Do you want CHANGE? Well don’t look to Obama for it. He is just a typical Liberal politician, who panders to special interests and now wants to buy the presidency of the USA.
My bologna has a middle name, it’s H-u-s-s-e-i-n.
Obama, from corn-wealthy Illinois, has deep ethanol ties
When VeraSun Energy inaugurated a new ethanol processing plant in Charles City, Iowa, last summer, some of that industry’s most prominent boosters showed up. Leaders of the National Corn Growers’ Association and the Renewable Fuels Association, for instance, came to help cut the ribbon — and so did Sen. Barack Obama.
Then running far behind Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in name recognition and in the polls, Obama was in the midst of a campaign swing through the state where he would eventually register his first caucus victory. And as befits a senator from Illinois, the country’s second-largest corn-producing state, he delivered a ringing endorsement of ethanol as an alternative fuel.
Obama is running as a reformer who is seeking to reduce the influence of special interests. But he also has advisers and prominent supporters with close ties to the industry.
His friend and surrogate, Tom Daschle, a former Senate majority leader from South Dakota, serves on the boards of three ethanol companies and works at a Washington law firm where, according to his online job description, “he spends a substantial amount of time providing strategic and policy advice to clients in renewable energy.”
Not long after arriving in the Senate, Obama briefly provoked a controversy when he twice flew at subsidized rates on corporate airplanes of the agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland, which is the nation’s largest ethanol producer and is based in his home state.
His Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, advocates eliminating the multibillion- dollar annual government subsidies that domestic ethanol has long enjoyed. He also opposes the 54-cent-a-gallon tariff that the U.S. imposes on imports of ethanol made from sugarcane, which packs more of an energy punch than corn-based ethanol and is cheaper to produce.
Obama favors the subsidies, some of which end up in the hands of the same oil companies he says should be subjected to a windfall profits tax. He also supports the tariff, which some economists say may well be illegal under the World Trade Organization’s rules but which his advisers say is not.
