Someone grab Sen. Dick Durbin and force him to read this:

The biggest factor in the skyrocketing price of gasoline is the historic ascent of crude oil, which has surged from $45 per barrel in 2004 to more than $135 this past week. Gasoline in Phoenix averaged $3.69 a gallon Friday, and AAA Arizona experts predict that instead of falling like normal after the holiday weekend, prices will continue to rise across the state.

In the first quarter of this year, based on a retail price of gasoline that now seems like a steal, $3.11 a gallon, crude oil accounted for all but about a dollar, or 70 percent, of the cost, according to the federal government.

The rest is a complex mix of factors, from the cost of turning oil into gasoline to taxes to marketing costs to, sometimes, nothing more than the competitive whims of local station owners.

The price of oil

The knee-jerk villains in all this are the oil companies, fat with multibillion-dollar profits, frequent targets of populist anger. But wait: The oil companies don’t set the price of oil or the cost of a gallon of gasoline.

Anger such as this from Durbin on Wednesday, when he worked himself into a self-righteous voice and demanded from oil execs:

“Does it trouble any of you when you see what you are doing to us, the profits that you are taking, the costs that you are imposing on working families, small businesses, truckers, farmers?”

Enough Durbin, back to reality.

Prices are a function of the open market, the result of futures contracts being traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange, or Nymex, and other exchanges around the world.

Buying the current July crude-oil futures contract means you’re buying oil that will be delivered by the end of July. Most investors who trade futures have no intention of ever accepting the underlying oil. Like stock investors who frequently buy and sell their holdings, they’re simply betting that prices will rise or fall.

Of late, on the Nymex, oil futures have been rising.

Oil is a free market, unlike say, food. Senator Durbin and a bi-partisan gang, saw to it that Americans will pay a high price for food, regardless of what happens on the open market.

It would be great if a family could subpoena Durbin to appear on their door step, where they could demand:

“Senator, does it trouble you when you see what you are doing to us, the costs that you are imposing on working families because you sold your integrity to agribusiness?”