Bob Filner: “I rise today, and I know the Speaker is well knowledgeable about this, to speak about the sudden and outrageous…”

“I rise today, and I know the Speaker is well knowledgeable about this, to speak about the sudden and outrageous increases in prices of gasoline that consumers in California and across the Nation have had to face. As you know, gasoline prices in California have gone up 40, 50, 60 cents a gallon. They threaten to go even further, and there seems to be no market reason why this has occurred. There is no emergency, there is no situation that would seem to have caused this drastic escalation in prices. Consumers are outraged, I am outraged. My colleagues from California and I have joined together to ask for an investigation of this situation by the Attorney General to see whether any monopoly or other practices have been involved. At the same time that these increases have occurred, the major oil companies have reported 40-, 50-, 60-percent increases in their profits from the previous year. So it is clear that this rise in price in gasoline is tied directly to the rise in profits of our major oil companies. Now, the Speaker of the House visited California over the weekend and announced that he would ask the Congress to repeal the recently added gasoline tax of 4 cents or so a gallon. I welcome the Speaker's attention to the problems of consumers in California, but I think he has deliberately taken our eye off the ball to focus on an extraneous issue.”