Chevron: Oil Be Getting Even Richer Off Your Wallet

You KNOW that the oil companies are always playing games with the gas prices, making billions in profit each time they "spike" the price. Jake Sexton finds a great review on this. Snippet:

The party line is that rising crude oil costs, refinery disruptions, pipeline breaks, power outages and complex market forces limit supply and drive up corporate costs, forcing price hikes like the ones in August and March. And it's true that market forces affecting oil and gas prices are complex. Interplay between the price of oil and gasoline futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) and economic reports, political events and natural disasters create a thick smoke screen behind which wholesale and retail prices are manipulated. What's not true is that any of these events significantly raised oil company costs in 2003. On the contrary, rising retail gasoline prices have enriched the big oil companies enormously, more than doubling their margins and resulting in the largest quarterly corporate profits in the history of the world. In the fourth quarter of 2000, ExxonMobil made front-page news when it recorded the largest quarterly profit ever: $5.12 billion. In the first quarter of this year, during the anxious months leading up to the Iraq war, the company blew that record out of the water, racking up more than $7 billion in pure profit.