Strategic Economic Alliance Survey

Too often politicians attempt to scare Americans into believing foreigners may no longer invest in the US of A. Americans and their so-called leaders need to understand that foreigners do not invest in the US of A because they like Americans or because Americans are nice to them.

Foreign companies, governments, and private investors invest in the US of A only because there are good investments in the US of A. Often these are amongst the safest, most reliable investments in the world.

This applies to US-based financial assets including short and long-term US Treasury instruments, corporate stocks and bonds, real estate, entire companies, and more.

Regarding oil: Some politicians, for expediency, claim the US and the industrialized world are "addicted to oil". Instead, they should comprehend that Western civilization is motivated to make progress and improve its lifestyle. Civilized people enjoy the fruits of their creativity, inventions and discoveries.

Western civilization needs only one product from OPEC nations. That one product is oil. Nations inheriting oil from the time of creation and condescend to sell it do not need to refine or process it in any way. Theoretically they can simply contract to sell it and allow Western or domestic companies to extract it from under the natives' feet.

Western civilization invented and developed all technology needed and used to extract, process, transport and refine oil in preparation for the consumer.

Within some few decades Western civilization will be past its need for oil. In the next decades smart scientists and engineers will invent and discover new and more efficient sources of energy. Smart businessmen will start businesses to utilize those new sources of energy. Oil's day in the sun will have passed forever. At that time, nations that have failed to plan, build and get civilized will falter. Any nations that promotes terrorism using oil revenue will be out of business.

Buying oil is the deal of this century... the last century wherein oil will have any value.

How Western civilization deals with it will determine mankind's direction.

SEA

What the world needs is an organization of oil consuming nations. The global oil market has been lopsided for over 30 years.

Over 30 years ago OPEC developed a monopolistic cartel which allowed it to set an arbitrary benchmark price for oil and hold consuming countries to its price. As the global economy evolved over the last three decades, OPEC lost much of its pricing power. Today OPEC's benchmark price is largely ignored by strong market forces. Those forces include speculation, hedging by users as well as financial entities, transient forces such as terror threats, realities, perceptions, dynamic events such as refinery capacity changes, meteorological events, and seasonal demand pressures for various oil byproducts.

The oil price-demand-quantity pendulum has swung from OPEC's near monopoly of the 1970s-1980s to the intervention era of market forces during the 1990s-2000s. It is now appropriate for consuming nations to unite into a formal buyers' consortium. This buyers' consortium should initiate formal policies implementing purchasing and ordering processes, allocation procedures for when shortfalls develop, and price-quantity negotiations with OPEC in conjunction with the independent producing nations.

The oil consuming nations must change the currency used to pay OPEC nations. OPEC and other nations that insist upon using oil revenue for offensive military purposes should be paid on a sliding scale. That scale will shift from 100% financial payment toward 100% commodity payment as warranted by each nation's degree of offensive military buildup. An oil producing nation's financial reward will be inversely proportional to its offensive militarism.

The world has enough oil to provide stable growth of newly-developing countries while supporting development of industrialized nations. Price spikes now created by wildly excessive speculation and over-dramatization of fear would be smoothed through effective implementation of the Organization of Consuming Nations and its formal and controlled implementation of purchasing, allocation, and payment procedures.

Please Buy Our Oil
We need your business before we kill you.
Buy it by the gallon, the barrel, or tanker load	Despite oil's importance, its price alone will not impede progress derived from technology but will expedite our decreasing oil dependency. Problems prevailing in the Middle East can cause oil price spikes anytime. OPEC nations need customers.

Many Middle East, African, Southeast Asian, and African nations must sell oil in order to maintain stability and support the survival of their rulers. These nations have little else to offer the world other than perhaps pistachios, olives and minerals. These commodities fail to produce the easy, steady revenue steam as oil does. This fact ensures that oil will be available for sale on global markets. At times there will be politically motivated disruptions in supply and non-market induced price variations. After the chaos entropies, prices will stabilize at market-determined levels.

Beyond supply, demand and price, inflation has a psychological driver. US business and consumer psychology includes fear of inflation. This fear prevents acceptance of price increases and prevents the bidding up of raw materials, finished goods and services beyond the incremental speculators' margin. Aside from sporadic market speculation which can effectively induce months of price increases, commodities and raw materials will eventually recede to market-induced sustainable levels.

Oil operates as an exception to market forces because its supply is modulated directly by the OPEC cartel following non-market forces. The Arabs have plenty of oil underground. Even when western engineers pump it up and out, most people of the Middle East have relatively little use for it... other than a few sheiks who need gasoline for their limousines. They will sell oil as long as there are buyers. They cannot raise the price of oil far beyond what buyers can afford to pay long term. Market forces will correct the price downward to rational levels balanced by demand-price relationships. Over time, producing nations must sell oil or they will disintegrate. Those arrogant demagogues floating on oil revenue must have a large, continuous stream of revenue.

They may not say please, but Middle Eastern and South American rulers will eventually sell oil... if not today, the day after tomorrow.

A SEA Change Is Needed: Western civilization and free economies must ally in order to effectively compete on a level with OPEC. For over 30 years the oil consuming nations have groveled and buckled under to the demands of the global oil oligopoly's united front known as OPEC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

When Western civilization's industrialized nations, the nations that produce the vast majority of humanity's progress, ally, they will be able to confront OPEC as its major customer. From that position of strength, oil will become just a commodity that sellers must sell and buyers are willing to buy at reasonable prices.

Rational Plan

The industrialized nations should join together, develop a plan, and confront the oil producing nations that belong to the OPEC cartel as well as the non-OPEC oil producers. They should negotiate and implement an overall, long-term policy and supply arrangement that includes long-term purchasing parameters. Those parameters include supply, quantity, price schedules with commitments.

Available and reasonably priced oil supplies are essential to support today's civilization and provide for evolution to more efficient forms of energy. Industrialized nations should establish an Organization of Oil Consuming Nations, OOCN.

Since the early 1970s industrialized nations have competed against each other while groveling to OPEC. Industrialized nations continue to be terrorized by the OPEC cartel's machinations, quasi price fixing, and unenlightened management that has little understanding of productivity, progress or business.

The industrialized alliance could provide a unified front to negotiate with OPEC on its scale. OOCN would be OPEC's biggest -- and in essence its only -- customer. Even if any nation, including China, chose to not join, it would not be a large enough customer to support the needs of the OPEC cartel. Industrialized nations would operate on a large enough scale to buy oil commensurate with OPEC's supply oligopoly.

OOCN would be mandated build a coherent Long-term Global Energy Policy. It would make long-term supply and price agreements with OPEC. OOCN would be empowered to deal separately with non-OPEC oil producing nations. OOCN could fracture the OPEC oligopoly into a multi-lateral market consisting of buyers and sellers -- each needing to do rational deals.

A separate multinational coalition of energy consuming nations could elect to cooperate in an energy alternative program to coordinate oil, natural gas, hydroelectric, nuclear, coal, nuclear, geothermal, wind and fuel cell sources with user demand, and develop efficient, abundant, long-term alternative energy sources.