Word: petroleum
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...even though domestic oil and natural gas are still under federal control. Retail fuel-oil prices are up about 10% from a year ago. One reason: dealers can raise prices to cover the costs of importing foreign oil-and the U.S. is now getting a record 44% of its petroleum from abroad. The Federal Power Commission last year allowed the top price of natural gas piped across state lines to jump from 52? per 1,000 cu. ft. to $1.44, in an effort to prompt more production. The Emergency Natural Gas Act passed this month permits gas-short areas...
...blame for the world's soaring petroleum prices? The vast majority of consumers and experts alike would readily answer: OPEC. During the past four years, the eleven-nation Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries has more than quintupled oil prices, raising the present tag to about $13 a barrel...
...impressively documented book titled The Control of Oil, just published by Pantheon Books, Dr. John M. Blair argues that the real culprits are the major international oil companies, known familiarly as the Seven Sisters (Exxon, Mobil, Standard Oil Co. of California, Texaco, Gulf, Royal Dutch Shell, and British Petroleum). In Blair's view, the companies actually aided and abetted the OPEC increase, while pleading helplessness to their price-gouged public. "A form of bilateral symbiotic oligopoly" is the author's complicated if caustic term to describe the relationship between the oil "majors" and OPEC...
...free market, which he felt had been curtailed by the economic power of a handful of huge corporations. From 1957 until 1970, Blair was chief economist of the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, and helped expose price fixing and questionable interlocking relationships in the drug and petroleum industries...
Blair proposes a tough remedy. At present, the big companies control each stage of the petroleum process: pumping, transport, refining, marketing. Blair would break them up into companies specializing in only one phase of the petroleum process. Ideally, each company would then haggle over price each time the oil changed hands and would thus unleash free-market forces that would push prices down...