Beltway Snark

It’s nice to see there’s at least one person in Washington who understands how gas prices happen:

The Federal Trade Commission will announce Friday its plan for investigating and regulating possible market manipulation by oil companies, traders and others, a Democratic senator said Thursday.

Under legislation passed late last year, violators could face fines of $1 million a day.

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., said the best way to bring down the price of gasoline at the pump is for the administration to start seriously policing the oil industry.

…

Last month, she called on the FTC to stop delaying and launch an investigation into oil prices, and more recently she asked the Justice Department to create a special task force to look at whether sky-high crude oil and gasoline prices are the result of market manipulation.

The price of gas has nothing to do with the President. It has nothing to do with Congress. It has very little to do with the oil companies, insofar as they aren’t manipulating the oil futures market. The people who actually set the price for oil are the futures investors that keep pushing the cost per barrelsky high for their own profit, and OPEC that uses the futures trading numbers as a benchmark for what they can charge per barrel. Blaming the Bush administration and proposing gas-tax holidays makes for better sound bites though.