Defending Record Profits
by Bill Shein

FOLLOWING LAST week's news that ExxonMobil, the world's largest publicly traded oil company, earned a remarkable $9.9 billion in the third quarter, there was a predictable outcry across America: How can we tolerate massive energy-company profits at a time when working families are struggling to afford gasoline and heating oil?

My response? Quit complaining. Because before jumping on the "attack the oil companies" bandwagon, it's only fair to ask one simple question: Who among us can honestly say they've never, even once, earned a $9.9 billion profit in just 90 days?

The answer, of course, is "very few of us indeed."

Like ExxonMobil's, my own $9.9 billion windfall arrived just a few weeks ago. Thanks to the skyrocketing wholesale price of newspaper columns, continued high demand, and Congressional approval of new tax breaks and subsidies for the newspaper-column industry, my profit-and-loss statement for the third quarter showed net income of $9.9 billion.

Did I feel guilty, apologize, and give some of the money back? Should I be embarrassed that during wartime, I had to rent a self-storage unit just to warehouse all of my cash?

Of course not. As ExxonMobil was quick to point out last week, many businesses — including newspaper columnizing — are cyclical, and massive profits one year often become slightly less massive profits the next.

Besides, our federal government is clearly on my side. That's why it recently approved legislation that grants billions of dollars to newspaper columnists "to increase production of news-based opinion columns and reduce America's reliance on foreign — possibly French — sources of commentary."

(The column bill also creates a loophole in the Clean Water Act to allow runoff from column-writing sites to flow into rivers and streams.)

Why do newspaper columnists need tax dollars to pay for the research, development, and column production that we're doing anyway? Why are we allowed to skirt important environmental regulations? And, most astonishingly, why do we get special treatment at a time when newspaper columnists like me are enjoying record profits?

I have no idea. But Congress thinks we should. And such an august and democratic body certainly wouldn't put the interests of billionaire newspaper columnists ahead of all Americans, would it?

Sure, cynics like to claim that newspaper columnists only won profit-enhancing subsidies because we spent $314.4 million lobbying Congress, the White House, and federal agencies in 2003 and 2004 — the same amount spent by the energy industry. And also by spreading millions of dollars in campaign contributions around Capitol Hill.

I have a message for the cynics: If you don't like the way the system works, go ahead and start your own little utopian democracy somewhere else, traitors.

Set it up however you like, too. Go ahead and end corporate personhood, so that giant corporations — legally required to make as much money as possible — don't have the same constitutional rights as living, breathing human beings.

Democratically finance your political campaigns with full public financing, which will cost $1.8 billion a year. Where will you find the money for that? In your $419.3 billion 2006 defense budget? Yeah, good luck.

And even choose your president "Afghan style," with a direct popular election, so every voter, in every state, has equal power. Whatever.

Do that, and anything else you want, and see what happens. Because in America today, where the most profitable industries receive special treatment from lawmakers and the president, and 43 percent of the 198 House and Senate members who have left office since 1998 are now registered lobbyists, everything is working just fine.

And I'm not just saying that because I'm a billionaire newspaper columnist. I really mean it.

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Bill Shein is president of the Billionaire Newspaper Columnists Guild of America.

(This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle newspaper on November 2, 2005. Join a discussion about this column in Bill's blog. And read Bill's previous column, "Me and Garrison").