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To: Kevin Podsiadlik who wrote (132441)	10/3/2001 4:57:48 PM
From: craig crawford	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 164684

>> Give me a break. OPEC hardly has to go to that kind of extreme to do us some serious economic damage. What they can do, and have in the past done frequently, is cut back production and drive prices up on us << so if opec attempts to screw us even after we defend it's largest member, why even bother? >> The reason those increases don't hold is because there is no one with sufficient power in OPEC to dictate to the others and prevent price competition << so if opec doesn't have any power to keep oil prices up why should we defend some of the members? >> That "sufficient power" is precisely what Saddam was after in 1990 << nope. saddam wanted to take kuwait and sell us all their oil, not cut us off. >> Or did you think Kuwait would have been the end of it if we had just stayed home? << i told it you it doesn't matter who runs the show over there in the middle east. they all want to sell us oil because that is their livelyhood. if saddam seized kuwait and then saudi arabia, you just eliminated two members of opec! then, if we wanted to interfere we could've brought saddam to his knees and gotten as much oil as we wanted all under the guise of stopping an imperialist! then saudi arabia would really owe us a debt of gratitude if we stopped hussein or maybe we just leave him in there and let iran have a sizable foe once again. then they could war with each other instead of bothering us! if we want to act like a bunch of imperialists we should do it right. we should have let saddam run rampant in the gulf and then let iran or saudi arabia or israel destroy him or if he took iran the allies could've gotten together and called him another hitler took over the whole place and iraq would be dealt with once and for all. at any rate if we would have just let them fight each other in 1990 they wouldn't be focused on us! they would all be worried about each other! idle hands are the work of the devil and after we kicked saddam around there wasn't anything for muslims to do except find a new target for their hatred. i prefer to let them keep busy squabbling amongst themselves and leave us alone! >> An import tax makes things more expensive (not always directly). An income tax gives people less money to spend Two different routes with the same result -- the consumers take it in the shorts << not so fast. first of all, imported goods become more expensive, but that is a discretionary tax. buy american or consume less and you won't have to pay the tax. income tax on the other hand is not discretionary. as for "consumers taking it in the shorts": free trade results in lower wages for many "consumers" as their jobs are exported out of the country. what replaces the higher paying manufacturing jobs? lower wage service oriented jobs such as retail and govt positions. so when we fail to protect our steel industry workers have to go get a job at wal-mart to sell all the cheap flood of imported retail goods that us consumers love so much. when we fail to protect the great agricultural and industrial manufacturing base that made this country great, women must go out into the workforce to maintain the same standard of living for a family. so "free" trade is not free. it comes at a price. a flood of cheap imports comes at the expense of the average american worker. of course the large transnational corporations benefit greatly because they lay-off loyal american workers and hire indonesians to do the same work for 50 cents an hour.