Understanding the Current Slide In Oil Prices

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/24/markets/oil/?postversion=2008102409

I was in a spirited debate with a cousin of mine last week over what has caused the fluctuation in the price of oil and gas over the past year or so. His argument was understandable, yet it had one fatal flaw. He was arguing that oil was going up and down because of supply and demand. Well, OPEC's recent decision to cut off oil supplies or production had much bearing according to the mainstream media on the price of oil. IT WENT DOWN even further. Supply and demand tells us that if there is less of something, then the price must go up.
The flaw in my cousin's argument is that he is arguing as if we are under supply and demand capitalist free market economy. We are not. The entire rise in the price of oil had little to do with the commodity's output, but rather it was being manipulated by the dollar.
In order to understand this, one must understand what happened to the dollar in the early 1970's under Richard Nixon.
When Nixon took us off of the Gold Standard so to speak, this allowed the dollar to become totally fiat and it allowed the printing presses to go hog wild. What the globalist bankers did not let us in on was the fact that they secretly put us on the Oil Standard. They began to manipulate the dollar with oil and vice versa.
The free market economy died in the early 1980's after a long decade of inflation, then a steep interest rate hike in the early part of the next decade. Then, the economy began and survives today off of bubbles created and manipulated through the currency.
Yes there is a supply and demand issue when it comes to the price of oil and gas, but it is more of a supply and demand of dollars, not the supply and demand directly related to the commodity itself.