BLAME OPEC

ohcasey ^ | 01, 30,09

[PRePublic]

BLAME OPEC

1.30.2009

This thought just came to me: "The American People" and the liberal media are so busy blaming Wall Street - not to mention the entire French Nation is currently rioting against the amorphous category of all "banks" - why is no one blaming OPEC?

This summer, gas was at a beyond record level - people were spending nearly 4x as much on gas as they did the year before. Clearly, this is going to cut into consumer spending. When is Obama going to call out Saudi Arabia?

If we did not have a world-wide OIL CARTEL and we paid market prices for gas and oil - Venezuela pays 30 cents a gallon, Iran less - then we wouldn't have had such a pullback in consumer spending. Yes, people are nervous about the "shaky economy" / "the RECESSION" - but average Americans are obviously short sighted. The same people that had on average 8 credit cards with an average interest rate of over 10% I don't think all of a sudden became fiscally conservative - I think they are BROKE from paying for gas the past year, and they cannot get more credit [cards] because of the credit crisis.

I'll have to think about this more, but I'm done with the pandering to the Middle East while they have the biggest monopoly in the world. Christ, MICROSOFT was "sanctioned" and owes the EU hundreds of millions of dollars. How about the EU takes on OPEC? That would show some balls. Oh wait, we're dealing with France, they only interfere once the beast is slayed. Once Israel bombs Iran I bet France will propose sanctions, as Tehran is in flames. Because that's helpful.

[remaxagnt]

blaming opec is the most stupid thing i have ever heard. they put oil out on the free market and we pay what the market dictates. if people want to blame someone blame the democrats who wont let us drill. we tell opec to drill and pump more and we dont drill for anything.

[ohcasey]

No, you are misunderstanding what “Cartel” means. OPEC is an oligopoly. A group that functions as a monopoly does - they fix prices and conspire to keep prices high by artificially manipulating supply. So they do not put oil on the “free market” they introduce price-inflated oil.

In the U.S. we have antitrust laws to prevent monopolies. Under the law at least, apple companies couldn’t just get together and decide to all change how many apples to grow for the purpose of changing prices.

So get your facts straight. More drilling is great too, but since we don’t have access to huge oil fields at the moment, market-priced oil would help the situation. Then again, an increase in supply and corresponding lessening of oil prices would weaken your tunnel-vision argument for drilling, so you wouldn’t want that either.