President Donald Trump has openly cheered what independent journalist Ken Klippenstein described as the “worst corporate heist in years,” one that has elevated the costs of everything from groceries to airfare.
That “heist,” as Klippenstein referred to it, was the oil industry’s record-high profits that have continued even as Middle East oil exports have since climbed back to pre-Iran war levels, as reported this week by the Financial Times.
“We were told the high prices was just a fact of life since the Strait of Hormuz was closed. It was bull---- then, as I tried to warn months ago,” Klippenstein wrote in an analysis published Thursday on his Substack. “Now it’s even harder to deny.”
As flagged by Klippenstein, the oil industry’s margin on diesel — known as the diesel crack spread — has “exploded” in recent months, climbing from $33 a barrel in February to a record-high $106 in September. Oil executives have openlyboasted about their enormous profits during earnings calls, though they continue to point to the cost of crude oil as justification for elevated fuel costs.
“The industry will say crude is still expensive, and that’s true. Brent hit nearly $112 a barrel Thursday as Iran keeps attacking tankers, and shipping a supertanker from the Gulf to China now costs more than ten times what it did before the war,” Klippenstein wrote.
“But that explains the price of crude. It doesn’t explain why the industry’s cut of every barrel ballooned to record levels, or why companies chose to export fuel while domestic supplies hit record lows.”
In June, Trump accused oil companies of price gouging, going as far as to instruct the Justice Department to investigate companies for not bringing gasoline prices down quickly enough.
“Yet in the same breath he also can’t help bragging about the profits bonanza,” Klippenstein noted.
As recently as Oct. 14, Trump boasted about the high cost of oil, claiming at a rally in Arizona that “our country is making more money than it’s ever made because of the fact that oil is so high.”
“The president, in other words, sees the profit bonanza. He just doesn’t see that it isn’t ‘our country’ benefiting from it,” Klippenstein wrote.
“So why isn’t there an uproar? Because naked profiteering has been dressed up as a ‘national security’ issue… Meanwhile the oil companies hide behind the flag while picking your pocket. When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the oil found a way around it. Now the oil companies are the ones charging tolls.”