California goes after gasoline price-gouging

Presumably court challenges will be filed next week, although they should fail as most states already have general price-gouging laws on the books. What is really needed, though, are tough, even brutal, federal laws dealing with collusion and price-fixing for everything, especially in the commodities markets.

In a swift manner of action, California has passed a law that prohibits companies from price gouging at the gas pump, meaning companies will face civil penalties for hiking up fuel costs. The new bill also establishes an independent watchdog division within the California Energy Commission (CEC) and gives CEC authority to impose penalties as needed.

According to the office of California Governor Gavin Newsom, oil companies hiked state gas prices up to $6.42 per gallon in 2022. This was $2.61 per gallon more than the average cost per gallon nationally. In the same year, oil and gas companies reported record profits in the trillions of dollars. - EcoWatch

An example from France regarding retirement

The potential parallels aren't precise, but they're plenty close enough.

To an American viewer, the current protests over raising France’s retirement age might look a little quaint: the country that once beheaded members of its aristocracy still gets in a tizzy when its president wears an expensive watch. In January, When President Emmanuel Macron revealed his plan to raise France’s minimum retirement age from a relatively young 62 to 64, protests erupted across the nation. Garbage collectors in Paris and other cities have gone on strike, leaving trash to pile up in the streets for more than two weeks.

But this is not a case of petulant Frenchmen failing to see how good they’ve got it. It’s a worker protest against an overbearing president, a demonstration of the power of organized labor, and a warning for the United States, whose retirement system faces similar challenges...

It’s unclear how the protests, and Macron’s policy, will turn out. But French people’s refusal to allow an undemocratic attack on their social safety net should be an inspiration for the US, whose people are bound by the will of an unelected Supreme Court, six of its justices appointed by presidents who lost the popular vote. Raising the retirement age in France isn’t trivial, and French unions are proving it. - Mother Jones

New U.S. bases in the Philippines

This has most definitely been underreported. You can search the “news” option for “us military bases philippines” and see what I mean.

More than a century of systemic human rights violations—including gang rape, indiscriminate shootings and murder—have been committed by the U.S. military in the Philippines since the United States invaded and colonized the country in 1899. These crimes led in part to a nationwide social movement to close the Subic Bay Naval and Clark Air Force bases. By 1991, in an attempt to finally rollback U.S. colonial control, the Philippine Senate chose to not renew the U.S. military bases treaty…

Now, the United States is once again supporting an authoritarian leader by spending lavish sums of money on military aid. And with recent official visits by Vice President Kamala Harris and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, an agreement to build four new U.S. military locations in the Philippines was solidified. - The Progressive

Getting rich trading your competitors' stock?

Yep, that's how it works, these days.

The Medpace executive is among dozens of top executives who have traded shares of either competitors or other companies with close connections to their own. A Gulf of Mexico oil executive invested in one partner company the day before it announced good news about some of its wells. A paper-industry executive made a 37% return in less than a week by buying shares of a competitor just before it was acquired by another company. And a toy magnate traded hundreds of millions of dollars in stock and options of his main rival, conducting transactions on at least 295 days. He made an 11% return over a recent five-year period, even as the rival’s shares fell by 57%.

These transactions are captured in a vast IRS dataset of stock trades made by the country’s wealthiest people, part of a trove of tax data leaked to ProPublica. ProPublica analyzed millions of those trades, isolated those by corporate executives trading in companies related to their own, then identified transactions that were anomalous — either because of the size of the bets or because individuals were trading a particular stock for the first time or using high-risk, high-return options for the first time.

The records give no indication as to why executives made particular trades or what information they possessed; they may have simply been relying on years of broad industry knowledge to make astute bets at fortuitous moments. Still, the records show many instances where the executives bought and sold with exquisite timing. - ProPublica

The Middle East is kicking the U.S. to the curb

And why not? Of course we don't know how long this Iran-Saudi glad-handing will last. But in any case U.S. influence will still be tanking. Looking at history, the only "surprise" is that it took this long.

In an interview with Al Jazeera English, veteran Washington Iran watcher Hillary Mann Leverett asserted that, in the wake of the reestablishment of Iran-Saudi diplomatic relations in an agreement brokered by Beijing, China is now “the indispensable nation” in the Middle East. She underlined that the United States could not have achieved this accomplishment.

The joint statement issued on Friday, crafted by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and diplomats of the two feuding Middle Eastern states, pledged non-interference in each other’s domestic affairs. Saudi Foreign Minister Faisal Bin Farhan tweeted that the agreement formed part of the Saudi vision for peaceful cooperation in the region toward a common efflorescence...

Now, half a century later, it is China that has 99% of the cards when it comes to relations across the Oil Gulf. The hardest of hard lines taken by the United States against Iran, with the imposition of a de facto global financial and trade embargo on that country’s oil exports, putting the two countries on a war footing, has led to the US utterly lacking influence in Iran or Syria, and to its having alienated most of Iraq. This invisible blockade was imposed on Iran even though it had carefully adhered to the 2015 nuclear deal it signed with the Security Council, a deal from which Trump withdrew and which he more or less destroyed. - Informed Comment

1T+ squirreled away in tax havens

The article says almost $1T in 2019, so it has to be a pretty safe bet that it's above that number now.

About a decade ago, the world’s biggest economies agreed to crack down on multinational corporations’ abusive use of tax havens. This resulted in a 15-point action plan that aimed to curb practices that shielded a large chunk of corporate profits from tax authorities.

But, according to our estimates, it hasn’t worked. Instead of reining in the use of tax havens – countries such as the Bahamas and Cayman Islands with very low or no effective tax rates – the problem has only gotten worse.

By our reckoning, corporations shifted nearly US$1 trillion in profits earned outside of their home countries to tax havens in 2019, up from $616 billion in 2015, the year before the global tax haven plan was implemented by the group of 20 leading economies, also known as the G-20. - The Conversation

Corporations are still abusing NAFTA

I hadn't known about this "legacy" crap.

International investment treaties and investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) play increasingly prominent roles in debates about the climate crisis and government efforts to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions. Around the world, states and international governance bodies are warming to the understanding that investment treaties threaten progress on decarbonization, sustainable development, and the achievement of human rights. Even in places where countries have taken steps to roll back ISDS, as in North America with the passage of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USCMA), corporate lawsuits against democratically enacted energy and climate policies continue to put a chill on government action.

This report looks at three such cases launched in the past two years against Canada, the United States, and Mexico under the expiring ISDS process in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). These disparate cases include: TC Energy’s $15 billion challenge to the Biden administration’s cancellation of the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline; a dispute from Koch Industries involving the cancellation of cap-and-trade in the Canadian province of Ontario; and about a half dozen energy- and mining-related ISDS cases from Canadian and US firms against Mexico, of which we will highlight the Finley Resources case.

What unites these ISDS cases, besides their links to energy and climate policy, is that they should not have been possible to begin with. They can only move forward because of a “legacy” provision that temporarily extended NAFTA’s Chapter 11 investment provisions in the replacement USMCA. - IATP

Big Gas profiteering from Ukraine war

I know that things like this have been going on forever. But it's nonetheless vile and despicable, when unspeakably greedy and selfish people use death and destruction in ways like this to engorge their wealth and power.

Europe’s gas industry has ramped up its messaging since Russia invaded Ukraine, exploiting fears over energy security to justify projects that risk locking the continent into long-term dependence on fossil fuels, DeSmog can reveal.

Four big industry groups began to post many more tweets portraying investments in gas and related infrastructure as the key to secure energy supplies soon after the invasion started — and maintained this strategy throughout last year, an analysis of their social media accounts found.

The lobby groups were Gas Infrastructure Europe; Gas For Climate; Eurogas; and the European branch of the International Association of Oil & Gas Producers, which represent companies operating pipelines, gas storage, and infrastructure to import liquefied natural gas (LNG). Members include oil majors such as Shell, BP, TotalEnergies, Chevron, ExxonMobil, and Eni, which have posted record profits off the back of the energy crisis triggered by the invasion. - DeSmog