Hey George: How's That Plan to Lower Gas Prices by Sucking Up to Oil Producers Working?

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 10:22 AM on April 17, 2008.

Hey, remember 2000? We had an election that year!

Let's recall then-candidate George W. Bush's pitch about how he'd lower gas prices, which at the time were averaging $1.66 per gallon [ht: Jill C.]:

Gov. George W. Bush of Texas said today that if he was president, he would bring down gasoline prices through sheer force of personality, by creating enough political good will with oil-producing nations that they would increase their supply of crude.

"I would work with our friends in OPEC to convince them to open up the spigot, to increase the supply," Mr. Bush, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, told reporters here today. "Use the capital that my administration will earn, with the Kuwaitis or the Saudis, and convince them to open up the spigot.''

He'd just build up a boatload of goodwill within the Arab world and then tell those rag-heads to open up the spigot! Unlike that loser Clinton ...

Implicit in his comments was a criticism of the Clinton administration as failing to take advantage of the good will that the United States built with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Also implicit was that as the son of the president who built the coalition that drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait, Mr. Bush would be able to establish ties on a personal level that would persuade oil-producing nations that they owed the United States something in return.

''Ours is a nation that helped Kuwait and the Saudis, and you'd think we'd have the capital necessary to convince them to increase the crude supplies,'' he said.

Asked why the Clinton administration had not been able to use the power of personal persuasion, Mr. Bush said: ''The fundamental question is, 'Will I be a successful president when it comes to foreign policy?'''

I guess that is the fundamental question, and if we were to reduce the measure of "successful foreign policy" to the profits raked in by Big Oil, then Bush's FoPo would indeed be the most successful ever.

When Bush made that oath to put the squeeze on his Saudi cousins, crude oil was trading at about $35 per barrel.

Skipping forward to the present, Reuters reports on a new poll that finds, "Eight out of 10 Arabs have an unfavorable view of the United States."

"The price of New York oil hit a record high 115.54 dollars per barrel on Thursday."

Average price of a gallon of gas today: $3.35

Here's Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz' views, as reported by the WaPo:

Even with a growing energy demand from China, the United States and elsewhere, oil traders anticipated before the war that the price of oil would remain about $25 a barrel. Instead, it has soared to more than $100 a barrel. Iraqi oil production has not risen with demand, in part because investment in the Middle East has been stunted by war-related unrest.

Those price increases are self-perpetuating, Stiglitz argues. Oil-rich Persian Gulf states are so awash in money that they are not sure what to do with it all. By holding back oil production, they make more off what they do produce and keep their greatest asset -- oil -- in the ground as they search for ways to spend their cash.

That cash, through state-owned sovereign wealth funds, has flowed into stocks, bonds and other investments, creating incentives for lenders to offer low-interest loans, many of which have now gone sour.

He's done a heckuva job, hasn't he?

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Tagged as: bush, oil

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.