National Crime Wave Exponentially Worse Than Reported

Tens of millions robbed blind as cops do nothing because thieves legalized their theft first

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A common device used by thieves to jimmy the global economy. (Uncredited photo / Creative Commons.)

So, here’s some criming that wasn’t caught by anyone’s Ring™ cameras or neighborhood watch or border patrol or riot police or racial/racist facial/fascist recognition or beefed-up, weaponized, militarized, friendly neighborhood beat cop: Big shale oil companies have stolen at least $500 a year from you personally. Think of all the TFN subscriptions you could’ve given!

Also, more importantly than stealing money from you, they’ve stolen $500 a year from me. And also from hundreds of millions of other people, who I’m told also matter.

The American Prospect has written about some aspects of this. Matt Stoller has some excellent explanations, too. But you won’t hear anything about this crime spree from the same outlets that will spend hours on looped video of a poor Black person shoplifting Slim Jims from a Piggly Wiggly. [Ed. note: Corporate names used solely for comedic juxtaposition with tragedy; we also could have gone with “shoplifting Ding Dongs from a Wawa.”]

But the fact you aren’t hearing about this elsewhere is why you subscribe to TFN. So let’s do this…

For decades, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has been controlling the price of oil by manipulating production levels. As the biggest producer, Saudi Arabia has basically been running the show, to insulate the big oil producers from any disgusting consequences of a genuinely free market — like competition — which could drive prices down.

This kind of thing is technically illegal in the United States, where we have laws against monopolies and price-fixing. No, it’s true, you can look it up on Google with your Microsoft software!

But about 20 years ago, fracking opened the door — and the ground, and our water supplies — to huge amounts of oil extraction here in the U.S. Fracked oil threatened to upend OPEC’s price fixing, and because this was in the U.S., where those aforementioned laws are, big independent frackers weren’t allowed to fix the price by jerking around their production levels. In other words, frackers were competing with each other — which drives prices down.

That hurt OPEC. So, trying to regain control of the market, OPEC ten years ago opened the taps, producing so much oil that crude prices plummeted, with OPEC producers taking the short-term hit in hopes of recapturing market share from the frackers.

By 2016, Stoller writes, everyone was sick of losing money in this trade war. (Everyone but the millions of Americans who benefited from the lower prices of gas and everything that’s produced or delivered by burning fossil fuels.)

So, first OPEC began colluding with Russia. Then, in September 2016, U.S. oil magnate Harold Hamm told the Financial Times that OPEC and Russia should cut back on production, which would push prices back up. “U.S. producers have cut back, we’ve done our part,. It would finally make sense for a freeze in production to be implemented,” Hamm said colludingly (that’s what “our part” means!)

OPEC and the big U.S. producers agreed to “share projections,” so that everyone could know what everyone else was up to, squelching competition and ensuring they would all continue to profit at our expense.

When oil prices exploded in 2021, none of the big producers anywhere on Earth raced to produce more oil from said Earth in order to capitalize on the higher prices. (Man, the Republicans who accuse Pres. Joe Biden of suppressing domestic oil production are gonna be pissed when they hear about this!)

So the cartel had gone global. And now the Federal Trade Commission — and a lawsuit by fucked-over gas-station operators — are beginning to give us some of the details, courtesy of internal emails chronicling this planet-wide smash-and-grab.

Just how badly have you and everyone you know been fucked over by this wholesale theft that prosecutors call price-fixing so they don’t get in trouble with their political-appointee bosses for calling it wholesale theft? According to Stoller’s calculator, this global crime ring is responsible for 27% of all the price increases that occurred anywhere on planet Earth during the year 2021. The bounty reaped by these international shoplifters was an estimated $200 billion, just for the oil producers.

Individually, we’re talking about between $500 and $1,000 lifted every single year from your pocket and the pocket of everyone alive, including people who don’t have pockets.

Of course, all the economic Big Brains — who alternate between catastrophically tanking our economy and incrementally making it ever more unjust — scoffed at the notion that monopolies or monopolistic collusion caused inflation, and condescended to those who made that case. 

Take Larry Summers. Please. 

Summers — a professional wrong be-er who has been managed to be wrong as Treasury secretary, National Economic Council director, and Harvard president — argued that blaming monopolies for inflation was “science denial.” As if economics were an established science. This is a field that only just recently began to address the fact that consumers are not perfectly logical calculating machines and still teaches that competing companies compete. Big Brains at work!

But wait, there’s more!

Readers of my Progress Report newsletter at TYT might remember when I wrote on Jan. 12 — not knowing I’d be laid off within a week…yikes! — about price-fixing in another industry.

Meat producers have been price-fixing for almost two decades, sharing information to let them avoid competition, which might otherwise save you money. Dozens of cow- and chicken- and pig-killing companies shared information via a third-party company that sold them “data”...about their competitors. Everyone used it, so everyone could see what everyone else was doing.

Which meant they could all agree (without “agreeing”) to jack up the prices of their dead animal parts even before they had tossed the packaged flesh chunks onto trucks fueled and cooled by gas, the price of which had also been price-fixed. A thieving double whammy for your ham sammy!

But wait, there’s more!

After COVID forced millions of people to start working at home, the dearth of commuters kneecapped gas consumption — and prices. Wall Street sought to get people back to work — so they’d buy more gas, driving the price back up, driving up the stock values, and more-enriching the rich oil execs who are Wall Street’s clients.

On April 22, 2020, Wall Street analysts and lobbyists held a conference call about oil prices. TYT Investigative Reporter Ti-Hua Chang reported on that call a couple weeks later. Here’s former Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) — by this time an Akin Gump lobbyist — in an exchange with Morgan Stanley Executive Director Devin McDermott:

Smith: We have to increase the demand, and that means get the economy back on its feet, and we have to look out for the energy industry, which is so essential to our national security and so essential to our economic well-being.

McDermott: That’s very helpful. We definitely agree with your last point there, the underlying issue here, with what’s going on in oil markets, is really a demand issue and the demand’s not there to consume the fuel that we’re producing, and to really fix that sustainably, we need to begin to reopen the economy and increase consumption.

Got that? To “fix” the emerging work-from-home utopia that consumes less gas, Wall Street pressured politicians of every stripe to get all of you lazy motherfuckers who think life is for something other than work back to the goddam Calvinist grindstone. Even though this meant increasing the risk that you would die.

So now, after jacking up dead animal prices and then jacking up the price of gas, they then devalued the value of you and forced you to buy more of that thievingly overpriced gas by pressuring your own government to dispatch as many labor units as possible back into workplace Petri dishes seething with a deadly respiratory virus. A thieving, homicidal triple whammy!

But wait, there’s more!

After Russia invaded Ukraine, gas prices soared. But was it proportionate soaring? I wasn’t sure at the time. Eventually, I began to smell an MBA.

So I called a former Commodity Futures Trading Commission official. As you do.

He told me that even before I called him to ask, he had come to believe that the price of every single publicly traded commodity was being juked by Wall Street.

He said Wall Street traders had created a regulatory loophole for themselves that allowed a hundred trillion dollars in bets on commodities to go unregulated. This turned commodity markets into a casino, where the house always wins. (That’s why, as I noted later, even when OPEC and its unindicted co-conspirators tried to affect oil prices, it didn’t always work.)

There was so much betting that the people who actually had physical possession of sticky, gooey, actual oil couldn’t even set prices any more. Even if they did sell a couple hundred thousand barrels of oil for a low price, that sale wouldn’t move the market price, because real physical sales were such a tiny fraction of the overall market.

So now, dismembered animal corpses got to you at price-fixed prices on trucks powered by gas that oil-producers had fixed the price of, which Wall Street then made even more expensive by getting the government to force more people to commute again and by turning commodity trading into a floating crap game.

But wait, there’s more!

Add Subtract another $650 per household for junk fees. (Remember when ATMs would save us money because banks could close all those branches and lay off all those humans?) And you can subtract however much hedge funds have plundered from/with/via higher education. (Remember when turning college endowments into private equity funds would boost financial aid?)

But wait, there’s more!

What do all these big companies do with all these profits? At their most benign, the executives give it out to the rich people who control the boards that sign off on executive compensation packages. In layman’s terms: They divide the booty.

But they also use the spoils of their undeclared war on All The People to increase productivity — so they can eliminate jobs and toss workers out onto the street. Automation. Outsourcing. Offshoring. Mergers. Acquisitions. Leveraged buyouts (what the Mafia calls a bust-out, only when Wall Street does it they don’t literally burn the place down, they sell it for parts. Y’know, like what virtually nobody but me has been telling you they’re trying to do to Macy’s right in front of our eyes.)

And if you’re wondering where Democrats are on this, make sure all the lights are on and you’ve got a grownup nearby, because here’s where our tale gets really scary.

Most Democrats are singing the children’s song of corporate greed — which begs the question, why now? Are they telling us corporations in the last couple years converted from altruism to greed? Why now?

Greed is never a good explanation without addressing why now. Exploiting supply-chain snarls might explain some of it, but clearly not all. This is systemic shit being driven by systemic change, not individual bad actors. Remember when Pres. George W. Bush blamed irresponsible home-loan borrowers for the mortgage crisis? Same thing now — neither irresponsibility nor greed are viruses that suddenly flare up. It’s always something systemic. And it’s typically deregulation.

Some Democrats understand the dynamic we’re talking about. Some, like Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), have responded to my reporting. But the folks with real power, well, there’s only a handful, and only so much they can do with their hands full.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) chairs a committee that covers all of health care. And labor. AND education. AND pensions! HELP!

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has been dealing with the just-deceased Republican effort to destroy the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Ye Olde Biden White House, you say? Apparently, according to that former CFTC official, there’s simply not enough institutional knowledge in the White House or the disproportionately white chambers of Congress to grasp the problem and reach the critical mass to do something about it. And the clock is ticking for Democratic regulators to put in place any rules that they want to survive a second Donald Trump presidency. Tick fucking tock!

TCB

SUNDAY SURPRISE! This has been a special edition of The Fucking News, kind of like an ABC Afterschool Special, but in the morning. On a weekend. I started this one a while back and thought since I missed a few days last week, this would be a good way to try to make it up to you.

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