By David Van Os - Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Mainstream journalists are beginning to notice that $3 per gallon gasoline now looks routine and that it won't be too long before we routinely see $4 a gallon.

Hmmm. Which candidate for Texas Attorney General said a year and a half ago that the 2006 escalation in gasoline prices was not a temporary up-tick and that the price at the pump would keep going up?

For approximately 20 years, from the late 1970s to the late 1990s, gasoline prices were relatively stable.

But in the late 1990s, the biggest of the giant Big Oil companies began to merge and create even more gigantic companies in a series of mind-staggering mergers. Exxon and Mobil; Shell and Texaco; etc. The continual escalation in gasoline prices of the past 9-10 years began with the beginning of the Gigantic Oil mergers and corresponds with the series of mega-mergers that took place over a few years' time.

These mergers naturally decreased competition. That was their purpose. When competition decreases, robber baron monopoly power increases, and unless there is government price regulation, prices go up. It is a rule of economic power as old as time. Instead of a free market, we end up with a monopoly market and a robber baron economy. It wasn't an accident that we ended up here. It is the very reason for the mergers.

Today, under the Clintonite-Bushite economy (sorry folks, some may find it hard to admit, but Big Bill opened the floodgates to the runaway monopoly economy), our government institutions protect monopolies from the people instead of protecting the people from monopolies.

As long as our public institutions continue to protect the monopolization that is at the root of the robber baron economy, there will be no end in sight for we the people from ever-worsening Giganto-Oil price squeezes - not to mention from the similar depredations of the Big Insurance, Big Health Care, Big Pharmaceutical, Big Toll Road, Big Banking, and other Big Robber Barons. And as long as we the people stand back and fail to take control of our public institutions, then those institutions will continue to protect the robber baron economy.

Isn't it time we get serious about taking control?

David Van Os

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Through 31 years of law practice, David Van Os has concentrated his priorities in the defense of Constitutional rights and liberties through the courts, the protection of working people through labor law and union contracts, and the promotion of human rights.

He has been listed in the prestigious reference book Best Lawyers in America by peer review for over 20 consecutive years. In 2005 the Backbone Campaign honored David with its Spine Award.

David is considered a co-founder in 2002 of the Texas Democratic Progressive Populist Caucus, and continues as an ex officio member of the steering committee. In 2007 he was named chairman of the board of the Inter-American Education Consortium and its hallmark project, the Liberty and Democracy Alliance.

For more information contact Rachel Barrios-Van Os 210-332-7080 or visit http://vanosfortexasag.com.