End global oil "price-rigging conspiracy" says Buchanan in BU speech

By Brian Fitzgerald

Reform Party presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan, who has described himself as an "economic nationalist" in the tradition of America's forefathers, stuck to his "U.S. First" stance when talking about the country's dependence on foreign oil at an International Relations Forum in the SMG auditorium on March 31.

In a speech entitled Breaking the OPEC Cartel, Buchanan lambasted Congress and the Clinton administration for failing to respond to OPEC's "war of economic aggression against this country." He said that soaring gasoline prices are the result of "a global price-rigging conspiracy" by oil-exporting nations.

"The response of the world's last superpower has been pathetic," he said. "Congress heroically enacted an Oil Price Reduction Act that calls for a report. They must be quaking in the Gulf. As for Mr. Clinton, he sent Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose vice presidential ambitions are sinking as fast as gas prices are soaring -- to beg the price-fixers to please pump more oil to help poor old Uncle Sam."

Patrick Buchanan: we must respond to OPEC's "war of economic aggression against this country." Photo by Vernon Doucette

He listed the villains as Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, who benefit from America's military defense, along with Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Ecuador, all of whom have received U.S. economic aid.

"When Andrew Jackson learned long ago that the mighty Bank of the United States was out to crush him, he confided to a friend, 'It is trying to kill me; but I will kill it,' " Buchanan said. "That is the stance to take toward OPEC. But Bill Clinton is no Andy Jackson. Indeed, he doesn't know a national asset from a national antagonist; so he wages war on Microsoft for anti-trust violations, while sending poor Richardson to propitiate that den of thieves called OPEC."

Buchanan suggested that the United States begin tapping its own oil and natural gas reserves, including opening up to oil exploration the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which at present it is off limits to drilling. He said that as president he would do the same with the Outer Continental Shelf, also under federal protection. He advocated as well an import fee to support domestic oil prices, and suspending the 18-cents-a-gallon federal gas tax.

"Third, we must focus on alternative fuels," he said. "Today, while France generates 76 percent of its electricity with nuclear power, Sweden 46 percent, and South Korea 41 percent, the U.S. has not ordered a new nuclear power plant since Three Mile Island. We invented nuclear power. Why let others exploit its potential, while we are too frightened to do so?"

Buchanan said the United States also needs to discover new sources of oil abroad, build pipelines in the Persian Gulf, Caspian Sea, and Central Asia (rather than Clinton's agreement to transport Caspian Sea oil from Azerbaijan through Georgia -- "whose regimes are vulnerable at any moment to an assassin's bullet").

He also said that the U.S. should tell such countries as Saudi Arabia and Kuwait to pump enough oil to cut the price to $20 a barrel by fall or "they can look elsewhere the next time war clouds descend over the Gulf." Buchanan seemed especially pleased by the audience applause after that remark: in 1991 he was criticized for his opposition to sending U.S. troops to drive Iraqi soldiers out of Kuwait.

"To show we mean business," Buchanan continued, "the U.S. should negotiate an end to sanctions on Iran and Iraq, sell both all the oil-drilling equipment they wish to buy, and let them sell all the oil they want on the world market. None of these Gulf regimes is worth another war. Let their avarice and greed work for America. If our erstwhile friends can collude with the regimes against whom we defend them, perhaps it is time to treat them all alike. Lifting sanctions on Iraq would also end an economic war, the primary casualties of which have been that country's innocent elderly, sick, and young."

Buchanan, once one of the Republican Party's fiercest ideological warriors -- he worked for the Nixon and Reagan administrations -- left the GOP last December. And in his BU speech he pulled no punches with George W. Bush: "His answer to every suggestion about protecting U.S. national economic interests is a rote recital of the free trade mantra