The Blue Beacon

For the past year, $20 has been usually far insufficient to cover a round-trip to Davis (203 miles), but for the past couple of days I found that it was actually just about enough, thanks to the gas price that made a spectacular drop.

It has long been known in South Korea that, before a presidential election, the incumbent party would do everything to ease the everyday life, by trying to bring down whatever cost that impacts the quality of life within the party’s control.  Tax, fuel, electricity, phone and other monthly bills were all affected this way, especially up until late 80s when the government exercised undue control over the market.  Electricity cost, for example, showed a sudden and clear drop in November and December 1987, when the incumbent Democratic Justice Party (DJP) party nearly lost the election after the June Struggle of 1987.

For this reason, it is a strong deja vu to me that the gas price is making a steep plunge these days for this reason.  Now that the GOP is on the verge of losing its decade-old regime, it has to put all available sociopolitical and economical resource to use to rescue itself, and it just so happens that the current Bush administration would exercise much influence, if not a downright control, over the oil industry after sponsoring a war in partial order to secure a new supply of oil.

This is not to say the gas price drop can be explained solely in this way; in fact the mainstream “analysis” suggests reasons like the hurricane season being over for this year.  However, knowing how reluctant gas companies have been in actually lowering gas price to reflect positive market factors, I strongly believe there is more reason behind this price drop than what is attributed in the “official version” of the story.

(A conspiracy theorist inside me even wants to think that the gas price hike for the past couple of months was actually staged for the dramatic effect of the price cut, but that interpretation would be far too stretched.  :-p)