While catching a break from my backyard chores today, I caught a TV glimpse of Bernie Sanders (I), Senator from Vermont, excoriating the Saudis for capping the production of oil from their fields in the Middle East. The man from Vermont has a point.
Sanders wants the U.S. Senate to prevent a pending arms deal with Saudi Arabia from going through, until the desert monarchy decides to pump significantly more oil in order to throttle down the speculative activity in this commodity. I think Sanders is onto something fundamental.
Yesterday, the price for crude oil futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) was $118.30 per barrel. A year ago, on April 02, 2007, it was just above $65 a barrel. The year before that, it was significantly lower. The issue is complex, and there are many reasons why oil prices are skyrocketing. But Sanders has hit on a point which I have advocated for many years: Break up the OPEC oil cartel.
If any consortium of U.S. producers were to conspire to control the output and, thereby, the price of a basic commodity by meeting regularly to set production targets (as OPEC does), the whole lot of them would be set upon by the U.S. Justice Department like a Peregrine falcon hurtling from the sky toward its prey.
Somehow, our erstwhile friends from the Middle East (15 of the 19 terrorists who attacked America on 9/11 were Saudi citizens) continue to demand more U.S. oil dollars, blithely ungrateful that U.S. forces saved their collective rear ends in the first Gulf War.
They seem to have an institutionally short memory of the time when New Jersey native, General Norman Schwarzkopf, led a U.S. expeditionary force which prevented Saddam Hussein from annexing Kuwait and from threatening the security of Saudi Arabia.
Good friends remember. They return favors. Just how good are the Saudis as friends of America?
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