The real truth is that the oils companies are doing the same thing as the government does with the strategic petroleum reserve, they purchase their own product thru a 2nd party purchaser, pump it into storage tanks and hidden underground reserves to create an artificial shortage then when the price is driven up to a specified point they open the valves and sell it back onto the market at a much higher price, kind of like insider trading.

All of the oil companies do it and have planed to do it for years but the had to have the cooperation of the government, the people in power would have to be able to protect them from investigation and by god it has worked, I have to say tho evil it is brilliant.

If you will check you will find out that oil and gasoline is only high in Europe and the United States, everywhere else such as Mexico, South America and the countries of the Middle East it is cheap, why?, could it be because they do not control the flow in those countries?.

A lot of questions need ansewered and investigated but that will never happen, not with the current people in political power be cause they are infact the very ones in charge of the dirty little operation and they will push the prices to the limit because they know once they do loos power the prices will fall like a rock. They could care less that they will bankrupt the rest of us because they will already have the wealth from the crooked plot.

HELLSJOKER

I have a few questions for you. 1) Are you an idiot? 2) Do you know anything about the world oil and gas markets? 3) Seriously, are you an idiot? Should I call a doctor?

Gas prices are not different between North America/Europe and South America/Middle East because of some weird conspiracy you have cooked up out of your own lack of education on the matter. The answer is actually quite simple. In the West there are considerable amounts of tax on gas prices, in some European countries as much as 75% of the cost of gas is from tax. In places like Venezuela, Egypt and Saudi Arabia there is no tax, in fact there is the opposite: subsidies. As you may have guessed countries like Egypt don't have very nice governments. And in order for those governments to stay in power they need to make the people happy, how long do you think the Egyptian dictator would be President if gas cost $3 in a country where you make $2 a day in wages (Note: i have no idea how much an average Egyptian makes in a day, but you get the point). So US oil prices would be the same as Middle Eastern oil prices if the government subsidized gas instead of taxed it. But then again without those taxes local infrastructure and government services would degrade to an Egyptian level of disrepair. Not too hard to understand when your not a conspiracy obsessed whack job.

Correct. The average Egyptian makes about $1600 per year, or about $5-6 per day, if you assume about 280 working days.

Gas is priced, taxed, and marketed different everywhere. Fortunately, or unfortunately, our society in the US has much higher salary rates, and therefore higher costs of goods. If we only made $1600 per year, THEN we could complain about it.

The higher gas prices were probably inevitable. In some ways they are better higher, because they force, and make possible, conservation and the use of alternative sources of energy.