Obviously, they need them soooo bad.
Fuck Social Security, unemployment, WIC, food stamps, and those gawdawful Pell Grants!
WASHINGTON -- The sputtering economy, high unemployment rate and punishing gas prices are taking a huge toll on average Americans, but at least somebody is doing well: The Big Five oil companies this week announced they had made a whopping $36 billion in profits in the second quarter of 2011.
According to second-quarter earnings reports, ExxonMobil alone made $10.7 billion in the most recent three months. That's a 41 percent increase over the same period last year and a 161 percent increase over 2009.
Shell nearly doubled its profits year over year, taking in $8.7 billion in the second quarter. Chevron's profits were $7.7 billion, up 43 percent. BP earned $5.6 billion, a far cry from its $17.2 billion loss a year ago. Only Conoco Philips, with $3.4 billion in earnings, posted smaller profits than a year ago, dropping 18 percent due to the jettisoning of some Russian assets.
A good chunk of these profits is coming right out the pockets of the American public, thanks in part to astronomical gas prices and to $4 billion to $8 billion a year in deficit-increasing tax subsidies that oil companies continues to get, long after the incentives those subsidies were designed to create ceased to make economic sense.
Rather than invest their profits in such things as product development, new facilities, hot talent or research -- things that could create jobs, improve consumer offerings and accelerate alternative energy production -- three of the five big oil companies are spending large amounts of that money buying back shares of their own stock.
Exxon spent $5.5 billion -- or more than half of its total profits -- to buy back its own stock in the second quarter; Chevron spent $1 billion, or 13 percent of its profits; and Conoco spent $3.1 billion -- or 91 percent of its profits. The numbers were similar last quarter.
"What this means is these companies see their profits as a way of managing their stock price, rather than investing money in the future of their own companies and the future of the economy," said William Lazonick, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.
