Price of gas gone up 34 cents a gallon in the last 13 days ...

and does anyone in the corporate media minions bother with the story?

(h/t to ThinkProgress)

Why am I not surprised that this another thing whose fucked up situation can be traced back to Wall Street greed?

From the Nation article (emphasis mine) -

Commodities markets involve essentially two kinds of participants: there are so-called “end users” like farmers and airlines that use commodities markets as a form of insurance against future price fluctuations, and then there are speculators—hedge funds, investors, big banks that try to make money by correctly betting on those same price fluctuations. The presence of these speculators isn’t in and of itself a bad thing; in fact, they bring liquidity that should, in theory, make the market more efficient. According to an analysis by the House Energy Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in 2000, physical hedgers, trucking companies, farmers, bakers, made up 63 percent of the crude oil futures markets, with speculators accounting for the rest. By 2008, those proportions had basically flipped.

Of course, the Wall Street banks say there’s nothing to see here, but that’s hard to believe. It’s almost impossible to make sense of 2008’s massive commodity price spike without concluding that the speculators played an outsized role. When enough money floods into a booming market, Greenberger says it can “unmoor” the prices of commodities from their underlying supply-and-demand fundamentals. The basic mechanism by which this might happen should be familiar; it’s the same principle that drove the housing market bubble or the tech stock boom. When a bunch of people think the price of a stock is going to go up, they rush to buy it so they can realize the imminent gains. Of course, a surge of demand itself pushes the price up and the price cycles upwards until it pops. The difference being, no one puts Pets.com in their cars, trucks and airplanes.

Any hope? Don't hold your breath -

One way to attempt to constrain these volatile mini-bubbles is for the Commodities Futures Trading Commission to impose “position limits,” essentially limits on the size of the bets that speculators can make. The New Deal–era Commodities Exchange Act gives the CFTC power to curb “excessive speculation,” and the just-passed Dodd-Frank bill explicitly calls for the CFTC to promulgate position limits.
Not surprisingly, the big Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs don’t want this ...

It's really sad how good ideas often get trumped. Never underestimate the awesome power of greed and stupidity.