Month: June 2008

Been to your local highway robber lately? I mean the place
where you pull up in your car and the device you operate to dispense the
commodity you’ve come for reaches out and turns you upside down to shake all the
money out of your pockets. Yes, I mean your friendly neighborhood gas station.

I was startled when, for the first time ever, I watched as
the price on the gas pump approached $50, and even more startled when the pump
stopped at that figure because my credit card company, unfamiliar with a fuel
purchase (at least by me) that high, had apparently instituted that amount as an
arbitrary limit as a way of preventing fraud. Who else would charge a $50 gas
purchase on a credit card unless they had stolen it and were using it to fill up
more than one tank? I guess I should consider myself lucky since, in some
places, the
era of the $100 fill-up has arrived . And as if it’s not bad enough we’re
being ripped at the pump, these thieves are now charging us to fill the air in
our tires. Shouldn’t fifty (or a hundred) bucks entitle you to a bit of free air
(especially since keeping tires properly inflated is a major way of increasing
gas mileage)? What is going on here?

The price of gasoline is a little like the weather;
everyone talks about it, but no one seems to be able to do anything about it. Our
elected officials stage “show hearings” from time to time, whenever gas prices
result in congressional offices being flooded with complaints from constituents.
And at those hearings,

as happened last week, our elected officials thump their fists on the table
at the fat cats who run the oil companies (many of whom make as much money in a
week as most of those incensed legislators make in a year) , and those fat cats
say “don’t blame us; it’s ‘the market’ that’s to blame.” They lie through their
teeth about how they’re doing everything to avoid price increases (even as they
amass

vast hordes of cash from their obscene profits, and restrict
refinery output. And everyone, from the media to our own government, buys
into (and worse, mindlessly parrots) the facile excuses “Big Oil” offers for
skyrocketing prices, and its outlandish profits, without actually examining how
the oil market does (or should) work. We even have a government
office that thinks its responsibility is to tell us how much gas is going to
go up in a given period, which the oil companies (surprise, surprise) treat as a
green light.

So, did you get as big a kick as I did out of

our president’s feeble attempt recently to cajole the Saudis into
increasing oil production to help us in our time of need? Can you imagine the
most powerful country in the world having to go, hat in hand (or should I say

hand-in-hand), to the terrorist-harboring sheikhs, to beg them for more oil?
Especially when our messenger (and his family) are

business partners with those sheikhs? Well, if it’s any consolation, the
Saudis are (hopefully) about to get their comeuppance when (and if) Congress
passes the law known, colloquially, as “NOPEC”
Then, at least, we can sue the bastards for their anti-competitive behavior.
That is, provided the prez doesn’t

veto the measure, as he’s (not surprisingly) promised. Then, of course,
there’s the move afoot in Congress to

cut off arms sales to the Saudis. See, even though they’ve got us by the
scrotum, and aren’t reluctant to squeeze from time to time, we still sell them
sophisticated weapons systems. Well, two can play that game. No additional oil?
No additional weapons. Makes sense to me.

I’m no economist, but I do know that in a truly free
market, the price of commodities is based on supply and demand. What’s more,
Economics 101 teaches us that any business that depends on raw materials is
going to see its profits go down when the price of those raw materials goes up.
Well, welcome to the wild and woolly oil market. Even though demand for petroleum
products has actually been

going down recently (and fairly dramatically), that hasn’t affected the
upward spiral in gas prices. What’s more, the higher the cost of the raw
material necessary to make gasoline (i.e., oil) has gone, the higher the oil
companies’ profits have as well. All of this is contrary to conventional
economic theory, and can be explained by what we all suspect: the price of oil
(and, therefore of its products) is being

manipulated.

Let’s also, while we’re talking about it, put to rest the
red herring being used by the oil industry and their handmaidens (mostly
Republicans) to divert attention from the real problem. Oil prices, they say,
are as volatile as they’ve been, and the oil companies powerless to do anything
about that (other, of course, than raking in the profits from those prices)
because (boo-hoo), our legislators are preventing those companies from exploring
(and exploiting) the “vast” oil reserves we have right here in our own country.
If we could only drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), they say,
all our problems would be solved, and it’s the fault of crazy tree-huggers who
oppose such drilling that we’re as dependent on foreign oil as we are. Studies,
including a
recent one by the Department of Energy (and

an earlier one from the same source), show that opening up areas that are
currently unavailable for exploration would have a negligible (pennies) effect
on the price of oil, and would provide, almost literally, a drop in the bucket
(4%) of our needs. So please, let’s can the phony “if only we could explore”
argument.

So, what are we Americans doing about the way the oil
companies are raping us? Why, bending over for more, of course (without benefit,
I might add, of any “petroleum” jelly). Oh sure, more people are taking public
transportation (good luck trying to do that in Memphis),

buying small cars, or

telecommuting, but for the most part, we’re still acting like sheep being
led to the slaughter. Why, I wonder, aren’t we storming the ramparts,

like they are in Europe. Maybe it’s because gas prices in Europe are even
more outrageous than they are here (though primarily because of taxes), or
because Europeans have already made all the sacrifices they can (and that we
haven’t) to mitigate the high cost of fuel. Or maybe it’s just that we realize
how powerless we really are when it comes to getting our government to do
anything that actually benefits us. After all, it’s no accident that Big Oil

spends as much as it does on lobbyists, or that it’s consistently among the

biggest donors to the campaigns of our legislators, including

all three of the candidates in the upcoming general election.

So, the next time you’re at your friendly neighborhood gas
station, just be glad that the oil companies let you put the nozzle in your gas
tank, even if it feels like they’re making you put it someplace else.

The odds on Mayor Willie
Herenton’s taking leave of his current job for a MacArthur-like return as
superintendent of the city’s schools fluctuate wildly from week to week.

They went up when the five
finalists in the School Board’s vaunted national search for a new superintendent
had second thoughts and started to drop out, one by one. They went down when Herenton
overplayed his hand by calling the remaining candidates “third rate.” And the
odds for Herenton go up or down on a daily or even hourly basis, depending on
whether he or his chief backer, School Board member Kenneth Whalum Jr.,
are blowing hard or keeping it civil.

Right now, neither the mayor nor
Whalum are contenders for the Congeniality Award, and Herenton’s prospects for a
job switch are correspondingly dim. If that scenario holds, it will disappoint
an increasingly crowded queue of candidates who hope to succeed His Honor in the mayor’s
chair.

One of the newest aspirants is
Criminal Court Judge Otis Higgs, who was the first serious
African-American mayoral candidate in Memphis history and ran unsuccessfully for
the office in 1975 and 1979. Higgs has not yet signaled any attention to run a
third time, but he confined to the Flyer some weeks ago that he would
be willing to resign from the bench and serve a several-month term as interim
mayor if the School Board should hire Herenton away as a full-time
superintendent.

And, among those who are
determined to run for Herenton’s vacated mayoralty in that eventuality is city
councilman Myron Lowery, who met with several council colleagues last
week to assure them his hat would be in the ring.

Acknowledging that current Shelby
County mayor A C Wharton would be the initial favorite in such a race,
Lowery said candidly that he preferred not to wait until he was eight years
older to make his own run. And Lowery’s chief talking point in such a showdown
might be to remind voters, as he did when asked about the race this weekend,
that, in order to run, Wharton would be taking early leave from his elected term as county mayor.

As for Wharton, he answered
“Yeah,” when asked by the Flyer in early April if he would be interested
in running to complete Herenton’s vacated term. This was after he had made it
clear that he had closely consulted with his Memphis counterpart on the latter’s
plans to resume control of Memphis City Schools. (And that consultation may have
begun as early as the famous La Tourelle chow-down between himself and Herenton
on the eve of Wharton’s decision to resist a mayoral draft in 2007.)

A third sure-fire candidate in a
special mayoral election is Carol Chumney. The former city councilwoman,
runner-up in the 2007 mayor’s race, virtually announced for the office on the
day of Herenton’s premature “resignation” bombshell in March. And, even more so
than Lowery, she is undeterred by the likelihood of Wharton’s running.

In fact, Chumney made it clear,
in the days following her defeat in last year’s race, that she would have
welcomed the presence of both Wharton and Herenton in the 2007 mayoral field,
believing that a split of votes between the two would have benefited her. Few
observers of that race would have concurred, most believing that Wharton would
have inherited a good deal of Chumney’s early support. But her argument might
appear sounder in a 2008 field including Wharton, Lowery, and three other name
black candidates.

One of those is Whalum, as
outspoken on the School Board as Chumney had been on the council, as unpopular
with his mates, and as determined to march to his own set of drums. He may also
have the same sort of cachet with restless voters wanting as abrupt a change as
possible at City Hall. Whalum hasn’t made a definitive statement on running but
is widely assumed to be willing.

There are also James Harvey and Thomas Long. Harvey, a first-term Shelby County Commissioner, has made it clear that he will be
a candidate for city mayor at the first available opportunity. Harvey might be interested in the county job, too, if the city one doesn’t come open until the next
regularly scheduled municipal election in 2011.

Long, now serving his fourth term as city court clerk, was quick to say, at the very beginning of Herenton’s Willie-or-won’t-he resignation drama, that he would run for any resultant vacancy.

And Chumney may not be the only well-known white candidate, either; her predecessor, both as city councilman from the 5th District (Midtown, East Memphis) and as chief council non-conformist, is John Vergos, anything but an admirer of hers and someone who has nursed mayoral ambitions himself. He has talked up running for mayor in the past and may do so again.

The probability of mayoral
wannabes having to wait until 2011 is the going scenario according to this week’s
odds, with the pendulum on the School Board having swung once more in the
direction of aversion toward Willie Herenton.

But who knows? The mayor might
leave office early for some other reason, even if he doesn’t become
superintendent. And there could be all sort of unforeseen consequences from the
current budget chaos in both city and county government, especially if the Young
Turks on the city council, boosted by Herenton’s apparent complicity during his
tete-a-tete with the council last week, should follow through on threats to cut
or eliminate city government’s share of school funding.

In any case, if there should turn out to a mayor’s race this year, we have a
basic cast-of-characters in waiting – and there’s probably room for more.