I’ve been out of work for nearly a year and a half now. While I collect unemployment, it doesn’t make all the ends meet, and I’ve needed other ways to make money and pay bills. On my better weeks, I’ve actually been able to eat.
One way I’ve tried to generate income was doing online surveys. Unless I’m missing something, it’s a huge waste of time. You’re better off plotting some sort of get rich scheme with your Facebook friends. Maybe something like selling expired hog parts to poor folk in Louisiana, or extracting gold from seawater. The ones I did ranged from waste of time to completely infuriating. I did a survey from Exxon-Mobil where they wanted feedback on how consumers felt about them. It had a lot to do with new initiatives they were engaged in that promoted cleaner-burning fuel and alternative energy, as well as reducing the atmospheric content of greenhouse gasses. This one was the most infuriating.
There was never an option to say “hate it” or “I don’t believe it.” All responses were limited to how much to how much you liked or cared for the new initiative. The questions that required short answers were only related to what you liked about something and how it made you feel. I could only respond to questions to how I felt about “Exxon-Mobil’s efforts to reduce greenhouse emissions,” and never how I felt about oil companies, including Exxon-Mobil, completely fucking us on fuel prices. In their effort to put a happy, smiling, friendly face on their survey, they instead came across as smug, smirking and arrogant. It seems that this company thinks of those whom they regard as hopeless and without alternative options as mindless robotic sheep. When I think of oil companies, I don’t think of these billion-dollar efforts reported on at G4 conferences. I think of the $3.50 price tag I see for regular at the local gas station.
This crap started around a decade ago, when the oil lobby became much more powerful in Washington. There’s no need to go into the politics of it, as anyone who has had to pay triple digits to fill up a truck’s gas tank has likely heard, and spoken, the same arguments. When fuel becomes so expensive, what happens? Travel and transport become expensive. In turn, manufacturing. That in turn affects retail sales, food industries, and airlines. What next? Hospitality and entertainment. I think that covers nearly all the bases. Ridiculous fuel prices have put companies out of business and eliminated jobs.
To hear oil CEOs talk about it, you’d think they were poverty-level paupers who didn’t know where their next meals were coming from. But you get a real taste of what they are like when you hear BP’s former CEO, Tony Hayward, bitch about having to end his yacht vacation because he had to come deal with a catastrophic oil spill. At the end of the day, Mr. Hayward said, “I want my life back.” Well, Mr. Hayward, the rest of the world wants its life back too.
What justification is there for high oil prices? It’s a complicated process where market analysts weigh the supply of oil versus the demand versus the number of gunshots in the Middle East versus the need for an oil baron to build his next palace. Then the analysts set the prices high no matter what, except for when elections are around the corner.
I blame the loss of jobs in the US on foreign outsourcing and on fuel prices. If you want a direct culprit to take it out on, look for the Tony Haywards of the world. As for me, it's sort of circular. Without a job I can't afford gas, and without gas I can't afford to go out looking for a (good) job. The good jobs are not local. Get it? I need gas to get to them!
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