6/24/08
One plus One Equals Three
Ron Ault, President,
Metal Trades Department
Energy supply and demand is very fragile. Social unrest in Nigeria or a hurricane in the gulf and oil prices hit a new record…some say that America did this to the entire world. They blame America for the oil crisis and the resultant world wide recession. Yep, they believe it was us that did it. And they say we are still doing it. $4.00 a gallon for gas? Yes, they believe America is the cause of the record prices of gasoline.
How can millions of these folks in the free world believe this to be our fault? Remember Iraq? The way they figure it, if the threat of social unrest in Nigeria or a hurricane in the Gulf can cause the world’s oil prices to rise dramatically, what would you think a war and foreign occupation of one of the world’s largest oil producing countries does to the world’s oil prices? They ask us this question: before the U.S. led Iraq war, how much oil did Iraq and Iran produce each year? How much do they produce today? Why is none of this information reported on the U.S. nightly news? Why aren’t we getting any “hard” news on the economic issues that affect us? We sure hear plenty about 17 year old, unwed Jamie Spears’ having a baby girl on network TV news and the 17 Gloucester high school girls wanting to get pregnant…Our European friends believe and point out that America is being “spoon fed” soft, magazine-style entertainment instead of factual news. No wonder they believe we are out of step with the rest of the world. We are being entertained while the rest of the free world is being informed.
I think all that may be true but other forces are at work, as well…OPEC is NOT our friend. It is an evil empire of nations, oil corporations, and commodity traders all jointly conspiring to artificially inflate and FIX the price of an essential commodity. By doing so OPEC is causing great harm to the rest of the world. Supply and demand has nothing to do with OPEC. OPEC opens or closes the oil supply valves based on the prices they have all agreed that they want us to pay, not on the actual market demand for oil. When you restrict supply, you create demand. Today, OPEC is a far greater threat to world peace than North Korea will ever be. OPEC has declared war on the industrialized nations. OPEC is not fighting this war with guns, tanks or bombs…they are using oil as their weapon. America needs to counter by fighting fire with fire.
If free trade is dead and OPEC style nationalism has taken its place; and if we ever expect this unfair situation to change, the industrial nations need to take action to force change. America and it allies should put OPEC and the rest of the world on notice that we will not go quietly to the slaughter pen while they steal our entire nation’s wealth. We should immediately suspend trading, embargo all food shipments to any OPEC nation and void all contracts of any goods and services to OPEC nations. The industrial nations need to demand the total dismantling of price fixing cartels, including breaking up OPEC, as our conditions for reopening negotiations for resuming normal trading relations. We should begin negotiations and sign treaties with individual oil producing nations on how our food shipments would be resumed and under what conditions we would buy their oil. Commodity traders found to be involved in price fixing should be tried and imprisoned to the fullest extent of the law, including mandatory sentencing guidelines equal to those used against drug kingpins.
America, in close consultation and in full cooperation with our closest allies, needs to immediately go on a wartime footing, and craft the highest national priority program like the WWII “Manhattan Project” to utilize all our nation’s research and development facilities—including universities, our national weapons labs, our U.S. heavy industrial and auto production facilities and private industry. The objective: to quickly develop and begin mass production on alternative energy technology that uses no petroleum, whatsoever, to power all of our energy needs. We need to discover and perfect the clean, greenhouse-gas free technology to fully utilize our vast coal reserves. The OPEC oil war on industrial nations could very well trigger the rebirth of a manufacturing economic boom, the likes of which has never been seen in America. Necessity is the Mother of invention.
I find it incredible that President George W. Bush ignores all of this as IF it does not exist. Bush should be taking his life-long OPEC pals and fellow oil men to task for restricting the supply of oil and maintaining the record high prices. Instead, he tries to shift the blame for record high oil prices to Congressional Democrats for not allowing him to break the offshore drilling law his own father signed into law as president and his brother, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush supported. Even IF we did drill for oil offshore and in Alaska’s ANWR, and IF it were possible to find the highly specialized offshore, deep water drilling ships to do this, it could be ten years before we could get any of the oil that we think might be there. And IF we found as much oil as the oil company experts predict is there, the total amount of that oil would be just about one month’s supply for America.
Is this President Bush’s answer to our $4.00 a gallon gasoline and our economic crisis? Remember when he finally got around to touring New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina…his assessment of how things were going was summed up in his support of then FEMA Director Brown…To paraphrase: “You are doing a hell of a job-Bushie.”
We need a change!
# # #
Metal Trades Department, AFL-CiO • 815 16th Street, NW •Washington, DC 20006
Phone: 202-508-3705 • Fax: 202-508-3706 • email: metaltradesweb@aol.com
