Politics & Power Quote by Maurice Hinchey

“Gouging” is a deliberately prosecutorial verb: it drags oil pricing out of the realm of market fluctuation and into the moral universe of predation. Maurice Hinchey isn’t describing a complicated supply chain; he’s staging a crime scene with a clear victim (“the American citizenry”) and a clear perpetrator (“the oil companies”). The adverbs do the heavy lifting. “Aggressively, relentlessly” turns price hikes into a sustained assault rather than a temporary spike. “Without any sense of conscience whatsoever” isn’t economics at all; it’s character assassination, an attempt to strip the industry of the one defense it often leans on: inevitability.

The intent is political in the most literal sense: to consolidate public anger and direct it toward a target that can be named, regulated, taxed, subpoenaed. Hinchey’s phrasing echoes the populist tradition of railing against concentrated power, but updated for an era when corporate messaging is slick and omnipresent. By invoking conscience, he invites listeners to feel that they’re not simply paying more; they’re being disrespected. That emotional framing matters because it converts personal frustration at the pump into collective grievance, the kind that can justify hearings, anti-price-gouging legislation, windfall-profits taxes, or tougher oversight.

The subtext is also defensive: if government intervention is coming, it needs to be pre-sold as protection, not meddling. “American citizenry” signals that this isn’t about consumers as shoppers but about citizens as people owed basic fairness. It’s rhetoric designed for moments of price shock, when the public is already primed to believe someone, somewhere, is getting rich off their commute.