Word: blaire
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dressed in his carefully tailored corduroys, Canada's Pierre Elliott Trudeau moved with an athlete's swift stride to the luncheon table at Blair House during the final hours of his courtesy call on Neighbor Jimmy Carter...
...graceful dining room of Blair House, Trudeau pondered the lessons from Thucydides and Macaulay, that all countries must finally change. Just then his young wife Margaret entered the room, fresh and smiling from a walk in the sunlight. With her at his side and with Friend Jimmy Carter's exhortations ringing in his ears, Pierre Elliott Trudeau headed back into the fray...
From the very beginnings of the international oil trade in the 1920s, Blair discovered a pattern of price fixing and cozy marketing arrangements by which the big companies divided up the world for their own gain and tried to ruin any small independent firm that sought to cut prices or intrude on their turf. No other industry, Blair implied, so depended on bribes and payoffs...
When OPEC abruptly tripled oil prices in the wake of the 1973 October War, the big multinational oil firms meekly surrendered. Blair makes the much-disputed assertion that the companies could have employed their own control over marketing, transportation and refining to try to break the price. Instead, he says, the oil giants raised their own prices to even higher levels. In chart after chart in his book, he cites the sudden surge in the Seven Sisters' profits. Blair also charges that the big companies actually helped prop up the OPEC price by cutting back on production at times...
...Blair proposes a tough remedy. At present, the big companies control each stage of the petroleum process: pumping, transport, refining, marketing. Blair would break them up into companies specializing in only one phase of the petroleum process. Ideally, each company would then haggle over price each time the oil changed hands and would thus unleash free-market forces that would push prices down...