Trickle Down Tyranny (35 page)

On Veterans’ Day, 2011, Obama vetoed the project by delaying it until after the 2012 elections. He ostensibly bowed to the radical environmentalists who have impeded energy development in the U.S. for decades, saying that more study needed to be done to determine the impact on the environment and the climate. In the process, he went against the construction workers’ unions, who overwhelmingly favor going ahead with the project.

In fact, he’s just making sure we don’t produce enough energy to maintain our status as the world’s most powerful nation.

It’s unbelievable to me that the American people aren’t demonstrating in front of the White House demanding that Obama resign. This action alone is enough to demonstrate that he is not intelligent enough or informed enough to be our president, and that he has everything but the best interests of the United States in mind when he makes decisions like this.

It may well be that Obama just killed the Keystone XL pipeline project permanently by this delay. If Canada can’t wait another year and a half to see if the pipeline will be built, there’s a waiting buyer for their oil. All they have to do is transport it to British Columbia and load it on oil tankers for shipment to China.

That may be what the Traitor-in-Chief had in mind all along.

It’s not just a sop to environmentalists. It’s another direct attack on America—like the others I’ve been cataloging for you in this book—that Barack Obama has been waging since he came to power.

What no one seems to be paying attention to is the fact that Mexico is drilling a deepwater oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, only 22 miles from U.S. territorial waters. Cuba is drilling a deepwater well 60 miles from Key West, Florida. Russia is exploring in the Arctic Ocean, near the coast of Alaska.

Obama is calling on us to “protect the environment” by not drilling, while our sworn enemies are using outmoded technology that is guaranteed to create pollution that dwarfs anything American technology could possibly generate.

Obama won’t rest until he’s brought Big Oil to its knees and crippled our economy in the bargain.

In order to do this, he’s not just beseeching other oil-producing nations to ramp up their production, and he’s not just attacking the oil companies themselves, and he’s not just effectively canceling projects like the Keystone XL pipeline and offshore drilling in American waters.

He’s going after commodities “speculators,” particularly those that buy and sell oil futures.

It’s the third leg of his beg, tax, and persecute strategy to bring the oil industry in the United States under government control.

Tyranny of the Government Regulators

At the center of Obama’s strategy of using regulatory agencies to stifle American economic growth is the idea that commodities speculators are the cause of the rise in oil prices. Where energy is concerned, he’s relying heavily on two of those agencies, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) and the EPA, to help him implement the government takeover of the energy industry. The two agencies were created as part of the surge of new regulatory bodies in the 1970s, and they represent the rise of regulation as a punitive force in American politics and business.

At the head of these agencies are representatives of two of the cornerstones of regulatory power that form the foundation of Obama’s power base: Goldman Sachs and the radical left.

The man he’s tapped to go after commodities traders is Gary Gensler.

Here’s what you need to know about Gensler, Obama’s handpicked choice to run the CFTC.

Like so many others in positions of financial industry power in the Obama administration, CFTC Chairman Gary Gensler is a former Goldman Sachs employee. His job duties involve regulating the multi-trillion-dollar commodities futures market. He oversees the commodities exchanges that trade future contracts for products that range from oil to wheat to derivative financial instruments.

Hiring Gensler to regulate these activities is like hiring the fox to oversee the henhouse.

That’s because Gensler, the man now charged with regulating commodities trading, played an important part in creating the financial meltdown that enabled Obama to get elected in the first place. He did that through making sure that close regulation of the trading of financial derivatives did
not
happen prior to 2008.

During the Clinton administration, Gensler was part of the team that saw to it that banks and other financial institutions were able to continue to package subprime mortgage loans and sell them to other financial companies and investors in order to hedge their own positions without close scrutiny. Gensler also helped rescue Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund that had gotten in trouble trading financial derivatives.
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As I explained in
Trickle Up Poverty
, when banks and traders were allowed to engage in selling suspect financial derivatives and in selling securities short with no checks whatsoever, I believe these practices triggered the financial meltdown that resulted in Obama’s election.

Did you know that Gensler’s policy changes are also responsible in large part for the implosion of Jon Corzine’s MF Global? I’ve told you about Corzine’s activities in chapter 4, but you need to know that between 2000 and 2005, Gensler was responsible for loosening the regulations guiding the types of investments futures brokers like MF Global could make with their customers’ money. These policy changes resulted in an environment where brokers could put their clients at much-increased risk, and they were instrumental in Corzine’s downfall.
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Now, Gensler is charged with regulating commodities trading. He’s supposed to do exactly what he wouldn’t do when he was part of the Clinton team in charge of regulating derivatives trading.

He’s the man Obama is depending on to “investigate” the role of commodities traders in the rise of oil prices.

I don’t trust him to uncover fraud.

I do trust him to carry out Obama’s continuing demonization of the oil and gas industry through attacks on commodities traders. The administration says he’s supposed to find them guilty of bilking the public, of making too much money at the public’s expense.

In fact, he’s supposed to take the spotlight off of Obama’s role as the true cause of rising oil prices.

The country is not buying Obama’s version of events, though.

Americans understand that Obama’s strategy to reduce prices is largely symbolic. The power-grabber in the White House rejects what he calls “quick fix” policies to lower oil prices while insisting that he’s focused on the long term.

In a
Washington Post
-ABC News poll, 71 percent of the people responding said they were being hurt by high gas prices, and 57 percent of them found fault with the way Obama was handling the economy. The signal Obama is sending is that “we’re not interested in producing oil and gas in this country,” according to Thomas Pyle, the president of the Institute for Energy Research.
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That’s not something Americans want to hear.

What’s even more revealing, though, is how little Obama understands of the market forces that are at work in determining oil and gas prices. At the time the president went on his crusade to find fraud among oil speculators, oil supplies were at normal seasonal levels, not an indication that any sort of fraud was being perpetrated. As one industry analyst put it, “This is a transparently political fishing expedition that insinuates that fraud or manipulation is distorting oil prices without providing even the flimsiest factual basis for such a suspicion.”
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As I’ve told you, Obama and his henchmen are doing everything they can to keep oil and gas prices as high as possible. That’s why Obama is actually banking on Gensler to fail. The subversive in the Oval Office doesn’t want to bring down oil prices, and Gensler is just the man to make sure they continue to rise to unprecedented levels.

Rising oil and gas prices are part of their plan to make the United States a second-class nation. One way to do that is to push a “green” agenda, a political strategy that places the interests of environmentalists above concerns about our economic stability and our national security. To accomplish that he’s relying on the EPA.

The Environmental Protection Agency was the creation of the Nixon administration in 1970. It was put in place in order to reverse the effects of the pollution spawned by the postwar industrial expansion in the United States, but in the Obama administration, it’s been transformed into the governmental arm of the radical environmentalist movement.

Lisa Jackson, the current head of the EPA, likes to brag that she’s a “Shell Oil creation.” In fact, Shell Oil financed her undergraduate education at Tulane University through a scholarship they provided to her.
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She’s also a radical environmentalist. As the head of the EPA, she promotes “environmental justice.” That’s based on the idea that U.S. environmental policy disproportionately affects people of color, and we’ve got to shut down our energy industry so that minorities won’t be further harmed by pollution. Jackson’s idea of energy policy is to promote government-subsidized “green jobs” so she can create “environmentalists for life.” For her, the EPA is synonymous with the environmental movement, and she makes it clear that she will do whatever she needs to in order to implement policies that significantly impede the expansion of our energy industry.
⁵²

Financing Jackson’s education is one mistake Shell Oil would like to take back.

On April 26, 2011, Jackson’s EPA denied permission for the Royal Dutch Shell—Shell Oil’s parent company—to drill off Alaska’s northern coast.

The EPA’s reason?

After the company had spent some $4 billion in exploration costs and had gone through the tortuous process of applying for a permit to drill, the EPA found that they had missed something. They hadn’t considered the environmental impact of the emissions from an ice-breaking boat they planned to use in the operation. The pollution created by the vessel, the EPA insisted, might contaminate the air and put at risk the inhabitants of a small village about 70 miles away.
⁵³

That’s it.

That’s the reason Shell, which had jumped over every other hurdle the EPA put in its way, was denied a permit to drill off the coast of Alaska.

Decisions like this are characteristic of the dictatorial power this administration is wielding over the very industry that is the lifeblood of our energy production, the foundation of our economic well-being.

Obama tapped the EPA to take over this role when the Senate refused, in June 2009, to pass the cap-and-trade legislation that the House had approved in 2008. That legislation had been described as “a centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s ambitious effort to transform the way Americans produce and consume energy.”
⁵⁴

That should read, “President Barack Obama’s ambitious effort to intrude further into our lives and wreak more havoc on the U.S. economy through his radical energy agenda.”

The radical environmentalists’ logic is straightforward: Making the cost of burning coal and oil significantly higher will encourage investment in new energy sources that reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Obama buys into it. He’s said as much himself when he explained during the 2008 campaign that under the policies he was proposing energy prices would “necessarily skyrocket.”
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We should have listened more closely at the time.

We should have gotten the message.

What happened when he couldn’t pass his cap-and-tax legislation perfectly defines
trickle down tyranny
: He turned to the Environmental Protection Agency in order to bypass Congress.

He decided to legislate by presidential decree, using the EPA as his enforcer.

The Supreme Court backed him up. Their decision in the 2007 case
Massachusetts v. EPA
ruled that the EPA
does
have the power to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

The Clean Air Act itself is not quite so clear. For instance, it doesn’t recognize carbon dioxide as a pollutant that needs to be reduced. It lists carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, particulate matter, and lead among the primary pollutants that need to be cleaned up.
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And the United States has done an extraordinary job of removing them from the environment. By the year 2000, carbon monoxide levels were 31 percent lower than they were when the Clean Air Act was passed. Sulfur dioxide (27 percent reduction), particulate matter (71 percent), and lead (98 percent) have all been cleaned up as well.
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That hasn’t stopped the EPA from implementing regulations that now threaten to cripple the U.S. electric grid altogether.

You remember the freak snowstorm that slammed the East Coast in October 2011. More than 800,000 Connecticut residents were without electric power for nearly a month after that storm!

The reason?

Lisa Jackson and the EPA are doing Obama’s bidding in order to shut down the U.S. energy industry.

Buried in the mountains of regulatory documents compiled to make sure Americans don’t have enough energy to meet their needs is this: The EPA “is aware . . . that this regulation may detrimentally impact the reliability of the electric grid.” The regulation they’re talking about is one designed on the face of it to reduce the amount of mercury released into the air as a result of generating electricity. In fact, though, the regulation is designed to shut down coal-fired electricity generation.