What Are You Paying to Heat Your Home?

Exxon Mobil just reported annual profits of $36 Billion with revenues far exceeding it's closest competitor - Wal-Mart. While I'm generally a capitalist and I understand that corporations are going to do everything to maximize their profits, why do I still feel like I just got dick slapped in the face with an oil dripping dong? Part of it is probably because the Iraq War and recent acts of God would lead you to believe that oil is scarcer and more expensive to procure, process and distribute than at other times in recent memory. While this would expectedly lead to higher prices for the average consumer, apparently Exxon Mobile is charging us more than a proportional increase in cost to them.

Check out the article for details including Exxon Mobil's attempt to demure and how the Republican controlled legislature wants to give the oil industry even more tax cuts!

In one measure of Exxon Mobil's wealth and influence, its revenue of $371 billion surpassed the $245 billion gross domestic product of Indonesia, an OPEC member and the world's fourth most populous country, with 242 million people.

The company's huge profit report came as no surprise to the White House or to lawmakers in either party, but it arrived just as Congress was preparing to resume a fight over imposing a one-time windfall profits tax on the major oil companies.

Last fall, the Republican-controlled Senate passed a bill to extend about $60 billion worth of tax cuts over the next five years, but it also included a provision that would impose a one-year tax increase of $5 billion on the nation's largest oil companies. The measure is unlikely to survive. President Bush has already threatened to veto the tax bill if it includes the tax on oil companies, and House Republicans included no comparable measure in their own tax bill.

Another measure approved in the Senate would effectively remove the foreign tax credit that the nation's three largest oil companies, Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips, receive for taxes paid in other countries. Most energy analysts do not see the measures winning approval in the House, but Exxon Mobil executives remain concerned.
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Republican lawmakers were on the defensive on Monday. Not only are they under heavy pressure from party leaders and from the White House to kill the proposed tax on oil companies, but they also inserted more than $2 billion in additional tax breaks for oil and gas companies in the energy bill that Congress passed last November.