Originally Posted by Bob Cosby :
My first thought on this....the arguement above was that the electric industry WAS regulated, and because of its success, oil should follow suit?

Originally Posted by Bob Cosby :
Second, the article itself stated that "But competition, especially for residential and small business customers, rarely emerged." I'd suggest this is key.

Originally Posted by Bob Cosby :
And third, is electricity considered a "commodity"?

1: an economic good: as a: a product of agriculture or mining b: an article of commerce especially when delivered for shipment <commodities futures> c: a mass-produced unspecialized product <commodity chemicals> <commodity memory chips>
2 a: something useful or valued <that valuable commodity patience>; also : thing, entity b: convenience, advantage
3obsolete : quantity, lot
4: a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (as brand name) other than price
5: one that is subject to ready exchange or exploitation within a market <stars as individuals and as commodities of the film industry

"The document, obtained this week by The Washington Post, shows that officials from Exxon Mobil Corp., Conoco (before its merger with Phillips), Shell Oil Co. and BP America Inc. met in the White House complex with the Cheney aides who were developing a national energy policy, parts of which became law and parts of which are still being debated.

Where is all the competition in oil? Gas stations don't count, there's little they can do to compete, other than a few cents. They're just pimped out by big oil. There's no way to start an oil company and compete. Just like the days of the East India Company, things like; permits, specialized research, rediculous EPA and safety standards, insurance etc...pricing everyone else out of the buisness.

I'd say so.
Websters:

On top of all of this, there's seems to be a rivalry between the Big Oil and the Fed, to manipulate the world currencies to their respective advantages...

the Feds recent cuts are likely to bring in even higher inflation. And the $150Tril. economics pkge, money we don't even have, will likely bury us further.

..And we wonder where Americans learn to spend money they don't have until they go bankrupt?(Hint: a big white house.)

even worse:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...111501842.html

But it is not sufficient just to accept an 'oil connection,' we should also ask — whose oil-motivated interests was the Iraq War meant to advance? Was it about feeding the addiction of the USA's gas-guzzling SUVs? Or was it about advancing the interests of US-based international oil companies (IOCs), long since locked out of access to Middle East oil?

A different but related question is: what oil-related interests have in fact been advanced by the Iraqui War and occupation? To the extent that near-record oil prices are in part a result of the War, then massive profit increases for the IOCs have certainly been a major effect of the invasion, if not a provably intended one.

In 2003, US spokespeople were blunt about the Iraq invasion being only a start in 'transforming' the Middle East. But was it also about rolling back OPEC? Partly as a result of the 1970s 'OPEC Revolution,' National Oil Companies (NOCs) now own and control more than 80 per cent of global oil reserves while the formerly dominant 'majors' (the IOCs) hold only around 10 per cent.

Was the Iraq War also about ensuring that the US forever has its hands on the oil (and gas) spigot as part of a geopolitical strategy to permanently dominate global politics?

For instance, was a prime purpose establishing permanent US bases in Iraq, thereby consolidating US control over the Middle East, Iran, and beyond — to the increasingly important oil and gas provinces of the Caspian basin and Central Asia?

There is a case to answer on all these charges. But there are also internal conflicts, policy inconsistencies and unintended consequences — which should not be surprising, given the disarray in US foreign (energy) policy.

In the real world there are Government conspiracies, and there are also ****-ups — the two possibilities being by no means mutually exclusive. The Iraq War perfectly exemplifies the ****-up scenario: multiple unintended outcomes adding up to fiasco, quagmire and a major loss of US international prestige.

Is the sharp increase in oil prices then, at least partly an example of such an unintended consequence of the US's Iraq plan gone wrong? And if so, in what ways?

For some influential neo-conservative proponents of the Iraqi War, bringing about a collapse in the price of oil was the central motive.Their explicit purpose was to privatise the Iraqi oil sector as part of a wider plan to turn the economic system of 'American Iraq' into a Middle East bridgehead for extreme neo-liberalism. That this was masked as 'building democracy' is especially ironic given that not even consultation was involved, let alone the approval of any Iraqi Government.

In this scenario, collapsing the price of oil would be achieved by rapidly expanding Iraq's oil capacity from 2 million barrels a day (Mb/d) to 6+Mb/d. Supposedly — as rashly promised by then Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz — this would enable Iraq's 'transformation' to be self-financing. In this impossible dream, as a new dominant major oil producer, Iraq would tend to sideline Saudi Arabia; some of whose citizens, unlike Iraqis, were actually implicated in 9/11.

http://www.newmatilda.com/2007/11/27...-or-conspiracy

It’s the Oil
Jim Holt

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’.

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion.

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.

...

This is the ‘mess’ that Bush-Cheney is going to hand on to the next administration. What if that administration is a Democratic one? Will it dismantle the bases and withdraw US forces entirely? That seems unlikely, considering the many beneficiaries of the continued occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term.

Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised.

Then there is the case of Iran, which is more complicated. In the short term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war. Iraq’s ruling Shia coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to Tehran, and the US has *****-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military. As for Iran’s nuclear programme, neither air strikes nor negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment. But the Iranian regime is precarious. Unpopular mullahs hold onto power by financing internal security services and buying off elites with oil money, which accounts for 70 per cent of government revenues. If the price of oil were suddenly to drop to, say, $40 a barrel (from a current price just north of $80), the repressive regime in Tehran would lose its steady income. And that is an outcome the US could easily achieve by opening the Iraqi oil spigot for as long as necessary (perhaps taking down Venezuela’s oil-cocky Hugo Chávez into the bargain).

And think of the United States vis-à-vis China. As a consequence of our trade deficit, around a trillion dollars’ worth of US denominated debt (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is held by China. This gives Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by offloading big chunks of US debt, China could bring the American economy to its knees. China’s own economy is, according to official figures, expanding at something like 10 per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer to 4 or 5 per cent, as some believe, China’s increasing heft poses a threat to US interests. (One fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times faster than the US.) And the main constraint on China’s growth is its access to energy – which, with the US in control of the biggest share of world oil, would largely be at Washington’s sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat neutralised.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n20/holt01_.html

There is indeed "dirty money" everywhere. But there are certainly opinions that differ from left-wing opinions you posted above.