Subject: Re: Trade deal with China reached
I was around back then - very young, but around. OPEC had influence....but that's it. Just influence.

Really? Just influence? I was around also.

The Arab Oil Embargo basically remade the auto industry from the ground up. Gone were the days of big, heavy muscle cars from the 1960s and 1970s and in came the era of the Econobox. The oil embargo caught the Big 3 flat footed and basically enabled a tidal wave of smaller, more fuel-efficient Japanese imports.

1 political action from a collection of bad state actors had massive ripple effects into the US (and world economy).

Salon has more:
https://www.salon.com/2015/03/...

October 1973 was a rude awakening for the entire United States. It was a watershed month for the American middle class. The Arab Oil Embargo would lead to the downfall of the American auto industry, whose generous wages and benefits set the standard for the entire economy. It was also the month of the Saturday Night Massacre, which made inevitable the downfall of Richard Nixon. The Watergate scandal resulted in changes to the American political system that put more power into the hands of lobbyists, political action committees and wealthy, self-funded candidates. Cooper didn’t know it at the time -- nobody knew it -- but the moment he started grounding those radio straps and tightening those nuts was the moment the upward fortunes of the American worker hit a wall. From the 1947 to 1973, the golden postwar quarter-century, hourly earnings grew at an average of 2.2 percent a year. Since 1973, they’ve been stagnant, barely keeping up with inflation, even as productivity has boomed.

The ripple effect was profound

The effect on the American economy was twofold: First, the embargo contributed to a recession in which the gross national product fell 2.1 percent, unemployment reached 10 percent, and inflation hit 12 percent. Not even the UAW contract could keep up with those prices. Second, as Don Cooper was learning during his tortuous return to the assembly line, Americans stopped buying American cars. The percentage of disposable income spent on new cars dropped from 4.8 percent to 3.8 percent -- the lowest since the Korean War -- and a lot of the purchases were fuel-efficient Fiats, Hondas and VW Beetles, which were less expensive to fill up than those street yachts the Lincoln Continental and the Chrysler New Yorker. The Big Three found themselves in a bind, which they soon figured out how to make worse. GM, Ford and Chrysler didn’t want to build small cars, because only ginormous cars provided the profits necessary to pay the wages and benefits they had just lavished on their workers.

So in short: One political decision from a collection of not-so-friendly countries led to...
-A complete remaking of the US auto industry
-A breaking of Detroit's dominance of automaking
-The rise of the Japanese car industry (at the expense of ours)
-The loss of tens of thousand of jobs as plants were idled
-Storied car companies started the spiral downwards (and out)
-One of the major forces and advocates for the blue-collar class lost most of its relevance

There's a lesson here. Never hand the enemy a weapon to use on *you*. Strategic dependence is one such weapon.