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As long a political history as she boasts, along with her strong political connections, it is doubtful that Phyllis Schlafly is unaware of the shenanigans of the Bush family. A pot calling a kettle black? [The bold emphasis is ours.]
Phyllis Schlafly column July 5, 2000
http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2000/july00/00-07-05.shtml
The biggest issue on the highways and byways of America is the high price
of gasoline at the pump, in some areas higher than $2 per gallon. Who's
to blame? Is it a presidential campaign issue?
Al Gore, struggling to pull himself up from bad polls numbers,
is trying to blame George W. Bush because (a) he's
from Texas, (b) he once ran an oil exploration company, and (c) he
has received some (perfectly legal) contributions from oil
companies. Gore's charges simply don't stand up.
If we want to play that game, Gore is the vulnerable
one. He and his late father received much money and many financial
favors from Occidental Petroleum
and its founder Armand
Hammer, a notorious friend of the bosses of the former Soviet Union,
and Gore still controls $500,000 in Occidental stock.
Gore may even be happy about the rising gas prices. He made clear in
his book
"Earth in the Balance" that he wants to rid the world of
the internal combustion engine.
The real place to levy the blame is OPEC, the 11-country oil cartel (plus
Mexico) that conspired to raise the price of oil. OPEC is a criminal
price-fixing conspiracy and, if its members were reachable by U.S.
law, its sheiks would be in jail.
OPEC is not selling us oil at free market prices. It has monopolized
the oil market by engaging in illegal practices that are exactly designed
to kill off the competition.
However, OPEC is part of the global economy that we've been told is the wave
of the future. OPEC is part of Clinton's plan to "integrate our economy"
with other nations and to seek interdependence with other countries in the
new global market, and that includes being dependent on foreign oil.
Clinton just failed to advise us of the price of his plan.
There isn't any shortage of oil in the Middle East. The OPEC rulers
don't even need to drill any more wells. All they need to do is turn
the spigots to increase or decrease the flow of oil, which is exactly what
they've been doing.
In 1997 they opened the faucets wide to increase the flow of oil and drive
oil prices down to historic lows. That had exactly the effect they
planned: it discouraged U.S. investors and drillers from exploration,
U.S. production was cut back and 30,000 Americans lost their jobs.
Now, in 2000, OPEC turned the faucets down in order to decrease the flow
of oil and drive up the price. So Americans, whose domestic production
has been curtailed, are paying extra tribute to the OPEC sheiks to the tune
of tens of billions of dollars a year.
Some politicians, at both the congressional and state levels, are toying
with the idea of cutting or suspending some of the taxes on gasoline.
That would affect only a small part of the big gasoline price increase and,
anyway, why let a criminal cartel stop us from repairing our roads?
These countries owe us. Don't you remember? We went to war in
1991 to save Kuwait from being taken over by Saddam Hussein. U.S.
ships and planes are defending Saudi Arabia today.
In 1994 the U.S. taxpayers bailed out Mexico with $50 billion.
Then, we organized a $40 billion bailout of Indonesia. Most of these
countries are still getting handouts from our foreign aid program and from
those alphabet-soup global lending rackets.
"Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend," spoke the Bard. And George
Washington warned us, "There can be no greater error than to expect or calculate
upon real favors from nation to nation. It is an illusion which experience
must cure, which a just pride ought to discard."
But maybe there is more behind this story than just greed and ingratitude.
In looking into the causes of the oil price increase, Congress should start
by investigating what could turn out to be the biggest scandal of the
scandal-ridden Clinton Administration.
This is the published news report that OPEC oil ministers quietly told national
security advisors on Capitol Hill that the oil production cutbacks, which
is the cause of the price increases, were made at the request of the Clinton
Administration. How's that again?
Can it really be true that the Clinton Administration asked OPEC to institute
cutbacks in order to raise the price of oil? What could possibly be
the motive of such duplicity? The wealthy OPEC sheiks don't need additional
money, but the increase in the price of oil on the world market immensely
benefits debtor nations such as Russia, Mexico and Indonesia. They
are now able to start paying back some of their overdue loans to important
Western bankers. The American people have gotten very tired of taxpayer bailouts
of corrupt foreign regimes that enable powerful U.S. investment bankers
to collect on their foolish foreign loans. Raising the price of oil
that we pay to foreign producers is a devilishly clever scheme to give the
big fellas another subsidy from the U.S. taxpayers.
Also see:
Clinton approves oil-price hikes by Charles
Smith
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_smith_news/20000509_xnsof_clinton_ap.shtml
Explaining high gas prices by Dr. Walter E.
Williams
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/bluesky_williams/20000705_xcwwi_explaining.shtml
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