I'd like to say I 'feel your pain', Ollie...but that wouldn’t be quite true. It's my OWN pain I'm feeling. You see, as I set here hoping my son can thaw MY frozen pipes without damage, I'm wondering if I have enough left in my 401(K) account to pay for another tank of $3.46/gal LP. Obviously, heating my small home primarily via electric heater isn’t going to work. Since it now takes $1300 to fill my 400 gal tank, a 350% increase over the past ten years, I look for alternatives. At my age, and in declining health, there aren’t many.

You see, I'm a 60-yr-old female truck driver. I expected I could always have a job, even here in Michigan in a county with, officially, 8%+ unemployment. As I already support 3 people fully and another 6 partially, that job is/was critical to the survival of ALL of us. However, in this recession that the news pundits all deny we're facing, freight has been extremely slow and my income has dropped over 30% in the past year. I have gutted my 401(k) to keep everyone surviving.  I'm still doing better, however, than many of my relatives, particularly a daughter with five children and one car. She and her husband both work full-time different shifts and that one old car sucks down $3.19/gal gas driving about 80 miles a day, IF they don’t do any extra driving. The 25% rise in grocery prices, in large part due to the high cost of fuel and the petrochemicals used in fertilizer to grow it, and the diversion of corn and soybeans into ethanol adds to food costs and takes another huge chunk out of our declining incomes. And, I'm quickly being starved out of my job in favor of cheap truck drivers from south of the border who demand a bit less than I to survive on. As the price of diesel fuel and the longer transportation distances of our increasingly imported goods send freight costs up, US carriers are supported by our government in various schemes to destroy another 5-8 million middle-class jobs.

Certainly we have a serious over-dependency on oil: this is a long-term problem it will take many years to solve successfully. Instead of government supporting small home energy-saving efforts with tax breaks and credits, it only responds to the big players who increase actual consumer costs to support more and more profits. Government pretence that food and energy costs need not be included in their official cost of living indexes does not negate the fact that they are destroying the middle-and lower-classes.

And why are oil costs to high, actually? "Threats" of this, that and the other thing don’t actually raise prices: Speculation raises prices! Once in a blue moon, one will hear some economic guru try to tell that to the so-called 'reporters' on the financial news shows. They are quickly argued into the floor by some blond bimbo who replies that stocks are doing well, etc. However, if one read the article in Foreign Policy Magazine last month, titled, "Seven Questions: The Price of Fear  Interview with Fadel Gheith", one realized that speculation is indeed the reason we are attempting to survive at $100 oil. Fadel Gheith is managing director of oil and gas resources with Oppenheimer & Co., Inc. The interview is available on-line at

 (http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=4045)

 I suggest you read it and absorb the fact that actual costs should be no more than $60/bbl-and that OPEC actually wants it at around $45/bbl. If you doubt Mr Gheith’s  assessment of the situation, perhaps you should read the article in American Thinker magazine dated August 9, 2006 and titled, “Enron and Today's Oil and Gas Prices “By Noel Sheppard. (http://www.americanthinker.com/2006/08/enron_and_todays_oil_and_gas_p.html) This article gives further teeth to the argument that a.) Speculation is causing high oil prices and b.) Government is complicit in allowing this situation to be created and to continue. The proof in this pudding is the link provided to a US Senate report from the US Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations titled "The Role of Market Speculation in Rising Oil and Gas Prices: A Need to Put The Cop Back on the Beat" (http://www.senate.gov/~levin/newsroom/supporting/2006/PSI.gasandoilspec.062606.pdf)     June 27, 2006 .

This leaves little doubt that all other arguments are simply smoke and mirrors to divert the American public into blaming anything and everything for our rapidly escalating woes regarding the increasingly higher cost of living while allowing the big-time players in the financial sectors to fill their pockets at the expense of the rest of us. And who are the biggest investors in the futures markets who are seeing their profits increase so dramatically? Chief among them are the various levels of government who invest their capital in the futures market!

Once again, Ollie, we blame everyone and everything for the outrageous price of oil-instead of the real culprits: speculators aided and abetted by our own corrupt government!

So, since you're there close to DC, and can likely afford the gas to drive on over to Capitol Hill, why don’t you motor on over there and tell that bunch of liars and thieves to cut it the hell out and fix the problem before they have no taxpayers left to tax!