A "FLEXIBLE" APPROACH TO FINANCING?

Green Fuel's Dirty Secret by Sasha Lilley, Special to CorpWatch June 1st, 2006

The town of Columbus, Nebraska, bills itself as a "City of Power and Progress." If Archer Daniels Midland gets its way, that power will be partially generated by coal, one of the dirtiest forms of energy. When burned, it emits carcinogenic pollutants and high levels of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Ironically this coal will be used to generate ethanol, a plant-based petroleum substitute that has been hyped by both environmentalists and President George Bush as the green fuel of the future. The agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is the largest U.S. producer of ethanol, which it makes by distilling corn.

A single ADM corn processing plant in Clinton, Iowa generated nearly 20,000 tons of pollutants including sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic compounds in 2004, according to federal records. The EPA considers an ethanol plant as a "major source" of pollution if it produces more than 100 tons of any one pollutant per year, although it has recently proposed increasing that cap to 250 tons.
ADM has another resource at its disposal, the considerable clout it has built up over decades of courting and lobbying Washington's power brokers. Days after the company's February expansion announcement of the coal-fired Nebraska plant, U.S. Energy Secretary Samuel W. Bodman visited ADM's Decatur headquarters to tout its part in President Bush's Biofuels Initiative. The secretary posed for photos with then ADM Chair G. Allen Andreas and announced that the Department of Energy would offer up to $160 million for the construction of three biorefineries to expand U.S. ethanol production.

ADM and its signature project have never lacked friends in high places, despite a history of price fixing scandals and monopolistic misdeeds. The Andreas family, which has headed up the publicly-traded company for decades, has cultivated bipartisan support through generous donations to both Republicans and Democrats. Since the 2000 election cycle, ADM has given more than $3 million in political contributions, according to the Center for Responsive Politics: $1.2 million to Democrats and $1.85 million to Republicans. These donations may have helped sustain a multitude of government subsidies to ADM, including ethanol tax credits, tariffs against foreign ethanol competitors, and federally mandated ethanol additive standards.
CORP WATCH

Let's revisit what the US Secretary of Energy said about taxpayer financing of ethanol factories: "The secretary posed for photos with then ADM Chair G. Allen Andreas and announced that the Department of Energy would offer up to $160 million for the construction of three biorefineries to expand U.S. ethanol production."

160 Million of our tax dollars going into the pockets of one of the world's largest agribusiness giants, ADM, to help build ethanol plants, or biorefineries. It doesn't matter what one calls these "Toxic Terrors" they'll still be polluting the water we drink and the air we breath, paid for by OUR tax dollars.

A certain ethanol plant that is in the works for Webster County has been out of the news of late. Does this mean that the backers of that ethanol factory are seeking some type of alternative financing, like a joint venture with ADM? ADM has deep pockets. Pockets that are large enough to hold more than a few politicians. These so-called "Public Servants" are at corporate giants like ADM's beck and call, always more than willing to change the law or provide these behemoths with huge dollops of our hard earned money.

Perhaps that's why the financing for this ethanol factory is so secretive. The backers are just being "FLEXible" in their ways to construct this behemoth on top of the Ozarks Aquifer.