Republicans have been trying to pin the blame for the recent rise in oil prices on President Obama, relying on the false claim that if Obama just allowed more drilling for oil on U.S. lands, prices would magically decline. Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) has “instructed fellow Republicans to embrace the gas-pump anger” as they push for more drilling.

Many experts, though, have pointed out that its not for a lack of drilling that oil prices are increasing, but rampant speculation in oil markets. Michael Greenberger, a former regulator at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) who oversaw the futures markets, told McClatchy that the increase is due to “excessive speculation” on the part of Wall Street:

“It is similar to the gambling Wall Street did on whether or not people would pay their subprime (below-market rate) mortgages in the mortgage meltdown,” said Michael Greenberger, a law professor at the University of Maryland and a former federal regulator of financial markets. “Now they are betting on the upward direction of the price of oil” … “It is excessive speculation, which is a fancy word for saying that gamblers wearing Wall Street suits have taken these markets over,” he said.

Back in February, oil prices cracked $100 per barrel despite the lowest demand since 1997.

The Obama administration has said that it will crack down on excessive oil speculation, but it’s oil speculation task force has hardly done anything at all. The CFTC, meanwhile, has been slow to implement new rules designed to rein in speculators that were a part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Democrats have been pushing the agency to begin that enforcement.

While Americans have focused on rising fuel prices over the past month, food prices around the world are also skyrocketing, outpacing the rate of inflation for other consumer products and threatening to create a price bubble for the third time since 2008. Food prices have increased 4.4 percent in the last year compared with a 2.9 percent rise for all consumer goods. Prices on products like coffee and peanut butter have risen as much as 27 percent.

And as with the spikes of 2008 and 2011, commodity investors and speculators are largely to blame, according to one study highlighted by Time:

The New England Complex Systems Institute released a study last week linking speculation in global commodity markets to rising food prices. The study indicates that spikes in food prices in 2008 and ’11 came largely as a result of investor speculation and increased ethanol conversion, in which corn is used for fuel rather than food. The authors expect another “food bubble” to occur by 2013, which “may lead to major social disruptions” on par with the riots and unrest in North Africa and the Middle East in 2008 and ’11.

Speculation on other commodities has also drawn recent attention. After blaming speculators for oil and gas price spikes in 2008 and 2010, experts are again pointing to “speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year” for the current rise in fuel prices. As with the fuel spike, rising food costs could have a dampening effect on the recovery of the American economy while also triggering social disruptions around the world — rising food prices were a factor in the unrest that led to the Arab Spring, according to some analysts.

The study also blamed increased conversion of corn from a food product into ethanol used for fuel. Corn prices spiked to a record high in 2011, and the U.S. now uses more corn for ethanol than it does for food production, a practice that has been propped up by federal ethanol subsidies that have been targeted for elimination by bipartisan groups of lawmakers.

With evidence that speculation had driven a rise in fuel prices last year, President Obama announced the creation of the Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group, which was tasked with investigating oil speculation. The task force, led by the Justice Department, was designed to prevent manipulation of the oil market and price-gouging at the gas pump.

Nearly a year after its creation, though, the task force has met “only a handful of times” and has yet to issue any public reports, McClatchy reports:

The Oil and Gas Price Fraud Working Group has met only four or five times since its creation last April 21, and most of those meetings came at the time of its inception. Back then, Obama promised that the group would “root out any cases of fraud or manipulation” and noted that its scope would include the “role of traders and speculators.”

Oil prices have begun rising again like they did before the task force was formed. A spokesperson for the Justice Department, which is leading the task force, told McClatchy that “the working group is monitoring the situation, and if we find any evidence of criminal behavior or other misconduct we will respond immediately.” The task force is also assisting the Federal Trade Commission in an investigation of American oil refiners and “conducting other, nonpublic investigations” into the oil and gas industry.

A wide range of experts pinpointed oil speculation as the cause of both the 2008 and 2010 spikes in oil prices, with evidence strong enough that Obama felt the need to create such a task force in the first place. Oil prices are again rising rapidly despite the lowest demand since 1997, and experts are again pointing to “speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year, mostly from hedge funds and large money managers.”

As McClatchy noted, the U.S. currently has “ample oil and gasoline inventories,” suggesting that “oil and gasoline prices are disconnected from supply-and-demand market fundamentals” and are rising due to speculation. The only question now is whether the task force created to investigate such irregularities is committed to doing anything about it.

As the improving economy has robbed conservatives of their chief talking point against President Obama, they’ve turned to rising gas prices as the next problem to pin on the president.

Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) “instructed fellow Republicans to embrace the gas-pump anger,” while Rick Santorum conspiratorially claimed Obama is intentionally pushing up prices to cut carbon emissions. Not to be outdone, Newt Gingrich released a 30-minute video today about how “the Obama administration is so anti‑oil” that they’ve forced the price of gas to go up.

But there’s little truth to claims that Obama has curbed U.S. oil production and driven up gas prices in the process. As NPR noted this morning, the number of drilling rigs in U.S. oil fields has quadrupled under Obama and domestic oil production hit an 8-year high in 2011. For the first time in 60 years, the U.S. is now a net fuel exporter.

Oil demand was actually down 4.6 percent last week over last year, while the supply of gasoline has actually increased slightly since a year ago. So why are gas prices so high? As McClatchy’s Kevin Hall explains today, there is a systemic problem: speculation.

Energy futures markets serve a legitimate role in helping producers (like oil companies) and big end users (like airlines) hedge against price volatility, but lately, they’ve been taken over by Wall Street speculators who never intend to actually use the fuel they’re betting on. As Hall reports:

Historically, financial speculators accounted for about 30 percent of oil trading in commodity markets, while producers and end users made up about 70 percent. Today it’s almost the reverse.

A McClatchy review of the latest Commitment of Traders report from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which regulates oil trading, shows that producers and merchants made up just 36 percent of all contracts traded in the week ending Feb. 14 while speculators who will never take delivery of the oil made up 64 percent.

Many experts, lawmakers (Democratic and Republican), and government regulators have expressed similar warnings.

Finally, after many delays, the government board responsible for regulating commodity futures markets finalized a rule in October to limit speculation, a power it was given by the Dodd-Frank Wall street reform law. However, the rule won’t go into effect until next October, as the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) needs to collect “one year of interest data” first. The financial industry is fighting the new rule, but just today, the CFTC took action against a company in different market, providing an example of how the energy regulation can effectively work.

Oil is once again trading above $100 per barrel, bringing with it estimates that U.S. gas will cost more than $4 per gallon by May, if not sooner. The Obama administration is already bracing for higher gas prices and the political cost that they could exact.

But it isn’t increasing demand for oil that is driving the recent price increase. In fact, demand is the lowest it’s been since April, 1997, according to the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS). Instead, OPIS points to speculators as the party responsible for driving up prices:

Strangely, the current run-up in prices comes despite sinking demand in the U.S. “Petrol demand is as low as it’s been since April 1997,” says Tom Kloza, chief oil analyst for the Oil Price Information Service. “People are properly puzzled by the fact that we’re using less gas than we have in years, yet we’re paying more.”

Kloza believes much of the increase is due to speculative money that’s flowed into gasoline futures contracts since the beginning of the year, mostly from hedge funds and large money managers. “We’ve seen about $11 billion of speculative money come in on the long side of gas futures,” he says. “Each of the last three weeks we’ve seen a record net long position being taken.”

A multitude of experts, from academics to government agencies, have pinned the 2008 gas price spike on oil speculators. Of course, a big increase in gas prices could doom the slow but steady economic recovery.

For decades, cotton farmers and buyers, like clothing makers, have used commodities futures markets to hedge against natural price volatility, which helps them to survive bad years. Now, however, Wall Street speculators like banks and pension fund have swamped the markets, controlling larger portions than the people who actually use the cotton, McClatchy reports.

These speculators, who have no intention of ever taking delivery of the product and treat futures contracts like a stock, have driven up prices and price volatility, making things harder for the people who grow the product, the companies that turn the raw material into finished goods, and the consumers who purchase those goods:

Such financial speculation helped drive an overheated cotton market to record levels of $2.17 a pound on March 7. Before peaking, cotton prices had risen by more than 140 percent in less than 18 months. … [T]his speculative money from investors who’ll never actually take delivery of cotton is distorting the futures market, driving up cotton prices, and thus raising prices for apparel retailers and consumers alike.

Sifting through CFTC historical data, McClatchy found that the total number of outstanding futures contracts grew by about 80 percent from 1990 to 2010. That’s big growth in a historically small market. Moreover, the number of contracts doubled between 2004 and 2010. This parallels the timeframe when institutional investors began to play seriously in commodity markets, aided by popular commodity indices developed by investment bank Goldman Sachs and the now-disgraced financial giant American International Group.

The problem with speculation in cotton can be seen across many commodities futures market, whether it’s for coffee, wheat, or oil, where speculation drives up the cost of gasoline for drivers.

Unfortunately, the agency that could help rein in speculators and address this problem, the Commodity Futures Trade Commission (CFTC), has been a frequent target of the GOP’s war on regulation. Despite the severity of the speculation problem across various markets, Republican lawmakers last month gave the commission a 2012 budget allocation one third lower than President Obama’s request. That, despite the fact that the CFTC is already stretched thin and will have to take on vast new responsibilities in implementing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law. This funding level so the stingy that the agency may be forced to lay off 60 workers — 8 percent of its staff.

“Without limiting the total speculation in each market, farmers and consumers will continue to needlessly suffer from higher and volatile prices,” said Dennis Kelleher, president and CEO of Better Market, an organization which works for more transparent markets. “We have seen the results of an ill-funded and ill-equipped regulator. It isn’t a pretty picture,” said Bart Chilton, a Democratic commissioner for the CFTC.