In Search Of Petro-Villains

The Delegator-in-Chief has announced the creation of yet another inert task force, this one forced upon the attorney general and tasked with examining the role of “traders and speculators” in skyrocketing gasoline prices. Technically this “working group,” as the administration is calling it, is a sub–task force of the extant Financial  Fraud Enforcement Task Force, and will include representatives from the FTC, CFTC, FRB, SEC, USDA, etc. Presumably, when the group finishes its work at some indefinite point in the future, its findings will be carefully reviewed by a commission, which will then issue a handsomely bound report to a czar, who will finally inter it in a filing cabinet.

What is causing high gasoline prices? Increased demand associated with the global economic recovery and (greater than average) Mideast instability certainly play their part, as does the continued control of a major portion of proven petroleum reserves by OPEC, a paradigmatic cartel whose very raison d’être is market manipulation. But the operant cause here, the main event to which this speculator business is a sideshow, is the man himself: President Obama, and his say-one-thing-and-do-another energy policies. He demagogues on oil speculators because he can’t — he won’t — do anything else.

Explain away an economic calamity as the byproduct not of bad policies, but of evildoers gaming the system, and find a group rich and unpopular enough to fit the bill; the rhetoric comes from page one of the Obama playbook and recapitulates the sorry formula we saw at work in his deficit speech. (Thus the president sneaks into a weekly YouTube address on the topic of fuel prices a perfect non sequitur about government subsidies to rich oil companies. There are many good reasons to end this bit of corporatism, but it is exactly wrong to suggest it will redound to the benefit of consumers at the pump in the near term.)

Behind the doublespeak, the reality is that President Obama’s favored policies do nothing to ease fuel prices, and more damning still, he doesn’t care. In 2008, when the national average was last peaking above $4 per gallon, candidate Obama made it clear that while he would have preferred a “gradual” increase, he saw ever-higher petroleum prices as a necessary antecedent and augur of our immaculate, green-energy future. And even now, as oil in the Gulf of Mexico sits and waits for new permits and the EPA scuttles the latest effort to tap the estimated 27 billion barrels of crude sitting below Alaska’s north Arctic coast, the president assures us that “what’s driving oil prices up right now is not the lack of supply. There’s enough supply.”

We agree, there is enough supply to meet current demand: at $4 dollars a gallon, and beyond.
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