"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:QJtRe.320321$xm3.146714@attbi_s21...
JH Better buy gas, too. The gougers and racketeers have already
JH jumped to $3 per gallon in Des Moines, as of this morning.

Snicker Uh, Jay, that would be free market entrepeneurs. Or have
you suddenly gone righteous/socialist on us?

Thousands of gas stations jacking gas prices nationwide, in lock-step with
each other, because of a trumped up "disaster" (and in the face of the
release of the Strategic Oil Reserve, which will totally off-set any
effect of Katrina) is not "entrepreneurship" -- it's criminal.

But it's an inevitable and utterly predictable result of our government's
ill-thought-out destruction of independently owned gas stations in the
1980s and '90s. All we have left now are the big company stations,
controlled by a relatively small number of owners -- so it's easy for them
to control pricing.

The release of the reserve is going to help very little. The big problem is
not lack of crude oil it is the fact that they can't turn on the lights at
the refineries that produce 10% of our gas.