Byron Dorgan: “I yield myself 2 minutes. That was about as good a presentation supporting windfall profits as could be made. These…”

“I yield myself 2 minutes. That was about as good a presentation supporting windfall profits as could be made. These charts of an 89-percent increase, the highest profits in the history of corporations, and so on, it is a pretty hard case to make on the floor of the Senate that these profits don't exist or this industry somehow isn't very profitable. My colleague talks about the long run. The problem is you don't heat your home in the long run, you heat your home tonight. And if you are stuck with a 50-percent increase to heat your home tonight, you don't worry about the long run; you have to figure out how you do it now. My constituents and his, when they order a load of fuel to be delivered to their farm and ranch, they are not going to pay for that in the long run; they are going to pay for it now. My point is this: This notion of the marketplace functioning--I would love to have a debate about the marketplace. This is so far from the free marketplace, it is unbelievable. There is no free market here. You have OPEC ministers sitting around a table deciding supply and price. There are the biggest oil companies, much bigger because of mergers, that have more raw muscle in the marketplace, and then there are the futures markets which, instead of providing liquidity, have become grand casinos of speculation. Now we call it the marketplace. Too bad for the consumers.…”