[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 7]
[House]
[Page 9932]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                               OIL PRICES

  (Mr. McDERMOTT asked and was given permission to address the House 
for 1 minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, it's kind of funny to listen to the other 
side talk today. You would think that they had been really working on 
the energy crisis in this country.
  When the President took over, gasoline was about $1.80 a gallon, and 
now it's $3.80 a gallon where I live. Now, that's an energy policy you 
could see developed in the White House by Mr. Cheney. He brought in all 
the oil company executives and said, how can we drive up the price of 
gasoline so you guys can make a whole lot of money? They had a secret 
meeting. They wouldn't tell anybody who was there. They wouldn't tell 
anybody what was talked about. They have been fighting in the courts 
for 8 years to keep from telling us what went on at that meeting at the 
beginning of the Bush administration.
  We see the results. They got them, the biggest profits of the oil 
companies in history. And we tried to take a little $16 billion 
loophole and close it and use some of that money for alternative energy 
production and conservation and the President said, no way, we can't 
take anything away from those oil companies. Why, they need it all.
  We're not going to get a reduction in oil prices in this country 
until we change the administration when Barack Obama takes over on the 
20th of January, 2009.

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