Faith-Based Fill-Ups

AFP:

At a Shell gas station in Washington, Rocky Twyman and an unusual group of activists were mad as hell about soaring fuel prices. "Last week, this station was 3.51 dollars. Now it's practically 3.60. So it's gone up nine cents in one week," Twyman said as he pumped five dollars' worth of gas into his thirsty American car. "Someone's making a lot of money and it's really, really wrong," added Twyman, who founded the Prayer at the Pump movement last week to seek help from a higher power to bring down fuel prices, because the powers in Washington haven't. The half-dozen activists -- Twyman, a former Miss Washington DC, the owner of a small construction company and two volunteers at a local soup kitchen -- joined hands, bowed their heads and intoned a heartfelt prayer. "Lord, come down in a mighty way and strengthen us so that we can bring down these high gas prices," Twyman said to a chorus of "amens". "Prayer is the answer to every problem in life... We call on God to intervene in the lives of the selfish, greedy people who are keeping these prices high," Twyman said on the gas station forecourt in a neighborhood of Washington that, like many of its residents, has seen better days. "Lord, the prices at this pump have gone up since last week. We know that you are able, that you have all the power in the world," he prayed, before former beauty queen Rashida Jolley led the group in a modified version of the spiritual, "We Shall Overcome". "We'll have lower gas prices, we'll have lower gas prices..." they sang. At the weekend, Twyman had led a group of around 200 people in prayer at pumps in San Francisco, where gas is touching the four-dollars-a-gallon mark. ... Americans have turned to prayer because the earthly powers-that-be don't seem to give a hoot, said Judy Dugan, a research director at Consumer Watchdog, a non-profit group based in California. She described Prayer at the Pump as "the ultimate Hail Mary." "It's what you do when you feel you have no one on your side, and they certainly don't have the US government on their side on this," Dugan said. At the Shell station, Twyman had dire words of warning for those who are raking in profits from high gas prices. "Woe be unto those people that are really greedy and taking advantage of American families," he proclaimed from his pump pulpit. "These prices will come down, just like the walls of Jericho came down in the Bible," he said, as another chorus of amens punctuated the sound of cash flowing out of the gas pumps.

A nation in debt, foreclosed on, and armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons gets Biblical at the pump. Meanwhile, as I predicted at the top of this post a month ago, the Federal Reserve has just expanded the scope of what was already the largest monetary stimulus in the history of financial markets.

If you feel like someone's watching you, it's probably the rest of the world's wary eyes.