AS WE DEPEND ON THE OIL, SO THEY DEPEND ON THE PROFITS IN ORDER TO AVOID TAXING THE POPULACE:

OPEC Ministers Weigh Another Oil-Production Cut: Alliance Jumps on Target of $75 a Barrel; Asking Non-Member Exporters to Curtail Supply (SPENCER SWARTZ in Cairo, Egypt, and NEIL KING JR. in Washington, 12/01/078, WSJ)

The cartel's 13 members, which supply more than 40% of daily world oil demand of about 86 million barrels, are already falling behind earlier pledges to trim exports as countries such as Iran and Venezuela try to keep revenue flowing amid a crash in commodity prices and demand in key markets such as the U.S. The price of crude oil has fallen more than 60% since its summer high, closing Friday at $54.43 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

OPEC members have been slow to comply with the production cut of 1.5 million barrels a day agreed to in October. The group's secretary general, Abdalla Salem El-Badri, told reporters that members had so far managed to remove only 850,000 to 1.2 million barrels a day from world oil markets.

The group's lack of discipline was one reason Saudi Arabia, OPEC's biggest producer, didn't push for another output cut in Cairo, even though the Saudi oil minister, Ali Naimi, argued that oil prices should be around $20 a barrel higher than they are now.

If these regimes had to go to their people for funding they'd fall.

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Posted by Orrin Judd at December 1, 2008 7:25 AM