During his candidacy and his first few days in office, Barack Obama has made both public and private comments regarding the use and cost of various forms of energy. He famously whispered that as president he would attempt to bankrupt the coal companies and the utilities dependent on coal for power generation. Quite recently, he said that $5 per gallon gasoline would be good for the country. Because he’s never held a real job,  commuted an hour to work, wrestled with the problems of a small business or assumed personal reponsibility for a profit/loss statement, Mr. Obama knows nothing about the realities of life here in these United States of America. He wasn’t concerned about helping Mother Earth when these comments were made. He was talking about controlling the lives of Americans through the availability, cost and appropriate use of energy. With the dollar nearly valueless, energy is now the new currency. By constricting supply, redirecting its flow or outlawing certain uses, Obama and his puppeteers can now control the entire US economy.

The carbon credit cap-and-trade scheme provides no direct benefit to the environment, the economy or the citizenry. It does, however, give the government dictatorial powers to control industrial output, personal mobility, even the flow of information. All of it requires energy. Starve a certain economic activity of energy, and it disappears. Provide cheap, abundant energy to another sector, and it will flourish. That’s called a planned economy. See Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Chavez. Even if the carbon credit tax scheme (yes, of course it raises taxes) doesn’t come to be, Mr. Obama and the Democrats in Congress have a dozen other means to achieve nearly identical results. Energy, like money, can be used to reward political allies and punish opponents. Energy, like money, evokes strong emotions of envy, entitlement and greed.

If you’ve ever watched one of those post-apocalyptic movies that hit theaters every now and then, you can’t help but notice that almost every film, energy is highly prized. Everyone fights over the available energy source, be it ancient fuel depot or swine flatulence, to stay alive or to impose their will over others. The leftist wing of the Democratic Party senses this. The private foundations and academic loonies have been touting this as the ultimate means of control for decades. But, how to get Americans to relinquish their standard of living and personal mobility - both possible only with cheap and abundant energy?

Enter the bogeyman - Al Gore, with an alarming vision of an environmental Armaggedon, replete with celebrity endorsements, Bruce Springsteen playing background music and thousands of militant morons flooding into the streets.  And so, Big Al and the environuts have trotted out their shameless scam of global warming to scare gullible Americans into scaling back their energy use and accepting the exhorbitant tax schemes that are being layered into energy costs. The environmental bogeyman frightens Americans into giving up their personal mobility, scaling back their standard of living and limiting their economic freedoms.

The media play along. In recent days, Exxon was again lambasted for its ‘obscene’ 2008 profits of $45 billion - a one time event. No one in the mainstream media bothered to report that over half of this profit was confiscated by the US government in the form of corporate income tax. Nor did they mention that Exxon actually collected nearly $300 billion in federal gasoline taxes for the government and turned it over within a few hours of collecting it. It costs Exxon lots of money to collect those taxes, do the reporting and transfer funds collected from thousands of gasoline stations and credit card issuers. Exxon was not reimbursed. The government expended no effort in collecting those taxes, other than to call the bank to see if they were deposited. And then, moments later, our government spent it. Out the door. Up in smoke. Never to be seen again. At some point, if voters allow it to happen, the government will take control of the oil and coal industries to ‘protect’ us from price gouging, when in fact it’s the hidden taxes in energy prices that are making them unaffordable to working Americans.  Once the means of production are controlled (Hugo Chavez playbook, p. 1), the government can impose its will as it sees fit. Whomsoever controls the levers of power, now controls each and every one of us.

So, when the brownouts start happening on a regular basis, when local radio stations featuring conservative talk show hosts are put on a limited broadcasting schedule to conserve power, and when your monthly electric bill is roughly equal to your mortgage payment, remember who started it all - Obama and his cronies in Congress. Their dreary utopia of equally shared misery is the best that socialists can offer.

Once Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the government, it wasn’t much of a stretch to have the government invest in private sector banks, buy their bad loans and generally reward poor performance. When the guys at GM got wind of the handouts, they wanted some, too. And then Arnold let Washington know that California wasn’t doing so well, either. Not be outdone, New Hampshire jumped up and starting squawking, too. Cities and counties threatened to default on their bonds. Everyone was jumping on the bailout bandwagon. But, the tractor pulling the bandwagon was running on empty.

Lost in the glare of media attention was a move by the Fed to pump $600 billion in freshly printed, unbacked dolars into the banking system to ‘create liquidity’ a day before the bailout bill was signed into law. Just a few weeks before that move, the Fed had already started shoveling money out the window with its special lending deals to banks and financial holding companies. Once the bailout package was enacted, several of the largest banks in the country (and the world) took advantage of the government funding and mortgage buybacks. The banks were supposed take this cheap money and immediately start lending it to their best customers at reasonable rates. They didn’t. Some of them sat on the money, waiting for market opportunities they could exploit with their huge piles of cheap cash. Others targeted smaller regional banks for acquisition. And a few started buying up the very same mortgage pools that they’d abandoned just a few weeks ago. The only difference is that these mortgage securities and derivatives were now priced way below market. A bargain, especially if you’re flush with billions of borrowed taxpayer dollars. What about lending to small business and consumers? You must be kidding.

Treasury Secretary Paulson is a smart man. He’s been under enormous pressure to save the US and world economies from annihilation, and he’s partly succeeded. What neither he nor anyone associated with the bailout package can prevent are the unintended consequences. Banks, investors, hedge funds, state budget directors, bond traders, insurers and even auto executives started to game the system, looking for ways to get a piece of this trillion dollar bonanza. The bailout package was probably a good idea. Only time will tell. Something had to be done to pump up confidence and nothing works better than a flood of money. But, even though the printing presses are running day and night, even the US Treasury will find a bottom to that wheelbarrow of cash. Printing even more money can flip deflation caused by a growing recession into hyperinflation in an eyeblink. This country could be facing the specter of stagflation, when the economy is in recession but prices spiral out of control.

For the last month, business TV pundits talked about ‘testing new lows’ in the stock markets and ‘credit freezes’ for businesses. What’s lurking in the background is something way bigger - national defaults. Russia is on the verge of reneging on its foreign debt. Again. Given the fragility of both the equity and debt markets around the world, a Russian default would have devastating consequences worldwide. And they have the mendacity to do it. What Russia lost in the Cold War, it can win back here and now. With financial markets underwater, America, Europe and a few affluent Asian countries cannot float the entire world. Russia and its old allies, the oil-rich Muslim nations of the middle East, can make their moves unimpeded. What they’ll do and how far they take it is anyone’s guess. Let’s hope they lose their nerve.