Editor's letter - Please tell me when it's all over

"They have all the oil and they don't like us very much," he observed. Talk about an understatement. 'They' in this instance were Venezuela, Columbia, Ecuador, and Bolivia, although he went on to explain that those four Central American countries could be replaced by four Middle Eastern or African oil-producing states and the result would be the same: They've got it and we need it.

In his opinion things are going to get a lot worse before they get better - in fact it's unlikely, he said, that