A1A South

MIAMI, FL — Why are gas prices rising nearly every day? When will it stop, and who’s behind it? Those are questions that many of us are asking.

One Florida fuel distributor wants the public to know that the blame shouldn’t fall on gas station owners. Gas magnate Max Alvarez owns and operates 65 stations in Florida and distributes to 100 more. He buys directly from the oil companies.

At 6 pm, the oil companies notify his West Miami office how much they will charge per gallon that day. Max then adds in taxes and freight to calculate what price his stations will be able to sell the gasoline at.

With wholesale prices at record levels and local competition tough, Max says he only adds one or two cents to the cost of each gallon. That’s far below the ten to 15 cents he needs to add to the price for the fuel sales to be profitable.

He blames speculators for the skyrocketing prices. Speculators are investors who buy oil commodities, hoping they’ll go up. Analysts say speculators can’t really influence the price of crude because they don’t take oil off the market.

“There’s a lot of people to be blamed, but I can assure you the speculators, Wall Street people have a lot to do with this,” Max said.

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I had lunch with the grandson in a small independently-owned restaurant yesterday. The clientele were rural black and white folk. The talk at the tables were the high prices at the pump, how the environmentalists and Dems had prevented new refineries from being built since the 1970s, and how Cuba/China were exploiting oil fields off the coast of Florida that U.S. companies were forbidden to access. Oh, snap. The rubes know who to blame for high energy costs.

Notice how nobody is chanting “no blood for oil” anymore?