RUSH: Jerry in Wheeling, West Virginia, great to have you with us today, sir, hello.
CALLER: So nice to speak with you, Rush. It’s quite a pleasure.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I’ve got a question, and then I’m going to hang up and I’ll listen to your answer. I understand how economics works somewhat and the price of oil today is anywhere between 90 to a hundred dollars, it’s been up and down. My question is, being that it’s an election year, and someone like George Soros, or even the people that’s selling the oil, the sheiks —
RUSH: OPEC?
CALLER: OPEC, yes. Can they manipulate the prices? Can they have their buyers come in and buy at the higher price and just kind of hang onto it till later, that’s my question. And I’ll let you answer this and I’ll go down the road —
RUSH: Well, wait a minute now, I’m not going to let you off the hook that easily.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: (laughter) What do you think?
CALLER: I think it’s possible. Anybody with enough money can do anything.
RUSH: Can you recall a period of time — how old are you?
CALLER: I’m 58 years old.
RUSH: You are 58. Well, you’re a year older than I am. So do you recall in any of your adult life when the price of oil was manipulated without withholding it from the market, contrived shortages, to affect elections?
CALLER: Personally, no, I can’t.
RUSH: The only time I can remember blatant examples of this would be with the contrived shortages of oil being allowed into the country in the seventies to be refined. There was not a shortage of oil. They were just withholding it from us for a host of reasons. They did get the price up, and it happened rapidly, went from 25 cents up to a buck inside of two years. But, you know, since 1969 when gasoline was about 25 cents a gallon, in 40 years it’s gone up basically $2.80, maybe three bucks, which is not really a whole lot. So when you talk about the price of oil you really take it down to the root level of the price of gasoline because that’s how it’s going to affect people’s lives. Democrats, after Hurricane Katrina, they went into these gouging examinations and analysis, they had these hearings, and they were just convinced that Big Oil was playing games by getting the price up there left and right, to gouge people, and the Democrats have yet to be able to find one instance of it.
In fact, the haughty John Kerry, who served in Vietnam, suggested during the 2004 presidential campaign — he did two things. The first thing he did was saying that if he were president, he would be on the phone with OPEC, and he’d make sure to get the price down and get whatever needed to be happening at the time. Kerry, ‘I’ll get on the phone, and I’ll make those–‘ and it wasn’t long after that that he accused Bush of doing the same thing behind closed doors. I think that when you’re talking about the price of oil, even the price of gasoline — do you know that everybody expected after Hurricane Katrina, we had refineries shut down for a while, we had some oil wells out there in the Gulf, and people were panicked, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God,’ and for a while, you could have found six-dollar-a-gallon gasoline in Atlanta for a day or two. But do you know what kept the price down? You know why none of that happened after hurricane Katrina? Because we import refined gasoline. It’s so tough to manipulate markets when it’s global. Let’s say that George Soros does try to impact the price of oil. George Soros may have it in for Republicans, but the ChiComs couldn’t care less about George Soros. If George Soros starts monkeying around or tries to, and the only way he could do this would be on the commodities market, which is where these fluctuations in the price of oil are taking place.
I ought to look this up because this is fascinating. We need to go into what the speculative price of oil, the future price of oil right now is, you said between 90 and a hundred bucks a barrel. Go to the government’s publications, and I’m not sure which publication this is, but it’s out of the Office of Management and Budget, and find out what we’re actually paying per barrel of oil that we import, it’s nowhere near 90 to a hundred dollars. That’s just the futures market price. But it always astounds people. Oil is the fuel of this world functioning, and when you try to up the price artificially somewhere, it’s going to have an effect somewhere else down the line. I don’t think anybody could sustain a full-fledged, world increase, dramatic increase in the price of oil. If it were possible, it would be happening all the time, and it doesn’t happen all the time. I know what you’re saying. You think that the Democrats or Soros might do this to impact the economy and give the election to Democrats since Bush is in office. They’re going to try things like this, but they really don’t have too far to go. Most people think we’re in a recession anyway when we’re not.