frankie's Journal: The gas price conspiracy theory

Could someone point me to a public database or list of:

• crude oil prices
• retail gasoline prices (bonus points for regular/premium/diesel split)
• retail consumption volume (bonus points as above)

with monthly (or weekly, or daily) data from 1998 (or earlier) through 2006? I'm pretty sure gas prices did not swing this much last year, and it's undeniable that lower prices (whatever the cause) benefit the incumbents.

At least one place

[nizo]

Could start here:
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/crude1.h tml [doe.gov]

Probably other stuff there too (I am too lazy to search around :-) ) I haven't seen conclusive evidence one way or the other; heck I don't even know how one would go about directly manipulating gas prices, short of dumping strategic reserves into the system or threating oil companies.

How to manipulate gas prices

[frankie]

Thanks for that link. Now we need the corresponding retail prices and we can draw some inferences.

I suspect that you, like USA Today and many others, are viewing this scenario the wrong way. Bushco is not coercing Big Oil to do his bidding at all. I see it as much more plausible that oil companies are doing this voluntarily and intentionally, as an enourmous unregulated campaign contribution. It doesn't even need to be a full industry-wide conspiracy. All it really takes is for any ONE of the larger suppl

Re:

[nizo]

Good point; record profits by the oil companies while prices go through the roof for the average joe look so very very bad (and very much like gouging). I am not familiar enough with the whole situation to say it IS gouging, but boy it sure looks that way. Keeping people in office who are your best buds (not that there aren't plenty from both major parties who are their buds) and helping people forget about those huge piles o' profits would be a reasonable reaction on the part of the oil companies.