On May 31st, Paul Blumenthal and Ryan Grim at Huffington Post headlined, "Banks Behind Hillary Clinton's Canadian Speeches Really Want The Keystone Pipeline," and they reported that, "Two Canadian banks tightly connected to promoting the controversial Keystone XL pipeline in the United States either fully or partially paid for eight speeches made by former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the period not long before she announced her campaign for president. Those speeches put more than $1.6 million in the Democratic candidate's pocket."
This is hardly virgin territory, however, for Clinton and the XL deal.
In a report that I posted at HuffPo and several other sites on 1 February 2014 summarizing the State Department's appalling corruption and perhaps equally appalling incompetence in its three (and especially in the two Hillary Clinton State Department) environmental impact statements on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline project, I headlined, "John Kerry vs. Hillary Clinton On The Keystone XL Report," and noted that:
Clinton's redo of her earlier faked report was itself fake, because: first, "The study does discuss 'Climate Change Impacts on the Proposed Project,' but not the proposed project's impacts on climate change"; and, second, because it was not written by the State Department but by an oil-industry contracting firm (ERM Inc.) that Clinton's State Department had non-competitively assigned to be performed by the company that was selected for this purpose by the corporation (TransCanada) that would own the pipeline; and, third, because that contractor had no climatologist. Both of Clinton's reports were simply fakes; they were barely disguised promo-pieces for TransCanada.
The links in that article track all the way back to the various passages in the source-documents. They show that, as the U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton did a terrific job for TransCanada, and for the Koch brothers, the two men who are the biggest owners of Canadian tar-sands oil, and whose fortune might be doubled by Obama's approving of the construction of this pipeline, which would enormously improve the market-competitive position of this environmentally super-bad oil as against cleaner oils, from other and cleaner sources.
But, as I have noted elsewhere, Hillary Clinton honors her deals with the billionaires who hire her, however indirectly, even if her very public and heralded words that are spoken to adoring crowds at her political events are of no higher value than whatever is imposed upon all the toilet paper that gets discreetly flushed away unheralded to regions unknown and unnoticed. See, for examples, this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this, and this.
Perhaps the thousands of pages of State Department Keystone XL environmental impact statements might serve a constructive purpose, after all: they can -- it must be acknowledged -- be recycled.
But of course, this isn't to say that she's any worse than other Republicans; it's merely to note that, like with Obama, her calling herself a 'Democrat' doesn't make any difference, other than to fool a different group of suckers. Regardless of the party label, only the deals that are made in private are adhered to; the promises that are made to the public are merely flushed away, alone, ignored, and forgotten, except by pockets of political malcontents, who don't pay -- and that's to say, by the public.
America has become a one-dollar-one-vote 'democracy'; no longer anything that even aspires to being a one-person-one-vote democracy. Will Americans tolerate this change?
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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, and of Feudalism, Fascism, Libertarianism and Economics.