On 10/08/2015 03:01 PM, Zenaan Harkness wrote:
"The market decides"
The market is, in the instance you used, a microscopic subset of humanity. The 1 percent or typically less who buy armies and guns. OPEC could never have existed without US and UK's naval demand for oil after WWI (because of the higher BTUs available per load than coal) and the strongmen those governments assisted to power to obtain the oil. Read the first chapter of "End of Oil" by Paul Roberts. He manages to give a history of the Middle East from the time the first barrel of oil was shipped from a Saudi oil terminal in the mid 1910s to the invasion of Iraq in a very concise manner. RR Ps. Norway and Venezuela are also members of OPEC, and are standing by to shift the internal balance of the organization entirely to the West if the illiterate "House of Saud" and it's perverted 'princes' are ever driven from power by internal revolt or the nation destabilized to the point where control of OPEC could be wrested away from them. PNAC's peeps would LUV that.