The answers are Yes, Yes, and Yes.

But the answer you really want is "the people with the capital, and that capital is oil in the ground, are the ones making all the money. Except for the US citizens who are giving their oil away to the oil companies really really cheaply so companies like Exxon and BP can make huge profits on it."

The US opened up ANWR, the North Seas nations opened up production there, Canada opened things up, and then they flooded the market with oil, driving the price of oil down below the cost of replacing the oil fields that are being depleted.

The result has been that the US oil fields, the North Sea oil fields, and many others are reaching their end of life in about a third the time that the early fields found in the US in Texas, Oklahoma, California, began to fall off in production.

The result is that only the oil owned by governments who reap all the profits have any real potential for increasing their production. But they have discovered that they can fetch well over $100 a barrel for their oil, so it makes absolutely no sense to increase oil production.

Think of it this was. Saudi Arabia is producing roughly 10 million barrels of oil a day at more than $100 a barrel. If they were to increase production by 5 million barrels a day, they would lose money. Today they get about a billion a day for their oil. But if they increased production by 5 million, the price of oil would probably fall to $40 a barrel. That means they would only get a profit of about half a billion dollars a day.

The same for Chavez, and Kadafi, and Iran, and so on.

Do you think that the House of Saud is a charity that is going to provide charity aid to US consumers who have no problem affording more than $125 dollar a barrel oil?

Ask yourself, what would you do if you were the oil minister of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Libya, Sudan, etc? Are you going to increase oil production so that the price of oil falls and you get less money even while selling more oil?

The answer should be as obvious as your going to your boss and telling him that you want to work fifty percent more hours each week, and to make that happen, you will take a 60% cut in pay so you work longer for less.