ConsumerWatchdog.org

Oh, man, I wish I had a share of Exxon. The shareholder meeting May 30 is going to be a show. A group of big institutional investors, mostly public pension funds, has filed notice that it will formally campaign to oust board member Michael Boskin. The investors say he refused repetedly to even meet with them about developing a corporate climate change policy. How dumb can a company get, refusing to sit and talk with its biggest investors?

What the Senate did today isn't huge, and isn't quite finished, but a 97-1 vote in favor of stopping White House oil purchases for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a landmark. The vote cracks the gridlock that has blocked effective Senate actions against the oil price crisis. It holds out the possibility of a shift to doing the peoples' business rather than scoring partisan points. Capping the reserve would also save taxpayers $6 million to $7 million a day that's now going straight to oil company pockets. Hooray on that.

OilWatchdog has offered plenty of reasons that suspending the federal gasoline tax would end up as a bad joke on consumers and the economy. Here are some fresh ones, from Jonathan Alter at Newsweek--including carnage on our potholed roads.

It's a flat-out lie when oil companies say they're only making an "average" percentage of profit compared to other companies. Furthermore, journalists shouldn't be taking the oil industry's figures at face value. That's the conclusion of a well-explained report in Nieman Watchdog on how oil companies get away with describing their profit as a percentage of revenue when issuing a press release, then use the accurate "return on capital" figure when talking with investors.

...And See If It Sticks. That appears to be where government stands on quelling oil and gasoline prices. Congress is now proposing bucketsful of legislation and other actions in a pre-election panic. Some of it is on target and some is just pander, either populist or corporate. Let's sort it out: the Bad, the Ineffective, the Actually Helpful

Consumer Watchdog has protested strings-attached grants from Big Oil to universities, but the oil companies are just following the path of Big Pharma. Here, from the Century Foundation's Maggie Mahar and Niko Karvounis, is a concise history of legislation that opened the classroom door to drug companies--and even let cosmetic giant Shiseido control research agendas at Harvard's Massachusetts General Hospital.  

A national lawsuit over water pollution from a gasoline additive was more than half-settled yesterday when four of the five major oil comanies agreed to pay $423 million in cleanup and other costs. Chevron, Shell, BP, Conoco and several smaller companies did what's right, and will escape years more of litigation costs. Exxon, which can no doubt afford to litigate until the world ends, was the only major holdout.

Oil prices are in Alice in Wonderland territory. Today's new futures-market record, above $122 a barrel, occurred despite a substantial rise in both crude oil stocks and gasoline stocks in the U.S., as reported by the federal Energy Information Administration. In any vaguely normal market, both of those events would drive down oil prices. But today, the speculators just shrugged, said "what the heck," and kept the upward spike going. Pardon my suspicious mind, but I connect it to "predictions" of $150 or even $200 a barrel crude oil.