Making Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2006 - Continued -
MAKING EMERGENCY SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS FOR THE FISCAL YEAR ENDING SEPTEMBER 30, 2006--Continued -- (Senate - April 25, 2006)
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Mr. SCHUMER. I have no objections to the amendment of the Senator from New Hampshire and would be fully supportive of it.
I will speak on another issue for about 5 minutes. I thank my colleague from West Virginia, our great leader, for ceding the time.
From one end of New York to the other, all the talk this past week has been on the high price of gasoline, the high price of oil, the high price of all petroleum products. Oil prices went up to $75 a barrel. Gasoline went up 40 cents in 1 month.
This is not only burning a hole in people's wallets and pocketbooks, but it is also putting a real crimp in our economy. In upstate New York, in New York City, we depend on tourism. Fewer people will drive, fewer people will come. People are making decisions not to buy that extra outfit of clothes for youngsters, not to take the trip to see the grandkids because of the high price of gas and oil.
Yet, today, when the President spoke about this issue for the first time, we did not hear what we needed to hear. The President seems to think that gouging is a problem of the corner gas station. It is not. It is a problem of the dwindling number of large behemoth oil companies. We did not hear from the President the five words we need to hear: Get tough with big oil.
That is the problem. Of course we have a supply and demand problem. We know that. The big oil companies, faced with no competition, take advantage of every twist and turn. Katrina occurs and the price naturally would have gone up, but it goes up higher, stays high longer, and spreads to more areas than need be because the oil companies are taking advantage.
Now we have had the changeover to summer fuels. Again, that cuts down production for a short period of time. But the big oil companies take advantage and keep the price high for too long. Over the last 5 years, never has production been as low as it has been today and stayed so low.
The bottom line is simple. We let--and this happened under Republican and Democratic Presidents--we let 20 oil companies become only 5. When there are so few, there is no competition. And who pays the price? The American consumer and the American economy.
The record profits are not an accident or part of free market capitalism. When you have so few energy producers, you are going to be taken advantage of. That is what the average citizen has found.
To ask for an FTC investigation, as the President did, about gouging, without mentioning big oil, does not make sense because it sure as heck is not the corner gasoline station.
The bottom line is we need to do three things: First, we most definitely need to conserve much more than we have. The fact that China's miles per gallon standards are higher than ours--and China is hardly an environmental country; they are doing it for economic purposes--should make us hang our heads in shame. We need a crash program to find new energy sources.
I, for one, am not averse to finding more fossil fuels while we wait for the new energy source to come online. The amount of money the President has proposed in this budget to do that is paltry.
Finally, we should, for the first time, seriously consider breaking up the big oil companies. As long as they have a stranglehold on us, we are not going to solve this problem. As long as they want to have fossil fuels be the dominant way we power ourselves and keep the prices high as possible and work in cahoots with places such as OPEC, we are not going to solve this problem. When there were 20 competitors, we always faced the fact that 2 or 3 would say I am going to expand market share by keeping the price a little lower. Not anymore. It does not happen.
When you ask, why have things gotten so much worse with oil prices and gasoline prices, part of it is supply and demand, but part of it is we let the antidote to collusion and gouging--good old-fashioned American competition--go by the wayside in the oil industry.
At some point I will be offering an amendment that we do a serious study about whether to and how to break up big oil as was once done about 100 years ago. I don't think there is any other solution that makes sense.
From President Bush, we finally heard some talk. But talk is cheap. The price of gasoline is not. We need serious action on conservation, on new energy sources, and on dealing with big oil if we are going to solve this problem and keep America as strong as possible.
I thank my colleague from West Virginia and yield the floor.
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