PRESS RELEASE
LaRouche Farmers Call for Doubling Food Production at Obama Rally in South Dakota
May 17, 2008 (EIRNS)—This release was issued today by the Lyndon LaRouche Political Action Committee (LPAC).
The Sioux Falls Arena was yesterday the setting for an appearance of Barack Obama at a rally with the strange title, Obama's One Stop Voting Rally. The deadline for registering to vote or registering a change of parties is Monday, May 19, and the thousands of rally goers were encouraged throughout the rally to contact volunteers who were standing by with voter registration forms so that they could register or change their registration on the spot. The One Stop Voting call was for people to take their new voter registrations to the election headquarters on Monday and vote early for Obama. This, in fact, was a second-choice tactic for the Obama campaign in South Dakota. In early March, Obama organizers had floated a proposal for a change in the rules of the Democratic Central Committee to allow the kind of cross-over voting of independents and Republicans they had successfully engineered in other states. When Clinton supporters vigorously opposed this proposed rule change, the Democratic Central Committee dropped it from the agenda.
Obama was introduced by former Senators George McGovern and Tom Daschle of South Dakota. Senator McGovern outlined his great friendship with Bill and Hillary Clinton who had worked for his own Presidential campaign in 1972. He said he had endorsed Hillary Clinton over a year ago but had endorsed Obama this week, when he had been persuaded that it was now mathematically impossible for Clinton to win the nomination. Daschle called for South Dakota to vote for Obama and stressed his policies on energy independence. In fact, Daschle, who had entertained a run for President, which he inexplicably dropped, turning over his staff to Obama for his Presidential campaign, was actually touting his own policies. He is one of the biggest lobbyists for ethanol in the U.S. under the auspices of Alston and Bird, the law firm he joined after John Thune beat him in the 2006 election. A year ago, Daschle joined the Board of Directors of Mascoma Corporation, which bills itself as a leader in cellulosic biomass to biofuels development and production. Just ten days before Obama's Sioux Falls Rally, the giant Marathon Oil Company bought a $10 million stake in Mascoma.
This made it all the more ironic for Obama to start the rally with his usual stump speech litany about refusing to take money from the special interests, lobbyists, etc., right after he expressed his appreciation to Daschle for being his first and best supporter.
The LaRouche farmer-activists were organizing at the entrance to the Arena with their now famous signs, "British Free Trade Globalization Equals Murder" and "LaRouche Says Double Food Production." They told everyone going in and out of the rally, "Here is LaRouche's interim report on the elections." Both people who identified themselves as Obama supporters and people who identified themselves as Clinton supporters were grabbing up the pamphlets, and were anxious to discuss the life and death issues facing the country, especially the food crisis, because they felt they had not had their questions answered in the rally.
