The oil companies are rolling in profits and with all the oil friendly speculators running up the prices, this next quarters profits are going to be obscene. Yet the american consumer will sit back and take it just like the airline employees have done. When smokers were told cigarettes were going to cost a $1 a pack, they said they'd quit................and now they're selling them as high as $7.50 a pack in NYC, and they're still smoking. We have hundreds, if not thousands of capped wells in the Gulf of Mexico that are waiting to be used. The oil company's say it is too expensive to uncap them (they were saying the same thing when oil was $20 a bbl back in the early 90's when I flew for Petroleum Helicopters out in the Gulf) and they WON'T uncap these wells till prices go a lot higher. Funny how we can have oil shipped 10,000 miles and it is STILL cheaper than oil 2 miles off our coast!!) I think the government has to be sitting back and laughing their collective @sses off as we sit in lines 40 airplanes deep and burn Jet A for hours on end with no result other than moving 50 feet every few minutes. I've been observing our fuelburns on the B737 and it's running around 800 lbs of fuel just to get to the runway for takeoff and that's with one engine/APU running. Pretty pathetic considering I've gotten out fairly quickly lately (20-30 minute taxi). Fuel costs are killing the airlines, and showering the oil companies with ungodly profits. The problem is that we have spineless leaders who think this is all OUR fault, meanwhile they continue to let more carriers enter the airspace in the northeastern USA and then blame US for the backlog and congestion. Go figure.................