I think you are vastly oversimplifying. "Oil speculators," includes contract buyers trying to lock in airline fuel costs and ordinary investors looking to commodities as a safer haven than the already over-leveraged stock market.

Demonizing others will not absolve the Street.

While I agree that the promiscuous vending of mortgages, many to folks the originator knew when selling the mortgage would never be repaid, if bad mortgages were the only problem, things wouldn't be nearly as economically bad as they are.

Things are so bad because Wall Street sharpies leveraged the mortgage debt to an extent only sustainable if real estate prices, peaked at 20%-40% over their historical values relative to rents and income, continued to rise.

All of those ill written mortgages were written because of the demand created by Wall Street securitizers for more mortgages to securitize into CDOs, slice and dice, re-slice and dice, and vend to ill-advisers investors, while retaining the, presumably, least risky slices, which were often placed in Specialized Investment Vehicles, established in places like the Cayman Islands, to move the toxins off the books.

The Collateralized Debt Obligation was invented by some financial sharpie about twenty five years ago, but determining the value of CDOs was a bit of a problem so they did not become immediately popular. Earlier this decade some other financial sharpie developed a valuation model which became accepted as reliable and CDOs became a land office business and word went out across the land "bring us mortgages." Thus the promiscuous vending of the types of mortgages of which you write.

Those issuing and holding CDOs purchased Credit Default Swaps, CDS, to protect themselves against defaults of the underlying mortgages, and other types of debt, and then the CDS were securitized into Synthetic CDOs, backed by zero cash.

When the real estate bubble burst the value of the CDO and SCDOs plummeted to an extent not really know by anyone. Banks quit lending to other banks because of the uncertainty of the potential lender as to how much toxic debt was on the books of the borrower.

Additionally, the more financially savvy amongst us saw an opportunity to buy a house at zero down, often with the closing costs included in the mortgage, refinanced as the value rose to remove equity for consumer spending or investment, and then walked away with their profits when the value dropped.

Really, the poor saps who went for the sucker mortgages really deserve only a minor share of the blame for the situation in which we find ourselves.

"The speculators are setting us up again -- this time to kill alternative energy development in the United States. A $25 / barrel tax on crude oil would be a good thing."

I want clean, alternative energy too, but be realistic.

From the largest demand for oil ever, hence the rise in oil prices, to the largest decline in consumption in more than 25 years, hence the fall in prices. Oil purchasers, hedgers and speculators intentionally increasing or lowering prices of a commodity like oil at will is ridiculous.

Alternative energy has had decades to get its act together. Nothing but talk and promises and excuses and blame the oil industry and we need more time and money, etc. Alternative energy is just around the corner like the promise of a cure for cancer, if we just had an unlimited supply of taxpayer money.

Should oil pay for alternative energy? Should the allopathic medicine industry pay for alternative medicine? Should the auto industry pay everyone for shoes so they would walk more?

I have no faith in the government trying to intentionally manipulate the price of oil including taxes. All that money will vaporize as useless.