Trickle Down Tyranny (37 page)

California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein puts it this way: “It’s time we end subsidies that we cannot afford and tariffs that increase gas prices.”
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José Goldemberg, former Brazilian Secretary of State for Science and Technology, puts it this way: “If the U.S. entirely lifts the tariff, demand for ethanol will go through the roof and the pressure on the environment would be enormous.”
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I put it this way: If ethanol tariffs and subsidies are removed, Barack Obama and George Soros will have taken another step toward undermining the U.S. oil industry and destroying the environment.

It appears very likely that Obama’s energy strategy is being controlled by George Soros. I argued in
Trickle Up Poverty
that I believe Soros was instrumental in putting Obama in office, and Soros is now collecting his fee in the form of energy policy that builds his enormous fortune and increases his power around the world.

You also have to keep in mind that Soros always hedges his bets. He made his fortune as a hedge fund entrepreneur, and he hasn’t changed his ways since branching out into the energy industry.

He’s hedging his ethanol bets by also investing heavily in oil production. Like Barack Obama, Soros’s energy investments are not in the United States.

I’ve mentioned that during his family junket to Brazil in the early spring of 2011, Obama promised that country’s state-controlled oil company, Petrobras (short for Petroleo Brasileiro), $2 billion in American loans to help them jump-start their offshore drilling programs, in the Tupi oil field near Rio de Janeiro.

There’s more to the story.

The organization providing financing for the Brazilian offshore oil production to go forward is the U.S. Export-Import Bank. The Ex-Im Bank is part of the U.S. government and so is presumably beholden to American citizens. The idea that Obama would even think about signing off on a move to provide money that puts our own federal bank in direct competition with American oil interests borders on treason.

What makes the move increasingly suspect is that Soros Fund Management LLC, the same company that invested heavily in Brazilian ethanol production, also owns an $811 million stake in Petrobras. That stake in Brazilian oil represents 22 percent of the investments of Soros Fund Management.
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Even though, because of new regulatory rules, Soros’s company is no longer managing other people’s money,
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Soros continues to invest in energy production for himself and his family.

Soros Fund Management also owns 11.9 percent of an Australian energy company called InterOil. Soros’s stake in that company represents the third-largest single investment in his hedge fund.
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Now InterOil’s primary asset is a vast reserve of natural gas on the island of New Guinea. Development of this gas field is important to the success of Soros’s strategy. Soros hopes to curtail production of natural gas in the United States so that we, even though we have the largest recoverable fuel reserves in the world,
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will have to buy natural gas produced in other countries.

In order to protect his investment and to reduce the competition from U.S. companies, Soros is lobbying vigorously for the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to pass rules that would require American oil companies to disclose payments to foreign countries. In practice, the rules Soros favors would make it extremely difficult for American companies to make deals enabling them to drill for gas in foreign countries, and it would put them at a disadvantage against state-backed oil companies in other countries.
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Soros also funded a “documentary” screened at ultraliberal Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival that denounced the developers of shale gas for the impact their drilling had on the environment!

As if Soros, with his investment in the destruction of the Cerrado, has any concern whatsoever for the environment.

Soros openly admits that his primary purpose in making the film was to undermine U.S. production of natural gas.
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The combination of Soros’s trying to curtail natural gas production in this country and trying to make it more difficult for U.S. companies to produce oil and natural gas in other countries plays into his strategy of crippling the U.S. energy industry.

The perfidious activity doesn’t stop there.

The Ex-Im Bank has recently granted yet another loan to yet another foreign country for the purpose of developing oil capabilities that we in the United States desperately need to develop here. The bank, which has become Obama’s foreign energy production investment arm, provided $2.84 billion to Reficar, a wholly owned subsidiary of Ecopetrol, the national oil company of Colombia, to enable it to build new refineries. The money involved makes this the second-largest project financed by Ex-Im. The largest is the New Guinea natural gas project. This loan was made despite the fact that, with the exception of a low-capacity refinery opened in Valdez, Alaska, in 1993, there have been no new refineries built in the U.S. since 1976.
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Do you know who appoints the board of directors of the U.S.-government-controlled Export-Import Bank?

The president of the United States appoints them.

Do you know who appointed Fred Hochberg, the current president of the board of Ex-Im?

Barack Obama did.

Obama couldn’t even wait until he was sworn in to appoint Hochberg. On January 9, 2009, 11 days before his inauguration, Obama made a public announcement of his intention to nominate Hochberg.
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The reason Hochberg’s appointment was so urgent was that it was part of the payback exacted by George Soros for having chosen Obama as his puppet in the White House.

You see, before his appointment, Hochberg had been Dean of Milano, The New School for Management and Urban Policy, one of the most left-leaning universities in the United States.

The school was formerly known as The New School for Social Research and was founded in 1919 by disaffected leftist professors at Columbia University who objected to the loyalty oaths they were being subjected to in order to prove they weren’t communist dissidents.
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I remember when I was in college during the late 1950s and early ’60s just how radical a reputation the New School had. It offered a temporary home for Marxist intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse—“the father of the new left”
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—when they fled from Nazi Germany.

Its politics haven’t changed much in the past half century.

Hochberg, the new head of the Ex-Im Bank, shares their radical leftist views. He also happens to be openly gay, and he’s member of the public policy committee of the Human Rights Campaign, an organization championing gay and lesbian rights.
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He’s been touted by the gay journal
Out Magazine
as “the 15th most powerful gay person in America.”
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George Soros is a frequent visitor to the New School.

In 2007, the school hosted Soros at a panel about how philanthropists spend their money. During that panel, Soros was questioned by Hochberg about the value of contributing to political candidates in the light of Soros’s support of John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. Soros answered that it was “money better spent.”
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Things have come full circle.

Now Hochberg is the head of a federal bank that has no congressional oversight, and he brings a leftist political philosophy in keeping with that of George Soros and Barack Obama to his job at a financial institution whose choices of where and how much to invest are outside of any regulation, even that of the Constitution.

Its activities are determined by only one person: the president of the United States.

In this case, that means they’re determined by George Soros, since the president is effectively Soros’s proxy.

The U.S., then, will either print money or borrow it from China and loan it to the Colombians to build refineries that compete with our own. In return, the United States is supposed to receive 15,000 temporary jobs.

Those jobs are projected to last four years.

And you’ll never hear of those jobs again after you read this.

The Real Energy Crisis

Obama’s energy policies during the first two years of his administration have reflected Soros’s vision, a vision developed through his anti-American think tank, Center for American Progress. That organization has been a fountain of leftist, anti-capitalist thinking since it was founded in 2003.

The Obama/Soros energy policy has several components, including promoting green energy, causing oil and gas prices to “skyrocket,” stifling oil and natural gas production in the U.S., weakening the dollar, and aiding and abetting the enemy by encouraging and giving international competitors loans through the Export-Import Bank for projects in competition with those promoted by U.S. interests.

Among the most important members of Obama’s team of czars was Carol Browner, one of the key people Obama has tapped for his administration as part of his energy strategy. Browner was a member of the Commission for a Sustainable World Society of the group Socialist International, which, as its name indicates, is a leftist political group dedicated to the spread of socialism around the world.
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Her green energy activities were an extension of her political philosophy, which focuses on the destruction of capitalism.

At the same time, the EPA and the CFTC have been implementing another component of the Obama energy policy: making sure that U.S. oil companies are continually stopped as they try to explore and develop new oil production capabilities. As of February 2011, there were more than 100 oil drilling permits awaiting review by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement. At that time, the Obama administration was issuing an average of fewer than two permits a month.
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In addition, Obama has reversed his earlier decision to open U.S. coastal waters to exploration, instead banning any drilling on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts of the United States and in the Gulf of Mexico. The effect of this will be to reduce oil production in the Gulf by more than 200,000 barrels a day at a cost of well over a billion dollars annually in lost revenues as more than 30 Gulf oil rigs shut down, leaving some 6,000 employees out of work. The ancillary effect will be to take away jobs from those who support the oil industry, from restaurant owners to retailers to equipment wholesalers.
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The rising gas prices Steven Chu speaks of—remember, it was Chu who said we need to make sure gasoline prices in the United States reach European levels—are an important part of Obama’s energy strategy, which is focused on finding ways to make oil and natural gas prohibitively expensive and force us into adopting so-called green energy technology.

Obama is also now floating the idea of a mileage-based tax on gasoline in the form of what it calls the Transportation Opportunities Act. The “opportunities” in the title are for the administration to intrude even further into your life by requiring you to install an electronic device on your car that records the miles you drive, with payment for those miles being deducted from your credit card every time you pay to fuel up at the gas station. The program would be administered by something called the Surface Transportation Revenue Alternatives Office, which would develop the program by doing what the plan calls “a study framework that defines the functionality of a mileage-based user fee system and other systems.”
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It’s a plan that would impose taxes on the poor, increase the cost of gasoline—which is already taxed exorbitantly—and further weaken the oil industry by reducing the number of miles driven by U.S. car owners.

In other words, it’s a plan that fits in nicely with the administration’s attack on American gas and oil production and sales.

I’ve explained in chapter 4, “Tyranny of the Treasurer,” how Ben Bernanke at the Fed and Timothy Geithner at the Treasury Department have systematically devalued the dollar on world markets. Their policies also have a powerful impact on the price of oil. Simply put, as the value of the dollar goes down, the price of the oil we have to purchase on the international market goes up. U.S. financial policy works hand in hand with the Obama/Soros energy policy to drive the price of gasoline up, with no end in sight.

You can’t mention the name Barack Obama without mentioning the name George Soros at the same time. The two are the political equivalent of Siamese twins. They’re ideologically joined.

The list of Ex-Im-funded energy projects is a perfect representation of the Obama-Soros anti-American energy strategy. It focuses on production in several key energy industry segments: corn/sugarcane for ethanol production, oil, and natural gas. What stands out is that this strategy focuses on those industries in every area of the world but the most important one: the United States.

I maintain that George Soros is dictating energy policy in many key areas, and his confederate in the White House is putting his vision into practice.