The populist Clinton promises to take on OPEC
Posted by: McQ
Great populist rhetoric, but I'd love to know how she plans to "go right at OPEC".
"We're going to go right at OPEC," she said. "They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they're going to produce and what price they're going to put it at," she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.
"That's not a market. That's a monopoly," she said, saying she'd use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.
She claims she'd use our "anti-trust law", but I don't see that as having any effect on a cartel who would not find any difficulty selling its product elsewhere if we decide to make it difficult to sell it here. And, frankly, it shows a pretty significant ignorance (or she assumes a level of ignorance by voters) of how world markets work - cartel or no cartel.
Secondly, I'm not sure what the WTO can do to a cartel which essentially has functioned under its "watchful eye" for decades. Again, the cartel has all the cards and the WTO, when it gets down to brass tacks, has no real power.
But it certainly is fun stuff to spout when you really don't have any idea of how to have actually have an effect on gasoline prices (well except the obvious - drill, drill, drill, exploit, expolit, exploit) and your sole "plan" is to sell the vapor-ware of 'alternative fuels' and "windfall profits taxes" which will drive the price of gas even higher.
