(Post Transferred from my formerly stand-alone blog, Tiffany Takes On.)
Saudi Arabia has pulled its typical "we're friends with you but screw off" nonsense again. After an appeal to Saudi leaders by President Bush to up oil output in order to try to stem increasingly high oil prices, Saudi Arabia replied with a token gesture that raised production by a laughable amount in line with the amount they increase output by every summer. Apparently, they feel there is no greater demand for oil than they're already meeting.
Excuse me? Who passed King Abdullah the crack pipe? Eight years ago, oil, per barrel, cost less than one fourth of what it currently costs. In a conversion to the gas pump, the price per gallon was one-third of what is charged today. According to "economists" referred to in an article on Yahoo, it is demand that explains the tripling of at-the-pump prices and quadrupling of price-per-barrel.
Apparently they shared the same crack pipe. I don't freaking think so. They blame India and China for being gas-hungry. Nice. Now, I know that those two nations are among the fastest growing, population-wise, in the world. Great. Bully for them. But they certainly haven't tripled or quadrupled in size in under a decade. That's garbage, plain and simple.
When will someone with a powerful voice finally stand up and say what the real issue is, here. It's not demand. It's not the cost of pumping or refining or shipping or King Abdullah's newest robe. It's the fact that a very small group of people in this world control one of its most valuable resources.
OPEC, or the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, is made up of 13 nations that have and export a lot of oil. We're not a member. Saudi Arabia is. So are Algeria, Angola, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Quatar, the UAE and Venezuela.
Look at that list, folks. Look at the countries - and carefully. Do they look like stable places to you? That'd be a big fat no. By and large, they are run by ruthless dictatorships or regimes that just can't wait to get their hands on more money from the export of oil so that they can fund programs indigenous to their countries.
Like terrorists. As in the 9/11 terrorists that struck viciously at our country and our way of life just a few short years ago. Right around the same time gas prices started going up, in fact. Ironic, eh? Hey, anyone remember where many of those terrorists came from and were trained?
Oh, yeah. Saudi Arabia. Let's call OPEC what it is; it's not an organization that protects the wellbeing of countries and prevents the exploitations of their natural resources. Bunk. It's a cartel, plain and simple, and it has been terrorizing the civilized world for far too many years.
Half of those countries are freaking lucky that we never bombed them back into the stone age when we've had various opportunities to do so. And we're repaid by the continued gauging of oil prices. OPEC has constantly and consistently screwed with output levels to up the price per barrel for oil. Unchecked by the so-called powerful and civilized nations of this world, like, namely, the UNITED STATES!
It's time we stop standing back and bowing down to these gangsters. We need to take a stance - and a good and firm one at that - that shows who really has the power in this world. Our country needs to elect leaders later in 2008 that actually have the cojones to chart a course for this nation to regain economic prosperity.
And I'm not letting American-based oil companies off the hook here, either. As OPEC has found more money to fill its coffers, so has Exxon-Mobil, Shell, and many others. Believe it or not, big oil magnates: you don't need to show profits in the billions of dollars to prove your business smarts. But you do need to show the American people that you're more than just moneygrubbers, riding on the tailcoats of foreign gangsters who want nothing more than to stick it to our people and our nation. Cut your profit margins - I dare ya! - and I dare say we will all reap the benefits.
Read more here: Saudis see no reason to raise oil production now and Wikipedia - OPEC.
(No Comments Transferred; original posting date 05/16/08, 3:52 PM.)
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