A Big Oil conspiracy that cost American families thousands of dollars

Federal authorities just exposed an American oil executive, Scott Sheffield, for colluding with our enemies overseas to steal from the American people — and it likely cost you and your family thousands of dollars.

The FTC uncovered hundreds of messages showing Sheffield conspiring with OPEC to artificially inflate gas prices. 

You know OPEC — the Saudi-led Big Oil cartel made up of dictators and state sponsors of terror who generally all hate America.

Sheffield’s price-fixing scheme stole hundreds of billions of dollars from everyday Americans, potentially costing the average American consumer $2,100 EXTRA DOLLARS at the pump during the height of the inflation crisis. 

The conspiracy accounted for 27% of all inflation in 2021 alone.

In the Marines, if one of us got caught colluding with our enemies to harm the American people, we’d be thrown in jail. We’d lose every dime we stole. And we could even be charged with treason.

It shouldn’t be any different for an American oil tycoon. But I’m sure it won’t surprise you to learn, it is.

Sheffield heads a powerful oil family that’s given huge sums of money to politicians in both parties. 

So, instead of getting sent to a jail cell like any of us, his fallout was collecting millions of dollars from Exxon in a golden parachute payout on the way out the door.

If our politicians want to prove their loyalty to the American people, you’ll see headlines about them returning their donations from the Sheffield family. 

But the betrayal, the corruption, the lack of coverage — none of that is the worst part of this story.

It’s that our politicians let it happen. And they’ve been letting it happen for decades.

Tens of trillions of dollars. The lives of thousands of American soldiers. Decades of war and nation-building abroad. Endless subsidies and tax breaks. That’s what our politicians have been willing to spend on behalf of Big Oil.

But while American oil executives and the Saudi Royal Family have continued to rake in record-breaking profits year after year, the American people have gotten nothing in return but higher gas prices and broken campaign promises from every president this century. 

American oil companies and OPEC have our country on its knees — and it should be clear by now that even with more aggressive action by the FTC or the DoJ, we can’t trust any president, from either party, to fix this.

We need Congress to act. We need rules that recognize the international oil industry is not a free market, but rather a cartel of foreign adversaries and multinational corporations who will never have an interest in providing products and services to the American people at a fair price. And we need new laws that compel American energy companies to finally put Americans first.

Here’s a plan that can start to make that happen.

1. We outlaw communication between American oil executives and OPEC, as well as any agent of a foreign oil company. Nothing good can ever come of them getting together.

2. We ban exports of American oil. Sheffield himself led the lobbying campaign that got President Obama to sign off on ending America’s 40-year ban on exporting our own oil. It’s made America less safe. And it’s let American oil tycoons like Sheffield jack up prices alongside OPEC’s price fixing. 

3. We ban any and all participation in politics by oil companies and the people who run them. No lobbying. No campaign contributions. No PACs. Sheffield’s price-fixing scheme with OPEC has proven that “American” oil companies are part of an international cartel that operates against the interests of the American people. Foreign interests should have no role in our politics or our elections.

4. We need to empower the FTC and DoJ to more forcefully investigate Big Oil price-fixing. And when wrong-doing by an oil company or its leaders is proven, regulators should be enabled to enforce a corporate restructuring that transitions the company to a new kind of for-profit corporate entity, modeled after benefit corporations, that would require the company to provide American consumers the lowest possible price for energy without excessive profit. And they’d be further obligated to pay taxpayers back every public dollar they’ve received in the past. 

This country has given no other industry more of its blood, sweat, and treasure than it has to these oil tycoons. It’s time they paid us back instead of knifing us in the back. So we can invest in an energy future that’s led by American workers, not criminals and foreign dictators.

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