Word: levins
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Carl Levin is determined to get angry about Big Oil and high gasoline prices - no matter what the evidence says. The Democratic senator from Michigan - under the aegis of the well-named Permanent Investigations subcommittee - spent 396 pages and who-knows-how-many taxpayer dollars drilling for political black gold in the field of possible price collusion by Big Oil. The report found no sign that oil companies had gotten together, OPEC-style, to keep prices high - but that "In a number of instances, refiners have sought to increase prices by reducing supplies...
...Levin still has problems with the current state of said free enterprise system. The investigation "did not discover any evidence of collusion," he admitted, but that was only because none was necessary. Gasoline markets, he argued, are so "highly concentrated you don't need collusion to have a big artificial impact on supply" and therefore on prices...
...Aside from the questionable use of the word "artificial" when it comes to companies selling their own products, Levin has a point - corporate names like BP-Amoco, ChevronTexaco and ExxonMobil demonstrate well enough the industry's recent wave of consolidation. But as Levin targets the brief but headline-making pump-price spikes of spring 2000 and summer 2001 and calls for antitrust action against the industry, he forgets how the got on this merger kick in the first place: the rock-bottom oil prices of 1999. Disappearing profits induced Exxon and Mobil to join forces in search of a vertically...
...mess better than Pittman, which is why he asked his top deputy to go back to Dulles, Va., on a new rescue mission. "AOL is our biggest problem, and so we're putting our best fighting general on it," says Parsons, who was designated CEO when Gerald Levin abruptly announced his resignation last December...
...Bears outshot the Crimson 38-24, while Harvard sophomore Jake McKenna registered 11 saves in goal. His Brown counterpart, Mike Levin, stopped ten for the Bears...