Doug Henwood wrote: > > How do oil companies manipulate oil prices? If they could do it, > wouldn't they always manipulate them higher?
I think these speculations on oil-company "manipulation" for political purposes exhibit the fatal weakness of empiricism. (Even valid conspiracy theories tend to lean too much on entheorized empiricist observations.) No one, of course, has ever doubted that commericial enterprises (going back to non-capitalist commericial enterprises of the ancient and medieval worlds) "conspire" and "manipulate" endlessly. That's what "commerical enterprise" MEANS! And particular instances, small and big, can often be uncovered by mere empirical investigation. BUT when you are talking about the policies of the ruling circles, inside and outside the government, of the strongest and most complex empire the world has ever seen, it is nothing short of sheer lunacy to think that one can arrive at any understanding merely by adding up the surface "facts" of some particular occasion. No doubt C.E.O.s are not very good dialecticians, and no doubt their 'vision' is often or almost always terribly short-range -- but they aren't completely stupid either, and they give _some_ attention to the context of their actions and the complexity of the relations which determine the outcomes of those actions. In other words, most of them are at least dimly aware that you can never do just _one thing_. So before doing Leavisite close reading of one vice-presidential visit or one little eddy in the huge world market, you need first to do some careful theorizing of how oil companies have acted over generations before you even consider looking for any evidence that an election at this time means that much to them. Frankly, I think it's probably a gross waste of time to give this hypothesis any attention at all. In the last 50 years how many price-changes of a few dollars a barrel have there been? What was the different reasons for those many price changes? After someone does a two hundred page study of the history of oil prices and then condenses it convincingly into a 300 word post and then shows that he/she has a theory of oil prices that will give credence to the present claims, then I will at least spend maybe 10 minutes listening to them and thinking about it. Carrol Carrol
