If you listened to Romney’s stump speeches, you would think he is the “people’s” champion for lower gas prices.
Who ARE these people?
His supporters like “Drill-baby” McCain, have been trying to convince us for years that the simplest and fastest way to lower gas prices is to drill everywhere we can fit an oil rig in the U.S. His message is that Obama is a weak leader, influenced only by his elite, leftist, Harvard-educated friends, and that left to his devices, we will continue to kiss environmentalist behinds and keep the price of gas in the $4-5/gallon range forever.
Because after all, $5 gas is no sweat to Obama and his friends. McCain and Romney are only looking out for you, the little guy.
It turns out that high gas prices aren’t actually a problem for Romney either. They are in fact a a boon to his political fortunes.
Using the little guy’s pain at the pump for political purposes, is not the only way he and McCain et al, benefit from high gas prices. Big oil interests are among his most reliable and significant supporters — and when gas prices are high, so are their profits.
These record profits give oil executives even more cash than usual to spend on advancing their political agenda — and that begins with electing Romney. In fact, Big Oil executives pledged more than $200 million to aid Romney’s campaign, and to defeat Obama.
The quid pro quo? Big oil gets to keep its billions in special tax breaks every year. So not only does the little guy pay once – at the pump – but he gets to pay twice through his income taxes, some of which goes to subsidize an industry where the top 5 companies earned $137 billion in profits last year!
In keeping with a time-honored tradition, Big-oil has managed to get Harold Hamm, a billionaire oil executive appointed as Romney’s top energy adviser. This is the same Harold Hamm who declared in 2009 that cheap oil would be a “disaster,” and that “clean energy is a magical fantasy”.
Romney actually gets passionate about oil and gas prices. At a recent town hall meeting, he responded to a question about high gas prices by asserting that efforts to reduce the billions in tax breaks for big oil companies are “dangerous”, and described Paul Ryan’s budget which protects the oil subsidies while eliminating clean energy investments as a “bold and exciting effort.” This was followed by a Fox News debate in which he said that oil and gas executives tell him they had it “a whole lot better” under fellow oilman George W. Bush. You think?
It gets better. Instead of tapping American ingenuity to make our cars go farther on a gallon of gas, Romney has continually blasted improved fuel-efficiency standards — including the higher standards that Bush signed into law as president. He has declared that U.S. clean energy sources — like wind and solar power — are not “real energy,” and that burgeoning green technologies are nothing more than “expensive fads.” He thumbed his nose at the U.S. auto industry by mocking Chevy’s hybrid electric Volt as “an idea whose time has not come.”
Looks pretty cool to me!
Romney’s mutual admiration relationship with Big Oil comes down to this: Oil company executives see high gas prices as an opportunity to profit financially. Romney sees that high gas prices represent an opportunity to profit politically.
Rachel Maddow had an interesting chart on her “Chart Imitates Life” segment last night which depicted the relationship between income inequality and political partisanship in Congress as two lines almost hugging each other from the 1940’s until now.
The next time you slide your credit card into that gas pump, give a thought to that chart and to Romney’s true sympathies. He may want to bet you $10,000 that gas won’t go to $5/gallon this year. If Obama’s ahead in the polls, take it!
iPeopleFINANCE 
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