Oil speculation routinely adds as much as 50% to the price of oil, but corporate criminals, like the Koch brothers, don’t want you to know that. Instead they are financing ads that accuse Barack Obama of using environmental policy to keep oil prices high. They and the media Koch suckers who spew this garbage are lying.

A key conservative group will launch a new campaign this week aimed at trying to put the blame for high gas prices on the Obama administration.

The Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the libertarian-leaning nonprofit chaired by David Koch, will launch rallies and media campaigns in a series of states — beginning with Nebraska — asserting that the administration’s regulation of the energy industries is key to pain at the pump.

“We want the public to know there’s a reason these prices are going through the roof: It’s because of the environment produced by the regulatory practices of this administration,” the group’s president, Tim Phillips, told POLITICO.

The group doesn’t disclose its donors, though much of the Koch fortune was made in the refining business.

Phillips said the fact that gas prices have more than doubled since the day President Barack Obama was inaugurated, when a gallon of gasoline sold, on average, for $1.83, is no accident. In recent weeks, prices at the pump have been nosing toward the most recent spike — $4.12 a gallon — in the summer of 2008, before they plummeted during the global economic slowdown.

Most analysts blame the global economic recovery, as well as turmoil in the Middle East, for much of the increase, but the oil industry and Republican critics have long argued that opening new areas to drilling and speeding the permitting process would lower prices. The administration also has sought to increase taxes for profitable oil companies, saying it would put the proceeds toward longer-term alternative energy solutions but hasn’t offered a quick fix… [emphasis added]