Anglo-American corporations and governments have kept the oil supply plentiful and prices steady for a century, despite fearful challenges. But today plunging oil prices are sending frightening signals. P eople are buying gas at 67 cents a gallon in Beaver Pennsylvania. It's highly dangerous.
Nothing so holds the world together as oil.
Millions of institutions and six billion humans use it to power automobiles, provide electricity, as raw material for the innumerable plastic artifacts of everyday life. If oil suddenly vanished from the world's storage tanks nothing would move, light too would vanish and, within a few days, so would food. That power to hold the world together has come from the fact that since the beginning of this century a few giant corporations, largely American and British, have had control of or influence over virtually all production and distribution of oil. In the 1980s, Thornton Bancroft, then CEO of Arco, observed that there never was a free market in oil. The 67 cents a gallon price is scary because it is a sign that those control mechanisms may finally be breaking down.