The world price of crude oil has been on a roller coaster lately, gyrating above and below $100 a barrel. Several weeks ago, prices at the pump reached $5 a gallon in some places but seem to have settled down, at least temporarily, to less than $4 in many parts of the country. The elevated cost of gasoline—and of heating oil, aviation fuel and other energy products derived from “black gold”—understandably is a matter of great concern to most Americans.

Rising energy costs already have changed many families’ summer vacation plans, threatened to short-circuit the weak recovery from the Great Recession and, combined with recent increases in food prices, contributed to incipient inflationary pressures that foreshadow a lower standard of living and a return to the stagflation of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Fluctuations in crude oil prices are being driven mostly by uncertainty over supplies from oil-producing countries in North Africa and the Middle East, along with a weakening U.S. dollar and other political factors that largely are beyond the control of the much-maligned U.S. oil industry.

But they are not totally beyond Washington’s control. Just recently, President Obama reversed course once again, announcing policy initiatives that the White House claims will increase domestic oil production.

The president says he now wants to lease more drilling areas in the Gulf of Mexico and reduce bureaucratic delays in issuing permits for energy exploration and recovery.

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As we head into this Memorial Day weekend, Americans will be paying more at the pump than they were even a year ago. According to a recent survey by AAA, gas prices have increased by $1.06 in the past year. But while Americans are busy feeling the pinch and demanding solutions to higher prices, the Obama Administration has little to offer but excuses.

The Heritage Foundation’s newest video takes on several of President Obama’s favorite myths and puts them to rest.

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In an apparent pro-business pivot, President Barack Obama promised Tuesday in a Wall Street Journal editorial eliminate those “dumb” and “outdated” regulatory regimes that hinder the nation’s economic growth.

“Regulations do have costs; often, as a country, we have to make tough decisions about whether those costs are necessary,” the president wrote. “But what is clear is that we can strike the right balance. We can make our economy stronger and more competitive, while meeting our fundamental responsibilities to one another.”

The president cemented his regulatory overture in a supplementary executive order and memorandum nudging the bureaucratic structure to soften those onerous regulations that “stifle job creation.” Enumerating the utility of a responsible regulatory system, the president’s order calls for a regulatory system in which a balance is stuck between the protection of public health and welfare and the promotion of economic growth and innovation.

But that caveat — that the Administration’s regulatory czars must use the least burdensome tools available — has ruffled the feathers of some progressive pro-regulatory organizations, who have already begun lobbying agency heads to ensure the order has minimal impact.

The groups will no doubt be busy, stirring dozens of regulatory pots: Coal, biomass, health care, education, Net neutrality, and card check. For a glimpse into havoc these groups have already wrought, BIG GOVERNMENT has laid out below those industries most affected by their iron-fisted regulatory regimes.

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Buried beneath the avalanche of press coverage about the lame-duck Congress, I found a story about President Obama’s mid-December meeting with twenty corporate CEOs. The purpose of this Blair House get-together was to discuss how to jump-start our still-ailing economy. Among other aims, Mr. Obama reiterated his goals to increase employment, end the recession, and double U.S. exports over the next five years.

These are lofty and laudable ambitions. But it seems that Mr. Obama’s regulatory bureaucrats haven’t gotten the memo. For example, consider the counter-productive impact of their efforts on agriculture.

As any shopper knows, food prices this past year have been rising faster than the overall rate of inflation. “Fears of a global food crisis swept the world’s commodity markets as prices for staples such as corn, rice and wheat spiraled after the U.S. government warned of ‘dramatically’ lower supplies,” the Financial Times reported in early October. “There is growing concern among countries about continuing volatility and uncertainty in food markets,” said World Bank president Robert Zoellick later that month. “These concerns have been compounded by recent increases in grain prices.”

Confronting this looming food-supply crisis is the American farmer. His productivity is such that the United States is the world’s largest agricultural exporter, with $108.7 billion in farm products shipped abroad in 2010. Helping him increase the supply of agricultural products is the key to addressing both rising food prices and global shortages. His productivity is also critical to our country’s broader economic recovery.

So, you would think that the administration’s apparatchiks would be doing whatever they can to remove the regulatory impediments that farmers face. But you would be wrong. Consider several ways in which federal regulators are threatening agricultural productivity, both directly and indirectly.

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In a new Fortune piece, former Rep. Harold Ford, Jr., Chairman of the moderate Democratic Leadership Council, hits out at President Obama saying he needs to make some “halftime adjustments” including “order[ing] his department heads and agency chiefs to declare a moratorium on new regulations until further notice.”

The critique is timely, given news that Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Julius Genachowski is engaged in a less-than-stealthy, renewed effort to ram through net neutrality regulations in advance of a Republican takeover of the House that will see one of several opponents of net neutrality assume chairmanship of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.), a leading contender for the job, recently wrote in a policy memo that “The FCC’s regulatory compass is broken as it continues in its unrelenting pursuit to impose so-called network neutrality regulations, regardless of whether the agency has the legal authority for such a blind power grab.”

In addition, Ford’s urging of a regulatory moratorium will no doubt hearten Gulf state residents concerned about an ongoing, de facto “permitorium” preventing the resumption of drilling operations in the region in the wake of the BP disaster, and subsequent drilling moratorium, earlier this year.

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The President of the United States was swept into office two years ago promising to bring change to Washington, starting with a more transparent and ethical government. In fact, Obama declared, “transparency and the rule of law would be the touchstones of this presidency.” Apparently, not everybody in the White House read the interoffice memorandum.

Following the BP tragedy, the White House commissioned the Secretary of the Interior to provide a safety report on offshore drilling. Secretary Salazar pulled in a panel of seven outside advisors to assist in his analysis of the safety of offshore drilling, and provide recommendations for going forward. A final draft of this report was sent to White House Climate Czar Carol Browner’s office before being forwarded to the president. Last week, it was reported that Browner’s staff edited the document to imply that the outside advisors recommended a drilling moratorium, when in fact this was not true. The tailored draft was given to the president, and the policy was made.

Whether or not the recommendation of outside advisors would have changed minds regarding the drilling ban is debatable. What isn’t debatable is the resulting economic destruction in the Gulf from President Obama’s decision based – in part – on information from a falsified document.

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Obama administration policies have caused “irreperable harm” to the Gulf Coast economy, stifling the energy sector and culling employment within it to a degree previously underestimated by the administration itself.

That is the conclusion drawn by Louisiana State University economics professor, Dr. Joseph Mason, author of a new critique of the Obama administration’s Inter-Agency Economic Report released last week estimating losses due to the deepwater drilling moratorium currently in effect.  According to Dr. Mason, that report understated the ban’s impact on job losses by as much as 60 percent.

During a conference call Tuesday, Mason criticized the administration’s methodology for calculating the economic effects of the ban, and said the administration used inflated, flawed logic to calculate its valuation of economic offsets—such as unemployment wages—and their counter effects on the economic downturn. He said the report was inaccurately rosy in describing the Gulf States’ economic recoveries following the BP spill.

“Those states have been irreparably harmed,” Mason said. “Essentially all of these economies have taken the summer off and are trying to get back to the baseline.”

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President Obama unveiled his latest economic proposal in Cleveland recently in a desperate attempt to boost the Democrats’ fleeting hopes of maintaining control of Congress this November.  But after two years of massive government spending and job-killing policies, the damage has already been done and it’s clear this fall’s election will be boiled down to a simple choice: job killers versus job creators.

With unemployment at 9.6%, the American people are clamoring for candidates with a solutions-oriented agenda for job creation as an alternative to the job-killing policies of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid machine.

Intel CEO Paul Otellini described it this way: “I think this group does not understand what it takes to create jobs.  And I think they’re flummoxed by their experiment in Keynesian economics not working.”

Simply put, candidates who propose job-creating policies and show how their opponent’s policies are killing jobs will win decisively in 2010.

American Solutions has already put forth its Jobs Here, Jobs Now, Jobs First plan, so let’s examine the top 10 job-killing policies of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid machine.

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While Harry Reid may have allowed the energy tax hikes to die on the floor of the Senate, liberals nationwide have continued their attacks on the energy industry. The Gulf oil spill is barely a fond memory of a moratorium and Democrats are already seizing on the incident to push a host of job-killing, industry-kneecapping taxes and regulations designed to do what they failed to do legislatively: take down the American energy industry.

First the regulations: starting in January, the EPA will begin enforcing a little known provision called the “Tailoring Rule” – a new series of regulations that allow the EPA to dole out permits to carbon-generating companies “allowing” them to pollute in certain amounts, strictly regulated by environmental watchdogs. These regulations don’t just touch the usual suspects, but also renewable energy sources that don’t immediately fall into the “green” category as defined by environmental groups – sources like Maine’s biomass industry, which creates usable energy from environmental waste. Under the EPA regulations, the biomass industry, which was viewed – and treated – up until now, as carbon neutral, would face a host of regulations directed at greenhouse gas producers – regulations that would greatly raise the cost of doing business and could have dire economic consequences for Maine and beyond.

And then there’s the taxes.

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In a visit to Washington, D.C., yesterday, a group of about fifty energy industry workers and representatives from the Gulf of Mexico area told lawmakers, reporters and bloggers that if the Obama administration and Congress are serious about creating and saving jobs, they will lift the moratorium on energy exploration in the Gulf.

The workers were joined by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and former Rep. John Peterson (R-Pa.), outspoken opponents of both the moratorium and tax changes proposed by Democrats that opponents charge would hammer the energy industry.

Thomas Pyle, President of the American Energy Alliance, a group focused on maintaining energy industry jobs in the Gulf area said in a statement, “In an economy like this, the President and Congress should be looking for ways to strengthen U.S. businesses, not weaken them.”

Several of those who traveled to the Hill for meetings with members of Congress say they are suffering financially in the wake of the moratorium’s imposition, and that layoffs and business closures will be unavoidable should it remain in effect.

“My job matters,” said Thomas Clements, co-owner of Oilfield CNC Machining in Broussard, Louisiana. “So I’ve come to Washington to find somebody to hear me, to see my hopelessness, my no-man’s-land that I’m in because of these proposed tax changes to the energy industry and the moratorium.”  Clements elaborated, saying that he had planned to hire more workers this year, but the six-month moratorium on drilling has halted those plans.  All orders for new metal parts used in drilling have been canceled and no new orders are anticipated, said the small businessman, who questioned how his business could survive for the full six months of the moratorium during a lunch attended by Washington, D.C.-based reporters and bloggers.

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The United States never was intended to be a democracy, but rather a compound republic delegating clearly enumerated powers to the federal government and creating a masterfully designed system of checks and balances amongst its three branches meant to limit Washington’s intrusions on the sovereignties of the several states and the liberties of their peoples.

As attentive students of the New Deal know, however, any brake that the federal judiciary might think of applying to the expansion of the central government’s powers was undermined by FDR’s proposal to “pack” the Supreme Court after his landslide reelection to the White House in 1936. Although it failed to become law, the court-packing plan nevertheless soon was followed by the famous “switch in time that saved nine”, thereby ushering in a period of judicial deference to the executive and legislative branches that fulfilled the president’s intent, namely securing a working majority of justices willing to clear the path of constitutional objections to the Social Security Act, the Wagner Labor Relations Act, minimum wages and other legislative monuments to his “progressive” agenda. More than any other consequence of FDR’s politically-motivated meddling, the Commerce Clause thereafter became a dead letter, as Ms. Kagan candidly admitted during her recent confirmation hearings.

Mr. Obama apparently has as little respect for the third branch of government as FDR had. Twice rebuffed in tests of the moratorium he imposed on offshore deepwater drilling by the federal courts, issued by executive order on May 27, the president responded by ordering a new ban on exploratory drilling in waters deeper than 500 feet, effective until November 30.

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The media continue to report dismal economic news, raising the specter that our teetering economy may fall back into a “double-dip recession.” Continuing high unemployment is the biggest worry for most Americans. The percentage of working-age people in the labor force last month fell to 64.7 percent—the lowest figure in a quarter century.

You would think that the administration’s top priority, then, would be to foster a pro-investment, pro-hiring business atmosphere. You’d certainly not expect them to pursue policies that could push any impending recovery, fragile at best, over the “tipping point” and down into another economic chasm.

That, however, appears to be just what they’re doing.

The administration’s entire agenda—from “stimulus” spending, to government-run healthcare, to takeovers of financial institutions, to higher taxes—has spread paralyzing uncertainty throughout the investment community. But that hasn’t caused them even to slow down, let alone change course.

Consider three job-killing measures imposed by this administration in a single area: environmental regulation.

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A federal judge has, for the moment, spared already-suffering Gulf state residents from the brunt of President Obama’s most recent anti-energy Power Grab. It has enjoined the administration from implementing its moratorium on deepwater drilling. The Order is here, and the Opinion here.

The administration has vowed to appeal. Regardless of the outcome, this victory is temporary. As I detail in Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America, Obama and his administration are committed to strangling domestic energy production. At the same time they promise to also clamp down on the cost of consumption, all in a way that makes our last energy-poverty president, Jimmy Carter, appear a free-market pioneer.

This was telegraphed immediately after Obama’s inauguration by his by administration revoking massive tracts of public land from possible lease for domestic energy production, even to the point of suspending lease agreements already struck.

None of this is either accident or coincidence, but affirmed as a deliberate plan by Obama’s concurrent clamp-down on families’ access to energy with a cap-and-trade scheme he vowed would cause energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket”. Though he dared not speak the scheme’s name, Obama renewed his support for it in his Oval Office speech last Tuesday by praising the House-passed bill.

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