Word: profitable
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Though OPEC seems invariably to profit from the suffering of its customers, the organization has hardly engineered the crisis from which it is benefiting. Instead, the group has merely been a catalyst, if a particularly jarring one, for economic changes that were bound to come. Petroleum prices have been going up because worldwide demand for oil has been increasing relentlessly while supplies have fallen. The cartel's policies have been designed to exploit the opportunity and earn a higher profit from petroleum sales...
...summer of 1979, Joseph P. Kennedy II--son of Robert F. Kennedy--decided to form a non-profit oil company to distribute low cost oil to the poor...
...idea of forming a non-profit oil company came out of the native notion that if you could return the billions of dollars in oil company profits you could do a lot for people," Kennedy says. "After all, in 1979 the whole national fuel assistance plan budget was only 11.6 billion. But Exxon's profits alone were $4.3. billion. Four billion dollars," he adds, "You could do a lot with that kind of money...
...some one had told me two years ago I'd end up working for a non-profit oil company, I'd have said they were crazy," Steven Rothstein, one of the original members of CEC, says. "When Joe first came to me with the idea I thought he was crazy. I worked for him for four months because I was his friend. But still I thought it was crazy. Imagine," he adds, "starting a non-profit oil company to help low-income people. It's brilliant. And it takes a lot of guts...
...People said it couldn't be done. They said Citizens was a one year thing. A political thing. And now we are back again," Rothstein says. "We do what Exxon does, only we are non-profit--and we don't have exploration costs. But out basic philosophies are directly contradictory. We are competitors, in an absolute sense, not a real sense. We are an idea. And if we are legitimized other people may decide...