Word: petroleum
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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COOPERATING ON OIL. During a meeting in Martinique, Ford and French President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing reached an agreement that should end a debilitating, year-long sparring match between Washington and Paris over a vital matter: how to deal with the OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) cartel responsible for the fourfold rise in oil prices that has so shaken the industrial economies. The U.S. has maintained that the consuming countries must form a united front to deal effectively with the OPEC cartel. Unhappy with this implied strategy of confrontation, the French have urged tripartite negotiations...
Since the oil-price spiral began 14 months ago, crude prices in the main producing countries have seemed a convoluted mess to Western eyes. At least three different figures could be cited as the price for a barrel of crude. Last week members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, meeting in Vienna, voted (despite two bomb scares that emptied the hall) to do away with this arcane setup and start on Jan. 1 a new one-price system. For most of OPEC'S members, the move means yet another increase in their sky rocketing oil revenues, but this...
Since the energy crisis and a gargantuan fourfold increase in petroleum prices, however, such chuckles have died away. Instead, there is anger that prices artificially set by the 13 members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries give those nations massive revenues to invest in the West. The new and powerful image of the oil oligarchs has prompted many menacing scenarios, including New York magazine's recent fantasy about a successful military conquest by the Shah of Iran...
...bigger its interest in U.S. businesses, the more the oil nations would be come hostages to that economy and the less anxious they would be to impose another embargo that would damage their own investments. Beyond that, to reinject a note of humor, if any company controlled by petroleum potentates got out of hand, the U.S. could always nationalize...
...world crisis does not derive from the price of petroleum. Inflation in developed countries has grown since 1972 until it is now 16%. If oil prices had remained fixed, inflation would have been around 14%. It has both surprised and worried us considerably that the big countries, and above all the United States, have decided to make oil the whipping boy when the truth is that the world crisis is a direct consequence of the crisis of the consumer society...