Eric Zuesse

On 17 July 2015, Paul Blumenthal and Kate Sheppard at Huffington Post bannered, “Hillary Clinton's Biggest Campaign Bundlers Are Fossil Fuel Lobbyists” and the sub-head was "Clinton's top campaign financiers are linked to Big Oil, natural gas and the Keystone pipeline.” This description of her fits for a politician who does the lobbyists’ bidding while she provides liberal rhetoric that denies she will, and so who burns-up not only the planet but the trust of the liberals who have voted for her in the mistaken belief that because her label is “Democrat” and because she makes her appeals to women, Blacks, Hispanics, and other disenfranchised groups, she’s not actually representing (just like the Republicans do) their common-enemies, which go beyond such ethnic or other groups and constitute the top-0.0001%-economic-class that’s exploiting almost the entire public — including women, Blacks, Hispanics, etc.

Her record does show that she represents those lobbyists, not the public. As I had reported previously, the Hillary Clinton State Department’s two environmental impact statements on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline were triple-hoaxes that totally and scandalously ignored the proposed pipeline’s impact on climate-change but that did discuss the impact of climate-change on the proposed pipeline (as if anybody even cared about that); neither of the two studies had even one climatologist on the team that prepared the report; and the State Department didn’t do either of the reports themselves, but instead hired two oil-industry contractors that were proposed to the State Department by TransCanada Corporation, which is the company that was proposing to build and own the pipeline. So: those ‘studies' were rigged to enable the President to approve the Pipeline — which he ultimately decided not to do.

Furthermore, on 2 May 2013, Steve Horn headlined, "Digging Into TransCanada's Lobbying History,” and he found that, indeed, Hillary Clinton was surrounded by TransCanada lobbyists while the reports were being prepared by TransCanada’s chosen oil-industry contractors. On 12 March 2014, I headlined "Keystone XL Pipeline Corruption With State Department Should Not Be Legal,” and reported that, "The Office of Inspector General (IG) of the U.S. State Department has determined that all of the corruption that was entailed in the preparation of the Hillary Clinton State Department's two Environmental Impact Statements (EIS) on the TransCanada corporation's proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, and that is still present in the John Kerry State Department's final EIS, was legal.” This didn’t mean that it was at all ethical. It was disgustingly corrupt, regardless of whether it was legal. But, he found: it was legal.

Hillary Clinton is also a big champion of fracking. In September 2014, Mariah Blake bannered "How Hillary Clinton's State Department Sold Fracking to the World,” and reported that, "As part of its expanded energy mandate, the State Department hosted conferences on fracking from Thailand to Botswana. It sent US experts to work alongside foreign officials as they developed shale gas programs.” The energy-companies didn’t pay for those sales-calls by the U.S. Secretary of State; taxpayers did.

On 10 April 2015, New Yorkers Against Fracking sent a letter to Clinton, opening, "We, the undersigned citizens groups from across the United States, write to urge you to join the growing majority of Americans against fracking.” Probably, she will, verbally, ‘join’ them, but her record shows that she often doesn’t follow her word, but that she does reliably follow her money: where that points, she goes (but as much in the dark as she possibly can — ergo, her private email server being used for government-business).

She earns her keep, for the lobbyists, and for her financial backers.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010 , and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity