Shiver me timbers...those meany Saudi Arabians are at it again! They are out to pirate a big price hike for a barrel of crude oil with their announcement of a huge OPEC production cut. And two other non-OPEC outsiders, Russia and Azerbaijan, also announced similar production cuts, in sympathy with the move of the Saudis.

In a quote from the New York Times, it was reported that..."Saudi Arabia, the world’s top exporter, issued a cut of 2.2 million barrels a day, or the equivalent of 2.5 percent of global production, to “bring things in balance,” according to the Saudi oil minister, Ali-al-Naimi" (unquote). 

OPEC and the oil ministers of the 11 nations, under the group's quota system, agreed to take a total of 4.2 million barrels a day off the market, the largest single production reduction in history.

Oh well; just when it looked like cheap, buck-n-a-half gas might be the remedy for an America mired in a debilitating, bone-rattling recession, we can instead look for prices to zoom back up to $2.50-3.00/gallon in the next 3-6 months or so, because OPEC is taking no chances: they've seen this "oil-oversupply" movie before, and they'll keep cutting production until the price gets back up to the 70 dollar-a-barrel level.

But what is most disturbing, is that Americans have also seen this exact same movie before in the 1990's, and learned ZILCH. Bill Clinton's presidency is widely regarded as the 'roaring 90's'. But Clinton was a leftist liberal, who luckily benefited from the perfect storm of falling oil prices, productivity gains of the computerized workplace, the explosive growth of the internet, and the concomitant dot-com job creation machine.

And in the eye of the perfect storm, was a republican Congress, who passed welfare reform, drilling in ANWAR, and a balanced budget-- and literally dragged a reluctant, kicking and screaming Bill Clinton, into a golden decade of prosperity.

But the Clinton administration made one of the most costly and long term damaging blunders in U.S. economic history, when slick Willie vetoed the congressional bill to initiate drilling in ANWAR. Back then, Mr. Clinton had 'succumbed' to the radical, Al Gore environmental lobby, and willingly danced at the end of the puppet strings of the Sierra Club.

But Clinton's 1995 veto didn't just restrict drilling in ANWAR. His lethal blunder set the stage for grievous long-term structural damage to the U.S. economy, due to the eventual result of the ban: a huge net capital outflow of  $700 billion annually to OPEC over the last decade, with no end in sight.

The veto also set the precedent for the current political-environmental insanity we have today, where 4 trillion dollars worth of American oil reserves have been declared to be both illegal, and also to be a supposed ecological disaster waiting to happen. 

What America stubbornly refuses to learn is that OPEC has directly affected the quality of our lives just as much as Congress, or any of the presidents or foreign wars in the last 40 years. Consider where America would be if ANWAR had come online in 2000, and the price of gas had stayed below a dollar-fifty/gallon. What then? Would we even be in a recession today?

Well, for starters, the U.S. would now be producing close to 50% of its domestic needs, rather than the current 30%. Instead, were importing 70% of our oil, and U.S. domestic production from aging oil fields is currently dropping at a rate of 2% a year. In just the next decade, we will be importing better than 80% of our oil, and falling further down into the unsustainable drain of our capital outflow to the foreign oil producers.

Currently, the United States remains a capital starved country. We produce practically nothing. We import almost everything. We are literally a debtor nation; and when it comes to our energy needs, we’ve been reduced to the status of a BEGGAR nation. Our economic fortunes are no longer in our own hands, but in those of the very people who despise our culture and way of life, and will do all they can to see us continue to falter.

And as a beggar nation, a once-proud America can only hope and beg for OPEC not to continue to short their production, and further burden the world's economy with yet another energy price shock, similar to the four dollar gas we saw as recently as last summer; and which is sure to return again--it's only a question of when.

But regarding our self-defeating energy policy, we're the nation of hope. We can only hope oil prices stay low. We can only hope that OPEC doesn't get any greedier. We can only hope that somehow, a new miraculous source of alternative energy will magically emerge to replace oil, and provide us with the hope for cheaper energy prices, and better times ahead. Yes, let's all just sit back, and keep on hoping for the best.

But hope is basically an excuse for DOING NOTHING.  And given the current political climate, it's what America does best...doing nothing but hoping, and watching our standard of living decline ever further, with every new tanker of foreign oil that docks within our ports.

But can their be any hope that America will see any relief from OPEC, when the politics of the country is so virulently against 'Big Oil'? Barack Obama, during his presidential campaign, cleverly was able to create a common enemy, the Exxon corporation, and constantly railed against "big oil" as though Exxon was being run by Lucifer himself. This political insanity of opposing domestic oil companies is only going to make a bad situation much worse, as the rest of the entire industrialized world seeks to develop new oil resources, while America is worried about turning back the oceans, and saving polar bears from drowning.

Perhaps Obama will consider a new State Department cabinet position-- the Secretary of Hope. This person would be in constant contact, and travel abroad to brownie-up the various OPEC heads of state, and tell the oil producers very nicely that... "We sure hope you don't lower your oil production!". This person would also be informing the Chinese that we hope they DO change their plans to horizontally drill offshore with their partner Cuba, and hope they DON'T suck our domestic reserves dry from underneath the Florida continental shelf just 60 miles offshore of OUR borders.

But goshdarn; it's just so much easier to hope, because reality seems so bleak. OPEC is out for OPEC. And the Chinese are out for China. They care not about America. They only seek what's best for their countries, and undoubtedly howl about the folly of the United States for restricting its own oil production for none other than blatantly insipid political reasons, like putting the prosperity of people subservient to the welfare of animals.

And because of the blunders beginning with Clinton, our OPEC "alliance" will continue to keep us over a barrel for the next decade or so, given the politics of the day, as the Obama Administration teams up with an expanded liberal majority in Congress. And this same majority will no doubt begin an all new, even more disastrous environmental assault on "Big Oil" in the next four years, and continue to enrich OPEC to the unnecessary detriment of our nation.