In the face of skyrocketing fuel prices, the Prime minister continues to feign action. Now he’s accusing retailers of not playing ball. It’s not exactly a violent attack – Lecornu says he asked his ministers to “objectively (!) assess once and for all what has happened to retailer margins”.
Who’s he kidding? How long does it take them to be “objective”? Everyone who goes to a gas station can see what’s happened: when world fuel prices increase, the increase is immediately passed on to the consumer but, when they go down, the price at the pump takes a long time to follow suit.
Nobody will be surprised to learn that fuel retailers have profited from the hike in price of a barrel of oil to increase their margins, sometimes as much as 30%.
The government may be preparing to implement its decree on limiting retailer margins. If that happens, it’ll be a lot of fuss over nothing much because it won’t stop fuel prices from rising if oil prices continue to climb. In the meantime, no one’s talking about the other profiteers who are lining their pockets at our expense on a far greater scale.
The biggest profiteers are protected
Since the start of the war in Iran, oil companies’ profit margins have quadrupled. Their stock -market value has gone through the roof. TotalEnergies made a billion-dollar speculative profit. The government has taken no action against them. And it’s the same for fertilizers, currently selling with a 30% mark-up. And no one’s pointing a finger at those profiteers either.
And then there are the financiers who are never the last to help themselves. They want another billion euros for the reimbursement of the French debt because interest rates have gone up. But it’s not an increase that came out of nowhere, it’s imposed by banks and investment funds who are making the most of the situation to extort more money from the state and, in reality, the population. And the government just obeys and plans to review the budget in order to make savings of another 6 billion euros!
The government isn’t fighting against the crisis and war profiteers, it’s giving them more, starting with those in the armaments industry. MBDA’s sale price to the French state for just one Mica missile is 600,000 euros, an hour’s Rafale flight is 20,000 euros.
The total additional cost alone resulting from military operations in the Gulf is 200 million euros per month. That money will go into the coffers of Thales, Dassault, Safran, Naval Group…and those of their shareholders, who are delighted to see the war continue.
The gentlemen of the bourgeoisie don’t go to war. They sell it. And we pay for it.
We are not yet paying the price in tens of thousands of deaths as is the case in Ukraine and the Middle East. But we’re already footing the bill, which is going to get bigger since the government has planned to increase the military programming law by 36 billion euros by the year 2030.
We have to refuse to be victims of their system, their crises and their wars!
Macron dared to assert that “we are all in the same boat”. Unbelievable! Capitalists are making profits and getting richer and the working class is paying for it!
We’re paying a fortune at the pump. We’re paying inflation that is eating away at our wages that were already insufficient. We’re paying because the capitalists are boosting their profits by cutting jobs and closing down plants. We’re also paying because the government, using the crisis as an excuse, is spending less to meet the needs of the population.
We have to stop accepting this. We have to oppose the big bourgeoisie and the shareholders who run multinational corporations. They’re vultures, war profiteers and speculators making profits from the world’s misfortune.
Workers need to get ready to do what no government is willing to do: make the financial records of multinationals and those of their holding companies public so that where the money goes is really transparent. We must take away the capitalists’ war profits, stop them from cutting into our purchasing power and depriving thousands of workers from earning a living.
Nathalie Arthaud