From Bloomberg:A DistractionEmphasis added.
Mark Cooper, research director of the Washington-based Consumer Federation of America, said focusing on collusion is a distraction and blamed oil industry mergers that have concentrated power in too few hands.
Oil refiners "don't need to collude to influence the price," he said. "The oil companies will never build enough refineries to put downward pressure on price. That is not in their economic interest."
The price increases have also prompted Republican Senators Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Mike DeWine of Ohio to propose enforcing U.S. antitrust laws against Saudi Arabia and other members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
Applying U.S. antitrust laws to OPEC would go against a longstanding legal doctrine that U.S. courts don't have authority to rule on the legality of foreign government actions, said Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust expert at University of Iowa law school in Iowa City. It also might prove difficult to enforce.
The proposal also raises a foreign-policy issue because oil is "a natural resource for these countries" and "the way they set price is by controlling output," Hovenkamp said.
"We would be outraged by the notion that a foreign country would tell us how much coal or how much hardwood" the U.S. should produce, he said.
I disagree with Cooper, by the way...the problem isn't the oil companies not wanting to build refineries; but rather liberals, like Mike DeWine, who stand in the way.
Hovenkamp is absolutely right. I don't see how the US can apply US law on Saudi Arabia or OPEC. If the US were to do so, they could just as easily sell that oil to China...it is amazing how free enterprise works! You'd think a two-term incumbent senator would know that...
