{"id":1904,"date":"2012-05-02T07:10:49","date_gmt":"2012-05-02T11:10:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/?p=1904"},"modified":"2012-05-02T07:10:49","modified_gmt":"2012-05-02T11:10:49","slug":"big-oils-mighty-first-quarter-profits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/2012\/05\/big-oils-mighty-first-quarter-profits\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Oil\u2019s Mighty First-Quarter Profits"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Together the big five oil companies\u2014BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell\u2014earned a combined $33.5 billion, or $368 million per day, during the first quarter of 2012. Recall that these companies made a combined record profit of $137 billion in 2011, mostly due to high oil and gasoline prices. Their ongoing huge earnings mean that these companies do not need $24 billion for a decade&#8217;s worth of tax breaks, particularly since the three American companies pay relatively low effective federal tax rates.<\/p>\n<p>Profits for Chevron continued to grow during the first quarter of 2012 compared to this time last year, while they fell slightly for Shell and ConocoPhillips. ExxonMobil and BP saw a decline in first-quarter profits mainly due to reduced oil production (both) and very low natural gas prices (Exxon).<\/p>\n<p>Cumulatively, profits were 7 percent lower than the first quarter of 2011. And more than one-quarter of these profits were used to repurchase companies\u2019 stock. Meanwhile, CEO compensation grew by a whopping average of 55 percent.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanprogress.org\/issues\/2012\/05\/big_oil_kaching.html\"><img src='http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/kaching_chart.png' alt='' \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">\n<p><strong>SOURCE:\u00a0<\/strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanprogress.org\/issues\/2012\/05\/big_oil_kaching.html\">Ka-Ching: Big Oil\u2019s Mighty First-Quarter Profits<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Together the big five oil companies\u2014BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell\u2014earned a combined $33.5 billion, or $368 million per day, during the first quarter of 2012. Recall that these companies made a combined record profit of $137 billion in 2011, mostly due to high oil and gasoline prices. Their ongoing huge earnings mean that these&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16,111,22],"tags":[1157,1158,532,533],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1904"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1910,"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1904\/revisions\/1910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/therationalprogressive.com\/cms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}