Political Quotes

“We certainly, as you know, passed a number of pieces of legislation which have attempted to look at a number of different issues. One, of course, was the manipulation by the OPEC nations to artificially inflate prices. The other thing we have looked at is price gouging at the pump. We passed that. The other item we looked at, of course, was the energy bill itself. And the other was we asked the FTC to look at manipulation. We wrote to the FTC about 3 weeks ago. The FTC gave attention to our letter and is now exercising, as I understand, its jurisdiction under the legislation that we passed to look at prices. In addition, we have numerous hearings scheduled. We've had some this week, next week, and the week after looking at various different aspects of this. Clearly, our consuming public, whether they be commercial, which are probably having the most critical problem because that's their livelihood, as well as those of us who are not driving for commercial sake but for important sake, to get to school, to get to work, to get to hospitals, to do all those things, we are very cognizant, as I know all of us are, of the strain that is being put on the consumers of our country. Not only are they seeing an economic downturn, but at the same time that they are having reduced capacity to purchase things critical to them, gasoline and home heating oil are going up almost every week 5 to 10 cents. And so we are addressing that.”