Business Channel 2006-09-22&24

Cheaper gas. Finally. But why? Well, the legendary 1 summer driving season is over. No hurricanes have damaged Gulf 2 Coast's rigs and refineries 3. Things are calmer between Israel and Lebanon. And Iran? Well, at least we are not at war with Iran. But with a little more than 6 weeks to the midterm elections, the blogs are buzzing with other theories. Are lower gas prices a Republican plot? This blogger wonders if Republicans are trying to soften 4 voters who've spent the last year angry about high gas prices.

I predict it will work, by the way. The Republicans will retain control of Congress.

Those Republicans need all the help they can get and Big Oil is doing the best they can to assist. I would conclude that falling gas prices is just another example of manipulation of the public by Bush and company.

Certainly there is a strong physical relation between Bush's approval rating and the price of gas.

911, approval spike 5, uh...

Doug Henwood, Editor of the liberal newsletter, the Left Business Observer, has charted President Bush's popularity against gas prices. He calls the correlation 6 he found uncanny, but he stops short of calling it a conspiracy 7.

More than three-quarters of the movement in Bush's approval rating can be explained by movements in the price of gas.

But it's not just the blogs. A recent USA Today Gallup Poll asked voters: Do you think the Bush Administration has deliberately 8 manipulated the price of gasoline so that it would decrease before this fall's elections? Forty-two percent said yes. Big Oil's P. R. operation calls the whole idea preposterous 9.

I think if politicians had, were really in charge of oil prices, I think that they'd be low, they'd probably be free right now. And ah, the very notion that we have some sort of command and control oil economy is, is silly.

Back in July, both crude oil and gasoline hit their highest recorded prices. Gas was averaging about $3 a gallon. By mid-September oil had dropped about 15 bucks 10 a barrel. So gas should have dropped about 45 cents a gallon. It actually dropped 50 cents a gallon, and it's dropped more since then. Could President Bush have had anything to do with plummeting 11 gas prices? We asked Professor Akshay Rao, who studies pricing strategies.

Surely if you picked up the phone and made, you know, 5 or 10 strategic phone calls, he might be able to influence prices to some degree. But er, you know, I, I think that's a fairly far-fetched, ah, theory.

What's more conceivable, according to Rao, is that the energy industry cut prices without any prompting from Washington. That's because they're worried that if the Democrats 12 win, they'll follow up on threats to tax the energy industry more heavily. We put that idea to Big Oil's P. R. people.

It can't be done. They couldn't do it if they wanted to do it.

The government says one more thing. Remember back to spring, when much of the country started to use ethanol as an additive 13 for summer gasoline. Well, that caused gas prices to spike. And now that we switch to winter blend gasoline, we won't have that added cost until next spring again. Ali Velshi, CNN, New York.

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Vocabulary

1. rig--noun. Also called drill rig, the equipment used in drilling an oil well.

2. Midterm elections are elections in the United States in which members of Congress, State Legislatures, and some state governors are elected, but not the President.

3. Big Oil is a term used to describe the individual and collective economic power of the largest oil and gasoline manufacturers, and their perceived influence on politics, particularly in the United States. The companies generally described as being part of "Big Oil" include ExxonMobil, Chevron 14 Corporation, British Petroleum 15, Royal Dutch Shell, and ConocoPhillips.

4. A Gallup Poll is an opinion poll conducted by The Gallup Organization and frequently used by the mass media for representing public opinion. The Gallup Poll is named after its inventor, the American statistician George Gallup.

5. preposterous --adj. completely contrary to nature, reason, or common sense; absurd; senseless; utterly 16 foolish: a preposterous tale.

6. follow up on--verb : carry further or advance