free market system
that is constantly monitored to prevent the temptation of fraudulent pricing or
illegal price manipulation and malicious trade practices.
There are many ways to stop this "economic murder" at the pump. And this is just one of them.
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