Last Saturday night at the Guilford Community Church, a concert was held to benefit the Windham County Heat Fund which – with at least two long months of winter left – had brought in almost $18,000 to help low income families with support for their heating bills. According to articles in the Reformer, so far this year, fifty-two families have been served.
The concert was a standing room only affair. The music was fine; donated refreshments, delicious. Evidence of the strength of our community was abundant both on stage and off. And to our delight, by evening’s end, the heat fund was pushed up over the $20,000 mark.
But this heart warming evidence of a community banding together to care for its own, stood in stark contrast to reports earlier in the day that – beating its own previous record – Exxon Mobil Corporation racked up the largest annual corporate profit in American history, earning $40.6 billion for the year.
Exxon also topped its own record for profit in a single quarter, posting net income of $11.7 billion for the final three months of the year — about $1 billion more than the same period in 2005, the previous quarterly record. According to media reports, sales for the year of 2007 rose to $404.5 billion — not coincidentally, a figure just slightly lower than the U.S. Defense Department's fiscal 2007 budget.
As our community bands together to raise a little money to protect our fellow citizens from the cold, the sad truth is that we are turning that money over to a corporation that is reaping obscene profits from the consequences of the disruption of oil flow from Iraq and Bush’s sabre rattling on Iran. Every mention of Iran pushes the price of oil higher, and by media reports as much as 30% of the price increases is being driven by speculators operating in the oil futures market. It is not only the brashness of this oil-soaked White House that surprises, but the unwillingness of the media, the courts, and the Congress to see a pattern that is clear to the rest of us.
So, while musicians and local businesses struggling every week to make ends meet come together to offer their talents to serve their community, Exxon is raking in record breaking profits. And no windfall profits bill has even been proposed in Congress.
A new balance must be struck in our society, and struck soon. The corporation’s freedom in the market place has come at the cost of our own.
Scott Ainslie