By Eric Berman
4/29/2008
A day after her husband told a Carmel audience they "should probably vote against" any candidate who says he can bring back cheap oil, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton is promising to bring oil prices down, and prices at the gas pump with them.
Senator Clinton contends there's evidence energy traders are manipulating the market. She says the Federal Trade Commission isn't doing enough to investigate possible violations. In a stop at an Indianapolis veneer plant, she maintained a crackdown could slash oil costs by 20 dollars a barrel.
And Clinton says the U-S should use the World Trade Organization to force OPEC to stop restricting production. Nine of the 13 OPEC nations are members of the WTO.
On Monday, former president Bill Clinton extolled his wife's emphasis on long-term solutions, including higher gas mileage and more investment in oil alternatives. He said economic trends carrying oil prices higher won't be reversed.
"Anybody who tells you that they can make oil cheap again, you should probably vote against, because the price of oil is set in a world market, and the fundamental problem is there's a limited amount of it and more people can afford to buy it," the former president said.
Hillary Clinton repeated her criticism of rival Barack Obama for voting for the Bush administration energy bill in 2005. Many of that bill's tax incentives and subsidies are for the alternative and renewable fuels Clinton wants to encourage, but it included more than four-billion dollars in tax breaks for oil drilling and clean-coal technology.
Clinton's also scolding Obama for opposing calls to suspend the federal gas tax: Clinton and Republican nominee John McCain have called for a summer tax holiday to provide immediate relief.
Unlike McCain, Clinton says she'd replace the money by imposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies. Money from the tax goes into the federal highway trust fund.
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