That's correct. And it's done in such a fashion to not alarm the masses, to preserve the status quo, as they say.

It's basically top down social engineering. They know how to placate the masses and tickle their ears with what they want to hear. There actions, however, are separate from their speech, their intents far different from what the public is led to understand.

Most people, however, are still working and acting under the impression that constitutional rights and principles to empower the masses are still at play. We still half heartedly believe in a sort of bottom up democratic social engineering process where the people are cognizant of what is happening and leaders are appointed to engineer what the people want to happen. Instead it's what the leaders want to happen, whether the people are consenting or not.

Now we've just got this massive class of legal framework being instituted to form a top down process while we're eating up and believing propaganda that says we're still a democratic society. Disconnect. Why is it relevant to the energy situation? Because people are dealing with two 'realities' and they don't know where to put their efforts. Government is empowering entrenched monetary interests to move in an anti-environmental direction, eliminating pressure to change. But people are hearing from statistics, numbers etc. that physical reality dictates change. Collectively I think we recognize the necessity of change, and that should reflect in the democratic bottom up process. But we're also part of a cult of money that disconnects us from that reality and forces us back to the dictates of top down social engineering to preserve our sense/understanding of wealth.

And hence an impending energy crunches that will cause huge turmoil.