IT'S CYING TIME FOR THE OIL COMPANIES. TUNE UP THE VIOLINS AND WHIP OUT THE HANKIES

The New York Times reports that oil producing nations and big oil companies are crying the blues over the price of oil dropping to $70 a barrel, the lowest price since 2006. Well boo-friggin'-hoo! Looking up the stats, in 2006 the oil companies reaped billions and billions in profits, setting all kinds of records, and none of the various dictators or kings running the oil producing nations were forced to cut back on their caviar and champagne budgets. Oil company executives raked in astounding salaries and bonuses, those bonuses being voted to themselves by themselves and paid out of other people's money, that of their stockholders, also known as patsies. Nice trick if you can get away with it.

So why do they say now that the low price of oil poses a danger to world markets? It's nothing but good news to everybody else, freeing up nearly a billion dollars every single day that Americans were pumping into their gas tanks just last month. Sounds like a good thing for the economy, and the oil companies can still make huge profits and keep rewarding their executives with lottery money every Christmas. Could it be that they want more? You think? Maybe they see what happened to the nation's financial sector and figure they'd better get theirs while the getting is good.

Not that they're paying attention to the damage the financial crisis is doing to America and Americans, that's never been Big Oil's hang up, but the damage done to the vast earning power of top executives. They recoil at the thought of their brethren in the financial industries having their earnings monitored and their princely bonuses curtailed by their new partner, the Federal Government. Not that there's any chance of Big Oil going broke and getting nationalized like the banks, investment houses and insurance companies. They're swimming in money.

And what the hell, everything runs on oil, so selling oil is about as tough as selling insulin to a diabetic. A high school student with a video game addiction could do it without looking up from the screen. The only guy dumb enough to lose money in the oil business is, well, The President of the United States these past 8 years, one Bush The Younger (how embarrassing is that, America?). Not too hard a guy to be smarter than, really. Which the Big Oil executives certainly are judging from the tens of billions of dollars in tax breaks they've gotten from Dumbya every year as "incentives" to do what they would be doing anyway to go along with their record profit margins. Life gets no sweeter.

Maybe they're afraid of the Feds looking around desperately for new tax revenues now that they're on the hook for over a trillion bucks in bad debts and lots more to come and one of them saying: "Hey, wait a minute! Don't those oil guys have all the money? Let's tax them!" It could happen. Not likely under Bush The Younger, but he's gone in 3 months, and then Obama will be in and they don't own his ass, an oversight they are already bitterly regretting as they watch John McCain's Big Oil-friendly campaign degenerate into slapstick comedy.

So now is the time for them to start creating some sort of phony panic about the low price of oil (as if 3 bucks and change a gallon is cheap!), trying to graft it onto the convenient aura of fear about our economy. Only this time nobody's buying their greedy opportunism. Leave it to corporate princes to not rally around their country in a time of economic crisis and pledge to keep oil prices as low as possible and ensure a plentiful supply. With the average Big Oil CEO making $15.6 million year before bonuses and lucrative stock options, you have to ask yourself why they make so much to sell a product that sells itself?

The answer to that one is: Because they can! It's not like anyone can say: "No, thanks, I'll walk everywhere I go and live in a cold, dark house." It's good to be king, no? Well, America got its start by toppling the rule of kings. When a product is absolutely essential to everything that runs, flashes, hums, rumbles or burns, you'd think a government would have formulated a policy about its price and distribution in the 35 years since the Oil Embargo and gasoline rationing in America when Nixon was president, as well as having moved forward with all due haste to find alternative energy sources. That would make a drop of sense, no?

This is, after all, the nation that put a guy on the moon almost 40 years ago, so it's not like there's a shortage of know-how around here. Big Oil knows this too, and realizes they can't discourage alternative fuel development and more efficient engines forever like they've been doing since the 1930's so they'd better just jack up the price now before the next president mandates a new Apollo-type program to fix the problem. And that next president might just have the balls to make them pay their share of taxes, a terrifying thought to these people. Instead, they would scare us and hold us up without a gun.

Time to investigate their business practices, strictly regulate their arrogant cowboy asses, expose their powerful lobbying organizations and tax them in a way that prevents them from passing their fair share of taxes to you and I at the gas pump. Root out and arrest all their accomplices in crime from the Federal Government while we're at it. Then use those taxes to pay for the Apollo program to find a different way to make all our stuff run, flash, hum, rumble and burn. They may take it hard, but they'll get over it eventually. Meanwhile, we'll tune up the violins and pass them some hankies while they weep for their lost kingdoms. Boo-friggin'-hoo!