The Real Reason for High Gas Prices: Position Limits now for the N.Y. Merc!: CFTC appointment in Jun

The Ed Show

It’s quite possibly the single most important nomination President Obama will make—with nothing less at stake than both the U.S. and global economies, not to mention the potential starvation of millions of people inthe developing world—and last night on The Ed Show, Ed Schultz broke the news that the White House vetting has begun. What is not clear is whether the White House understands just how important this appointment is.

The position is commission member of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. It sounds boring, until you understand that how the CFTC does its job has a direct impact on how much money you pay at the gas station and the grocery store—and how much of that money goes to Wall Street. The CFTC’s function is to regulate the trading that takes place on everything from oil to wheat.

When things run well, as they did after FDR got his hands on them, the price of your heating oil and your gasoline and your bread and your cereal and your rice cakes and your cotton shirts and your sugar is determined by two factors everyone understands: Supply and demand. The reason bakers and heating-oil companies and airlines don’t just pay whatever price is dictated by current supply and demand is that sometimes unforeseen events can mess with supply (or demand). To hedge their bets against such price fluctuations, those companies I just mentioned (which are known as end users) started to buy contracts with their suppliers to lock in future prices. End users agreed to pay a little more six months or so down the road, in return for knowing they would pay no more than a little more.

For this system to work, end users actually need speculators. They keep the system liquid, and ensure a steady supply of futures traders willing to bet counter to however the end users are betting. You can’t have a casino where everyone’s betting on the same thing, after all. FDR recognized that speculators, left unchecked, could overwhelm the commodity exchanges with bets designed not to hedge against supply and demand, but designed to manipulate prices. He signed into law position limits, legal caps on the volume of Wall Street speculation that kept speculators in check and ensured that most of the futures trading was done by genuine end users.

read more> ed.msnbc.msn.com...

Update:

Now in the wake of the quakes in Japan I notice Fox News propagating the idea of long gas lines and trains not running in Japan along with sensationalizing the reactor explosions hoping to help speculators over price energies. They are a propaganda wing of the Koch empire. The Koch's helped to finance Murdoch's media empire which makes it part of the Koch brother's global matrix. A global petro empire! They make their money primarily from oil, gas and coal. They help to speculate the price of fossil energies so we all have nothing in the end, but personal, business, and public debt.


STOP NEWS CORP! STOP THE KOCH BROTHERS NOW! Ask congress and the president to, "Please expropriate all U.S. fossil fuel production and the N. Y. Mercantile Exchange before these fools completely financially enslave us?"

It's the only effective current solution unfortunately to financial freedom for America. I hate national socialism, but it's the ICU of an economy hijacked by feudalism orchestrated by an elite minority.

R. James Woolsey, Jr. former CIA director says that due to the reactor threats in Japan that the world should stop using nuclear power and power electrical generation instead with nateral gas.

The establishment he has made his bread and butter from being apart of makes most of their money from petro dollars, and mining everyone's pockets... threatening to send everybody to the poorhouse through mechanisms designed to help hyper inflate energy speculations. These ill gotten gains originate from your hard labors. Every common citizen has to pay them through having their manipulated costs being passed down through the cost of everything from energy production, their golden goose, to you, the final consumer, the victim of their energy racket. They do it by first dissimulating sensational information that is designed to scare people and excuse away hyper inflated speculation using media relationship assents. Then they cash in on the hyper inflated sales of energies.

It's a SHAME the establishment engages in such financial mining activities, a SHAM!

Oil defense complex Fox News just told everyone to buy Buy BUY OIL salivating about oil going over 130 this summer due to the attacks on Libya which produces less than 2% of the worlds oil output. They minimized the lack of demand in Japan for oil which has decreased more than 2%. Does anyone else here see this oil racket for what it is... propagated BS through the tool of corporately controlled mass media?

We need "position limits" placed on N. Y. Mercantile Exchange buy orders. There is a position coming up in June on this board en.wikipedia.org... Tell Obama that we want someone who will impose "position limits" on futures trading.

Stop the oil trading madness!

It's as easy as


1 www.thenation.com...

2 www.thenation.com...

3 www.thenation.com...

To understand.