Clinton: OPEC 'can no longer be a cartel'

Clinton's attacks on oil prices as artificially inflated, Enron-style, keep escalating, and today she appeared to threaten to break up the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

"We’re going to go right at OPEC," she said. "They can no longer be a cartel, a monopoly that get together once every couple of months in some conference room in some plush place in the world, they decide how much oil they’re going to produce and what price they’re going to put it at," she told a crowd at a firehouse in Merrillville, IN.

"That’s not a market. That’s a monopoly," she said, saying she'd use anti-trust law and the World Trade Organization to take on OPEC.

Clinton has cast herself as a warrior for working people against the oil industry and malicious "speculators," and made that -- along with her push for a gas tax holiday -- central to her closing message in Indiana.

It's a potent message, like the attack on "Wall Street money brokers," with deep roots in American politics. It' It's also very hard to figure out what exactly she means by the threat to break OPEC.

UPDATE: The Obama campaign points out that Clinton has not signed on to cosponsor a bill that aspires "to make oil-producing and exporting cartels illegal."

UPDATE: Clinton's campaign says she voted a version of the bill in 2007 and has long favored filing a WTO complaint against OPEC.

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