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Terrible Saudi Oil Policies
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TERRIBLE SAUDI OIL POLICIES
MER - Washington - 8/10/97:
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It's great for the Americans and Europeans of course -- ever-cheaper oil prices to further lubricate and expand their economies.
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It's terrible for the hundreds of millions of Arabs spread out from Morocco to the Gulf, however, for not only do their economies remain underdeveloped and not only do they lack even a common market among themselves, but the wealth of the Arab world, the black gold of the modern era, continues to be squandered in huge quantities to the West at prices -- corrected for inflation -- even lower today than in the days of the quickly aborted "oil embargo" of the 70s!
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The main culprit in all this is the government of Saudi Arabia -- i.e., the royal family of Saudi Arabia -- which has mismanaged OPEC and oil supply/prices even worse than it has failed to assert Arab interests in international politics.
While the Palestinians are turned into landless and jobless "natives" of what was once a self-sufficient Palestine -- relegated to "autonomous" homelands surrounded by road-blocks, electrified fences, and tanks -- a small number of sheiks in "Saudi" Arabia continue to supply the Americans, and indirectly the Israelis, with all the oil they have ever dreamed of...and at absurdly low prices! Rarely if ever in history has a people so rich in a central world resource so squandered its wealth as well as the political value that could have resulted from it.
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Moreover, these selfish and decadent Sheiks of Arabia don't even invest the petrodollars in building up their own Arab countries -- rather they further squander it all in absurdly lavish life-styles, save and easy growing investments in Western countries (rather than their own!), secret foreign bank accounts, and ever-growing "arms or cash" purchases that serve to recycle even the petrodollars back to the West!
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It's a terrible scandal of historical proportions. And only by ever- harsher repression and suppression can the Saudi regime, and the associated American-controlled "client regimes" in today's Arab world, continue in power.
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