The uh, profits?

Item: the media have announced that all the oil companies posted record profits in this year's first quarter

Item: on NPR they announced that the top three oil companies mad sixteen billion in profit in that time

Item: the NYT reports that the CEO of ExxonMobil makes $13,700 an hour

I mention these because Jon Stewart had Kimberley Strassel, from the Wall Street Journal, on The Daily Show the other night (Wednesday, I think ... I caught the Thursday 8pm rerun), and she was defending the rise in gas prices. She went on about Congress's share of the blame with their silly ethanol mandate (forcing people to use product B as a direct cause of product A's getting more expensive...), and how the cost of production had gone up, and how the cost of crude had gone up ... Jon had mentioned the record profits, and she was ignoring it as hard as she could. Jon let her go on, quite a long time it seemed (and I was growling at the screen "Address the profits! Address the profits!"), until it became clear that she was just not going to mention them.

So he interrupted her and asked her point-blank about the record profits being posted. Wouldn't, he asked, if their costs were going up and so they were raising the prices, wouldn't their profit stay the same? (Since, you know, profit is the difference between what you take in and what you lay out?)

You know what? She wasn't able to answer that. She floundered around a couple of half-started sentences, but there was no way for her to spin that in a pro-big-oil-business way.

Now, Jon is, as he has pointed out before, not a newsman. He's a comedian, an entertainer, a fake newsman, and so he let her off the hook, suggesting that it must be hard to explain things to stupid people. To her credit, she let him stop her, but not by accepting his out, that it was too complicated to explain to the uninitiated. She merely said we don't want to stop the oil companies making money, since we need them to invest and explore and so on and so forth.

(Maybe we do. But that's not going to be recorded as profit. That'll be listed as r&d or whatever oil companies call it.)

Now I don't say that companies shouldn't make profits.

But I do wonder about companies that make billions and billions a year. I mean, just how much profit does anyone need? (And who's getting paid less, or deprived of benefits, or over-charged, to make those billions?)

And I don't have to wonder about companies that make record profits when the commodity they sell is in supposedly short supply.