On the heels of the latest bits about how Ticketmaster is now indulging in legal larceny by reselling Radiohead tickets to itself (TicketsNow) and reselling them to you at a hefty margin, here is some more of the same, but this concerns oil:

Exxon shatters profit records
Oil giant makes corporate history by booking $11.7 billion in quarterly profit; earns $1,300 a second in 2007.By David Ellis, CNNMoney.com staff writer
February 1 2008: 2:26 PM EST

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) – Exxon Mobil made history on Friday by reporting the highest quarterly and annual profits ever for a U.S. company, boosted in large part by soaring crude prices. [emphasis mine]

Exxon, the world’s largest publicly traded oil company, said fourth-quarter net income rose 14% to $11.66 billion, or $2.13 per share. The company earned $10.25 billion, or $1.76 per share, in the year-ago period.

The profit topped Exxon’s previous quarterly record of $10.7 billion, set in the fourth quarter of 2005, which also was an all-time high for a U.S. corporation….

Read the rest 

Worse yet, they pumped less oil, but made more money, as this May 1st article from U.S. News details.

Commentary after the jump.

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This is from last December, Wired via ABC. I don’t know how I missed this, since legalized high larceny is something I follow with interest–

Thoughts, opinions, welcome.

Bands Seek Piece of Ticket Scalpers’ Action
Dec. 6, 2007

With CD sales tanking, bands and their managers are looking to squeeze extra cash out of the live-music revenue stream by getting a piece of online ticket scalpers’ profits.

Now Radiohead, The Verve and more than 400 other bands have joined the Resale Rights Society, a new British industry group that wants to levy fees against websites that facilitate so-called secondary sales of tickets. The money would be used to compensate artists, managers, booking agents and promoters.

“It does not make sense to try and criminalize (ticket scalping),” said Marc Margot, former Island Records chief and chairman-elect of the Resale Rights Society, which was announced Tuesday. “On the other hand, there are not only real issues of consumer protection here, (but) it is unacceptable that not a penny of the estimated 200 million pounds in (annual) transactions generated by the resale of concert tickets in the U.K. is returned to the investors in the live-music industry.”

Many fans see ticket scalping as unfair, and in some U.S. states the practice is limited or illegal. But others see sites like Seat Exchange, eBay and StubHub — which let scalpers resell concert tickets at whatever price the market will bear — as a natural part of the music ecosystem. And some fans simply recognize scalpers as the easiest route to getting great seats to sold-out shows.

But just as record labels are going after a portion of concert receipts with their so-called 360 deals, managers and bands are salivating over ticket scalpers’ hefty markups.

Read the rest 

Read about it over at GreatNorthwest.

Addendum: I’ll lead in with the single fact that explains everything I’ve discussed below. MyCityRocks.com is based in Houston, and Texas has no law against larcenous ticket reselling. There was a bill “being discussed” in the Texas legislature way back in 2005, but it was drafted so that “Senate Bill 246 will make ticket scalping illegal for everyone except full-time ticket resell vendors such as Ticket City and Ticket Connection.” So, regardless of whether it became illegal for people to scalp on the streetcorner (I don’t know the answer to that, yet), what MyCityRocks is now doing through their website is perfectly legal and completely despicable. The Texas legislature was primarily concerned about street scalpers not paying taxes, ergo, they just wanted their cut. Fucking slime.

And I’ll put the rest behind the more tag, now, because nobody wants to read it, anyway.

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Hi there!

The gap between corporate grunt salaries and those of corporate CEOs has widened substantially since 1971. This flash diagram graphically illustrates this.

I wouldn’t have so much of a problem with this if so many corporate CEOs weren’t vile fuckheads.

And politicians, who were once corporate CEOS. They’re vile fuckheads, too.

Hostile Takeover

The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times lead with, and the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal front, Microsoft’s unsolicited $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo!, an effort to step up competition with Google for Internet supremacy. Microsoft decided to “go hostile” with its bid after Yahoo! ignored softer overtures in recent weeks.

Read it

Japanese whalers angry over stink bomb

Tokyo - Japanese whalers are angry at the Australian government for failing to detain and hear two activists who boarded a Japanese whaling vessel. An Australian and a British national were held by whalers for two days after they boarded a harpoon ship to deliver a letter protesting the slaughter of whales. The pair were turned over to an Australian patrol boat on Friday, which later returned them to their own vessel, the Sea Shepherd. Canberra says the Japanese government agreed to the return.

Just an hour after the release of the two Sea Shepherd activists, the group threw stink bombs on board the Japanese whaler, the Yushin Maru 2. The founder of Sea Shepherd, Paul Watson, says the stink bombs will prevent work on the ship’s deck for two days. The president of the Japanese company which owns the vessel, Kyodo Senpaku Kaisha, described the throwing of stink bombs as a terrorist and inhumane act. (source)

Pretty amusing parody from a long-missing TV personality.