Oil Market Manipulation has Crude Prices Sky High

Today's price of oil is $74/bbl, having retreated these past days from over $80/bbl. This, a price more than 100% that the $33/bbl touched in February 2009. This, with land storage so filled to the brim that over 30 million barrels are kept in floating storage at sea. As one example, Kuwait's crude oil exports to Japan plunged by 47% to less than five million barrels a month.

In spite of the summer driving season inventories of gasoline in the U.S. are rising. Supplies of oil at Cushing, Oklahoma, the delivery point for the New York Mercantile Exchange futures contract are less than 1% from their all time high reached in May of this year.

Inventories in a 15 state region that includes Illinois rose to 97.7 million bbls/oil earlier this month, the highest ever since data was recorded, beginning in 1980 according to a USDOE report. The price of crude taken together with the country's jobless rate of 9.6% makes no sense at all. Clearly the price of oil has lost all ballast to the dynamic of supply and demand.

The situation of distorted trading on the commodity exchanges could be contained in large measure if Congress stepped in to restrict participation by computer-based traders. The oil industry would harness their "K" Street lobbying teams, the best that oil money can buy, and combine forces with the Wall Street speculators in order to squelch any effort to bring some rationale, some sanity, some semblance of fair play back to the oil trading pits.

The oil interests have the money to do it, and we have a Congress whose election campaigns yearn for the money they can provide and are therefore happily doing their bidding. We, in turn as consumers, have no alternative but to pay, pay, pay while the oil interests and the oil speculators gorge themselves with billions of undeserved margins and profits while great swaths of our population are suffering massive economic turmoil.

Read more in the Huffington Post.