Sen. Obama is really on to something with his windfall profits tax on big oil. The package before the Senate would have imposed a 25% tax on unreasonable profits on the five largest oil companies, giving government the leeway to address oil market speculation, and best of all made energy price gouging a federal crime. It failed, though 51 Senators thought it high time to penalize the politically unpopular oil producers.

I think I have just the package to guide this legislation through Congress. The price of crude oil has dropped over 50%. The wholesale price of gasoline has also dropped over 50%. Oil production and equipment companies are in a dire situation with Exxon Mobile at a yearly low, and Halliburton and Tesoro at 3 year lows. Now is the time for a windfall profits tax on Big Oil to Bailout Big Oil.

Big Oil is in a fix. They obviously need to pay more taxes because popular opinion says they should pay more taxes, and the polls must be right, but the bubble has burst on energy, and profits are tanking. There is only one way to fix this. The government should take an equity position in each of the 10 largest oil companies financed by you guessed it, a windfall tax on the big oil companies.

Think of the all the distressed oil executive, who if they could only pay a bit extra in tax, would receive the bounty of the Government to assist their enterprise. Special commisions made up of wholely worthy commissioners gathered from the best minds in academia and the Woods Foundation could choose the exact methods of providing government funds to Big Oil in a wholely bipartisan and transparent series of wires to offshore accounts, in exchange for donations to the Woods Foundation, who would then be able to assist ACORN to provide for the families of gas station attendants in Federal Prison for price gouging under the Senate plan.

Oil production is of vital strategic importance to the security of our country. We must tax it to save it, and save it to tax it, and jail those who profit more than we think they should if we are to guarantee the future of the cycle of regulation, taxation, political donations and bailouts. Lets save this cycle for the good of the cycle.

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John Powers is the President of the Chicago Daily Observer