Democracy? Riiiight.

Apparently this article is being tracked down and disposed of. It comes from my hometown ABC news. Here you are:

Mar. 10 (ABC7) — We're all watching gas prices climb towards three dollars a gallon and most of us are not happy about it. But in San Francisco there's a group that is very pleased to see oil prices at $50 dollars a barrel. ABC7's Mark Matthews covered that group's meeting today.

Today and tomorrow, oil refiners are attending a conference in San Francisco. You never saw so many people so happy about rising oil prices. This has been a very good year for the refining industry and they don't expect it to change anytime soon.

The lunch time speaker at the World Refining & Fuels Conference was the president of Connecticut-based Premcor Refining - the country's biggest independent.

Hank Kuchta, Premcor: "The refining industry obviously had a great year in 2004."

Premcor's president told the audience his companies stock is up 50 percent, and he credited high oil prices and the fact that demand is up and supply is tight.

Kuchta: "We're finally in a situation where we don't have a lot of extra supply."

Usually you don't get oil refinery chiefs to be this forthcoming. Ordinarily we don't hear from the oil refinery chief at all. But at the conference, the head of Premcor felt comfortable enough to encourage his colleagues to keep supply tight.

Kuchta: "If it stays tight, we're all geniuses right?"

Premcor, he says, won't be over-producing.

Kuchta: "We are going to meet the demand that exists and not some theoretical demand."

And demand is expected to rise dramatically. Korea's biggest refiner says China is going to take care of that with a double digit jump in oil consumption this year.

Dong-Hyong Sheen, SK Corporation: "More than 30 percent oil consumption is predicted. Yeah, that's a huge amount."

It's not a pretty picture for U.S. consumers. The refiners are talking about linking with oil producers to make sure demand and supply stay tight.

Kuchta: "The moral of the story is we have a few good years before we shoot ourselves in the foot."

The president of Premcor did tell his colleagues that the only way they could screw up is if they didn't invest in clean technology and if they didn't take the concerns of the environmental community very, very seriously.

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I find it very upsetting that this segment was on, without a transcript (because it is important), that someone had to write in to force a transcript on (my mother was the one that did) and now it's being forced from public eyes by Premcor. Yet, people say this sort of thing couldn't happen in a democracy. I've got news for you -- those who do not vote, those who make a conscious choice to be ignorant, they help to perpetuate this kind of activity. Living in ignorance is not participating in democracy. Keeping people ignorant is not promoting a democracy.