One could even say “unqualified.”
Author of the seminal alternative economic history, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Naomi Klein sees and elucidates political trends better than just about any writer today. Her new article at The Nation is titled, The Problem With Hillary Clinton Isn’t Just Her Corporate Cash. It’s Her Corporate Worldview. The article effectively contrasts her political philosophy with Bernie Sanders’ and offers the best explanation I have seen to date of what makes the Clintons’ worldview so wrong — and dangerous (and in need of change). The article is subtitled:
Clinton is uniquely unsuited to the epic task of confronting the fossil-fuel companies that profit from climate change.
I am including excerpts below, but please read the whole article. Klein’s argument is so cogent, it really pays to read from start to finish (and it’s not that long).
In the article, Klein lays out the cold facts on the money that fossil fuel interests have poured into the Clinton campaign and Clinton Foundation, linking the latter to Clinton’s policies at the State Department:
. . . Then there’s all the cash that fossil-fuel companies have directly pumped into the Clinton Foundation. In recent years, Exxon, Shell, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron have all contributed to the foundation. An investigation in the International Business Times just revealed that at least two of these oil companies were part of an effort to lobby Clinton’s State Department about the Alberta tar sands, a massive deposit of extra-dirty oil. Leading climate scientists like James Hansen have explained that if we don’t keep the vast majority of that carbon in the ground, we will unleash catastrophic levels of warming.
During this period, the investigation found, Clinton’s State Department approved the Alberta Clipper, a controversial pipeline carrying large amounts of tar-sands bitumen from Alberta to Wisconsin. “According to federal lobbying records reviewed by the IBT,” write David Sirota and Ned Resnikoff, “Chevron and ConocoPhillips both lobbied the State Department specifically on the issue of ‘oil sands’ in the immediate months prior to the department’s approval, as did a trade association funded by ExxonMobil.”
Did the donations to the Clinton Foundation have anything to do with the State Department’s pipeline decision? Did they make Hillary Clinton more disposed to seeing tar-sands pipelines as environmentally benign, as early State Department reviews of Keystone XL seemed to conclude, despite the many scientific warnings? There is no proof—no “smoking gun,” as Clinton defenders like to say. Just as there is no proof that the money her campaign took from gas lobbyists and fracking financiers has shaped Clinton’s current (and dangerous) view that fracking can be made safe.
Klein goes on to quote Eva Resnick-Day, the Greenpeace activist Hillary famously blew up at for calling her out on these donations:
As a youth movement, we have done our own research, and that is why we are so terrified for the future…. Scientists are saying that we have half the amount of time that we thought we did to tackle climate change before we go over the tipping point. And because of that, youth—the people that are going to have to inherit and deal with this problem—are incredibly worried. What happens in the next four or eight years could determine the future of our planet and the human species. And that’s why we’re out there…asking the tough questions to all candidates: to make sure that whoever is in office isn’t going to continue things as they’ve been, but take a real stand to tackle climate change in a meaningful and deep way for the future of our planet.
Klein continues:
Resnick-Day’s words cut to the heart of why this is not just another election cycle, and why Clinton’s web of corporate entanglements is deeply alarming with or without a “smoking gun.” Whoever wins in November, the next president will come into office with their back up against the climate wall. Put simply, we are just plain out of time. As Resnick-Day correctly states, everything is moving faster than the scientific modeling has prepared us for. The ice is melting faster. The oceans are rising faster.
Leading her to her main argument about tackling climate change and other necessary policy (bolding is mine):
That is hard. Really hard. At a bare minimum, it requires a willingness to go head-to-head with the two most powerful industries on the planet—fossil-fuel companies and the banks that finance them. Hillary Clinton is uniquely unsuited to this epic task. . . .
The real issue . . . isn’t Clinton’s corporate cash, it’s her deeply pro-corporate ideology: one that makes taking money from lobbyists and accepting exorbitant speech fees from banks seem so natural that the candidate is openly struggling to see why any of this has blown up at all.
. . . The problem with Clinton World is structural. It’s the way in which these profoundly enmeshed relationships—lubricated by the exchange of money, favors, status, and media attention—shape what gets proposed as policy in the first place. .
. . . At the center of it all is the canonical belief that change comes not by confronting the wealthy and powerful but by partnering with them. Viewed from within the logic of what Thomas Frank recently termed “the land of money,” all of Hillary Clinton’s most controversial actions make sense. Why not take money from fossil-fuel lobbyists? Why not get paid hundreds of thousands for speeches to Goldman Sachs? It’s not a conflict of interest; it’s a mutually beneficial partnership—part of a never-ending merry-go-round of corporate-political give and take.
Books have been filled with the failures of Clinton-style philanthrocapitalism. When it comes to climate change, we have all the evidence we need to know that this model is a disaster on a planetary scale. This is the logic that gave the world fraud-infested carbon markets and dodgy carbon offsets instead of tough regulation of polluters—because, we were told, emission reductions needed to be “win-win” and “market-friendly.”
If the next president wastes any more time with these schemes, the climate clock will run out, plain and simple.
Klein contrasts this with Bernie’s worldview:
Bernie Sanders’s campaign is built around precisely this logic: not the rich being stroked for a little more noblesse oblige, but ordinary citizens banding together to challenge them, winning tough regulations, and creating a much fairer system as a result.
Sanders and his supporters understand something critical: It won’t all be win-win. For any of this to happen, fossil-fuel companies, which have made obscene profits for many decades, will have to start losing. And losing more than just the tax breaks and subsidies that Clinton is promising to cut. They will also have to lose the new drilling and mining leases they want; they’ll have to be denied permits for the pipelines and export terminals they very much want to build. They will have to leave trillions of dollars’ worth of proven fossil-fuel reserves in the ground.
And concludes:
there can be no doubt about who is best suited to rise to this historic moment.
Finally, I’d like to add a comment about this whole “unqualified” business. Most of the breathless reporting on this conveniently omits that Bernie’s comments were not about alleged lack of knowledge and experience (as Hillary’s about Bernie were) but rather about Clinton’s actual record:
I don’t think you are qualified if you get 15 million through Wall St through your SuperPac. I don’t think you are qualified if you have voted for the disastrous us war in Iraq.
To this, Klein would surely add “I don’t think you are qualified if you and your Foundation get millions through fossil fuel interests.” Can anyone really dispute that?