Boycott the oil companies

[AtlantaWalter]

Why do we as consumers keep letting the oil companies screw us over?
It's bad enough that we let the OPEC countries screw us over but the oil companies are just as bad.

I think we should pick one company at a time, for a 30 day period, and not buy that company's products. Mobil this month, Texaco next month, and so on down the line. See how Mobil likes losing 1/12 of their 17 billion in profits. Occasionall one see's on the internet a "Let's boycott the oil companies on this day" type letter. Americans could never get organized enough to do that, not would losing one day's profits get the attention of the oil companies. A full month of lost profits per company might wake them up a little bit though.

Every time the price of oil goes up, the oil companies make even larger profits gouging us. We need to retaliate and hit their pocketbooks like they hit ours.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1134616.stm

Exxon Mobil, the world's biggest oil company, has announced record fourth-quarter profits of $5.12bn compared with $2.7bn the previous year.
The US oil giant attributes the huge growth in profits to soaring oil and gas prices.

And full-year profits climbed to $17bn, hitting a world record.

The $5.12bn profit excludes the cost of the merger - the industry's biggest last year.

Oil companies had claimed during the September fuel crisis that they made very little profit on petrol sales.

And Exxon Mobil - which sells petrol and diesel in the UK under the brand names Esso and Mobil - was one of several oil companies criticised for not lowering the price of its petrol.

But while struggling to make profits on petrol sold at the pump, the high international prices of crude oil mean that Exxon Mobil reaped massively higher amounts of money from its oil and gas production units.

In spite of the news, Exxon Mobil's share price ended the day marginally lower due to this year's downward movement in the crude oil price.

Texaco's profits double

And on the same day Texaco, the US' third largest oil company, announced a doubling in profits.

Texaco's fourth quarter profits reached $840m compared to $370m in the same three months a year ago.

Texaco is in the middle of a merger with its US rival Chevron, which it hopes will give it greater leverage to compete with oil giants such as Exxon Mobil.

All the oil companies, including European majors such as BP and Shell, are expected to see soaring profits because of the sharply higher price of crude oil.


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[NewGuy]

Everyone with an email adress has had this same proposition sent to them.

The problem is that usage is not diminished, but purchase is merely delayed. All dollars normally spent will still flow to the oil companies. This doesn't affect them one bit. It merely places a delay on earnings as opposed to an actual difference.

If you want to make a difference, convert to a steam piston engine which would be far cleaner, more durable, longer lasting, simpler, and more powerful and versitile anyway.

 

[AtlantaWalter]

I'm not talking about not buying gas on Monday and then getting it on Tuesday instead. I mean not to buy gas from one company for a whole month. They'd feel that.

 

[insein]

not really. The effort would be too wide spread and ineffectual. Youd eventually need gas. Whether you buy it from Sunoco or Texaco is something that the oil companies deal with everyday. So it wouldnt effect their pockets at all. New guy has the only solution and its not currently reasonable to implement.

 

[NewGuy]

Originally posted by insein
not really. The effort would be too wide spread and ineffectual. Youd eventually need gas. Whether you buy it from Sunoco or Texaco is something that the oil companies deal with everyday. So it wouldnt effect their pockets at all. New guy has the only solution and its not currently reasonable to implement.

As a side thought, how long would anyone be allowed to try?

If a massive movement were to come about in which the idea of steam piston engines were to be used, refer back to the movie "Tucker".

It tells a story about the real life Tucker automobile and how the big 3 shut him down illegally because of the threat he posed.

Add in the oil companies and politics, and my bet is that people would be aquiring lead poisoning.

 

[insein]

that is very true. Now i havent read into the facts about the real tucker. so i dont know how much was fact and how much was hollywood fiction. But Tucker did have dreams and ideas. And they were never fully achieved as evidenced by no Tucker autos on the road.

 

[NewGuy]

Originally posted by insein
that is very true. Now i havent read into the facts about the real tucker. so i dont know how much was fact and how much was hollywood fiction. But Tucker did have dreams and ideas. And they were never fully achieved as evidenced by no Tucker autos on the road.

True, themovie had some fiction....How much, I don't know either.

This I know:
The car existed and some people have them. The car had a few revolutionary designs that the big 3 stole. Some designs also sucked so bad nobody used them. The issue of how the guy was unsuccessful and why remains overwhelmingly true, however.

 

[Comrade]

Originally posted by AtlantaWalter
Why do we as consumers keep letting the oil companies screw us over?
It's bad enough that we let the OPEC countries screw us over but the oil companies are just as bad.

I think we should pick one company at a time, for a 30 day period, and not buy that company's products. Mobil this month, Texaco next month, and so on down the line. See how Mobil likes losing 1/12 of their 17 billion in profits. Occasionall one see's on the internet a "Let's boycott the oil companies on this day" type letter. Americans could never get organized enough to do that, not would losing one day's profits get the attention of the oil companies. A full month of lost profits per company might wake them up a little bit though.

Actually Microsoft's cash and liquid holdings far exceed oil corporations

Therefore on that same track let's also boycott the USE of MICROSOFT software, in that same month.

Because that's the same sort of impact such a selectively blind boycott will net us.

It's not about "waking" them up, just shutting us down.

Oil and gas were stagnant, utility-like stock holdings for the last 30 years, and finally when the business is booming you want to socilalize it, because first of all, no one is going to follow some grass-roots boycott of one while we all absolutely still need our oil from another. So the government makes a difference, or else you are dreaming.

We are going to see a huge number of leftist Kerry supporters in the coming months protesting the high gas prices.

What kind of profits are acceptable to this crowd. If I want to invest my own money in fielding reconstruction in Iraq oil well today, or in exploration of the national Alaskan preserve, how much of a return based on risk of loss should I expect and would that be unreasonable to your group?

Well if it was then fuckit, you don't get my money, and we all can freeze in the dark, can't we?

 

[5stringJeff]

Targeted boycotts won't work.

Let's say we all decided to boycott Texaco this month (and Chevron too, since it's now the same company). All Chevron and Texaco have to do is lower their prices a couple of cents. If the boycott is really organized, then demand will rise at all the other gas stations, pushing their prices higher. Now consumers are paying more money for gas then they were before, which is the exact opposite effect that they were trying to acheive.

I'm telling you, go buy a high yielding oil stock. That's my next move.