Oil's dirty, little (not so) secret

Conservatives have been calling for off-shore drilling as though the resulting oil will be “our” oil, as though it will be, ironcially to the conservative disdain for socialism, in effect, a social property. The logic is that the more America has of its own oil, the less it will be dependent on oil produced by other nations, and thus the less American citizens will pay at the pump.

The reality is, however, that newly drilled oil off America's shores will be the property of the same companies that are now making record windfall profits at “our” expense. Americans unwittingly are fantasizing that oil, as a social property, will undercut the market. But let us not get too carried away with utopian dreams of socialized oil: our newly invigorated popular support for off-shore drilling will benefit private companies who will attempt to leverage their supply to increase their revenue. The increased supply, relative to global supply, will be miniscule, and the oil companies will play that supply against the global market; they will not play it as a nationalized, socialized property that belongs to the American people, and the effect at the pump will be relative to global, not nationalistic, factors.

Oil companies’ windfall profits come at the cost of increased prices for the little guy at the pump. Higher pump prices create political support for the expansion of the oil industry, due to a misguided, unwittingly conceived, nationalistically energized notion of socialized property. This sequence is, no doubt, the dirty little secret of oil company executives and their Congressional allies. Popular disgruntlement with oil prices is being leveraged as an election issue, not to bring relief to the consumer but to expand the industry. Barack Obama knows this and thus, on principle, orates against it. But the populace generally does not know it and thus is in jeopardy of being led to the slaughter, again, tugged by the cord of myopic immediacy.