Another socialist blog

When OPEC announced this week that it would cut oil production, the White House complained that oil prices should be set by market forces. This is disingenuous even by the standards of the Bush administration, on at least a couple of levels.

Of course OPEC didn’t say they were going to raise prices. They said they planned to cut production. Everybody knows cutting production will have the result of increasing prices, because that’s how market forces operate.

What they really mean, of course, is that oil prices should be set not by market forces, but by political forces exerted by the United States. The fact that OPEC can still engage in price gouging just underscores the failure of U.S. terror tactics to subdue the rest of the Middle East. After so much killing, so much threatening, and so much bribery, the OPEC nations still aren’t taking orders particularly well. This must be frustrating for the emperor.

Of course, it’s rankest hypocrisy for any capitalist, let alone a crony of the oil companies, to complain about price gouging. Predatory pricing is one of the central features of capitalism, and capitalists love it as long as they aren’t on the receiving end.

Did Bush intervene when Enron was inflating the electric bills of California consumers? Nope. Did Bush get indignant about the Microsoft monopoly and all its attendant price distortions? No, it was the Bush administration that let them off with little more than a some good-natured finger-wagging.

Absent from all this empty talk of “market forces” is a discussion of the demand side of energy prices. Bush just last month extended a regulation permitting car makers to produce less fuel-efficient vehicles. This move makes perfect sense if your agenda is to increase oil company profits by maximizing demand. And, of course, no sense at all if you complain about high gasoline prices.

We are now faced with the spectacle of the Republicans’ “economic stimulus” package. I don’t doubt it is stimulating to the rich, who, under the Bush plan, will pay no income tax on their stock dividends.

The rationale for this, which is being repeated as fact in the media, is that stock dividends are double taxed: i.e., corporations pay income tax, then stockholders are taxed on the same after-tax corporate profits when dividends are paid.

Working people, of course, are in exactly the same boat. We pay income tax on our wages, then pay sales taxes when we spend our after-tax wages. There are no Republican proposals to curtail sales taxes, of course, nor any other regressive taxes.

If you thought you were paying too much for music CDs, you were right: it turns out that music retailers and publishers were colluding in a scheme to prevent the retailers from selling at a discount. Retailers Trans World Entertainment, Tower Records, and Musicland Stores, and publishers Universal Music & Video Distribution (UMVD), BMG Distribution, WEA, and EMI Distribution (EMD), and Sony Music Distribution together will pay $143 million to settle an anti-trust lawsuit brought by state attorneys general.

Yeah, it’s just a slap on the wrist for a multi-billion-dollar industry, and they don’t have to admit any wrongdoing, but it still couldn’t happen to a nicer gang of defendants.

Tomorrow’s Bush administration photo-op will be a bogus “economic forum” in Texas, a give-and-take conversation to which no administration opponents have been invited.