Behind the appearances with Elizabeth Warren, behind the populist promises and behind the rhetorical jabs at special interests and “millionaires and billionaires,” is a Hillary Clinton campaign funded and directed by Wall Street bankers, K Street lobbyists and other corporate bigwigs. This is nothing unusual, but it undermines her woman-of-the-people rhetoric.
The Clinton campaign brags of its fundraising advantage over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, giving credit to “more than 1.5 million grassroots donors.” Her fundraising emails show the smiling (almost wincing, though) mug of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and promise “to make our economy work for everyone … not just the rich or the well-connected.”
But open up Clinton’s books, and the donors you’ll actually find are “the rich and the well-connected.”
The top donors to Clinton’s election — both her official campaign and her non-campaign operations such as super PACs — are the Saban Capital Group ($10 million dollars), the Pritzker Group ($7.4 million) and Soros Fund Management ($7.0 million), according to the Center for Responsive Politics. This money gets access for these politically involved financiers.
Haim Saban, with a net worth of $3 billion, produced and distributed “Power Rangers,” and owns Univision, the Spanish-language pro-Clinton television station.
Among the dozens of meetings Clinton omitted from her official calendar as secretary of state, in apparent violation of open-records laws, were meetings with donors, including Saban. In addition to Saban’s $10 million given to Clinton super PAC Priorites USA Action, he is a top-tier bundler (a volunteer fundraiser) for Clinton.
Comb through Clinton’s donor files, and you see plenty of gifts from people describing their occupation as “government relations,” “lobbyist” or “government affairs.”
Peter Prowitt, for instance, is a former Senate Finance Committee chief of staff who is now the executive director for Global Government Relations at General Electric’s aviation division. Prowitt is also a Clinton donor.
His job includes lobbying for subsidies from U.S. taxpayers in the form of financing from the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Clinton has said she wants to put the “Ex-Im Bank on steroids.” In the primary, she attacked Bernie Sanders, who dubbed Ex-Im “corporate welfare.”
GE is also one the first major manufacturers to eye Iran as a major export market, trade made possible by the Iran nuclear deal. This has “Clinton’s fingerprints … all over” it, according to expert accounts.
Anna Weinstein and Oscar Ramirez of the Podesta Group are both Clinton donors. Their lobbying clients include Credit Suisse, Nationstar Mortgage, Google, Wells Fargo, the Biotech Industry Organization and others. Ramirez represents solar-energy companies such as SunRun and Solar City, the latter being owned by millionaire Elon Musk.
Clinton’s energy plan includes the installation of more than 500 million solar panels, which would require massive subsidies for the industry. Laura Abram, lobbyist for First Solar, is also a Clinton donor.
Other Clinton donors include in-house lobbyists for Verizon, Accenture, Bayer, Comcast, Cigna, BAE Systems, Visa, Travelers Insurance, Bechtel, Procter and Gamble, BP, the Mortgage Association and the Bank of New York Mellon — just in April alone.
Corporate political action committees have contributed directly to Clinton’s campaign. POET is the nation’s largest ethanol producer. Clinton campaigned in Iowa for preserving the federal ethanol mandate. The POET PAC gave Clinton the maximum $5,000. Other PAC donors include Caesar’s Entertainment, Edison Electric Institute, Synergy, Anheuser-Busch, Dow, Growth Energy, EDP Renewables, Starwood Hotels and more.
The PACs of lobbying firms have contributed, too, including Alston Bird (clients include Aetna, Boeing and Goldman Sachs), Baker Donelson (clients include the drug-industry’s trade association) and McGuire Woods (clients include Altria, Exxon and Blue Cross).
The lobbyists, corporations and lobbying firms named above are a tiny slice of Clinton’s corporate and K Street donors.
Why does this all matter? First, when solar companies fund her campaign and she supports solar energy, that relationship deserves at least as much scrutiny as the standard Republican politician gets for taking oil money. Solar power remains heavily dependent on government in a way oil is not.
Second, Clinton’s record of taking lobbyist money and supporting policies to profit lobbyists and their clients shows how her efforts to channel Elizabeth Warren’s populism are merely for show.
Clinton is a corporatist. When she supports big government, it is often to the benefit of these corporations. Consider her support for bailouts, Ex-Im, ethanol mandates and solar subsidies, for example.
Clinton has been blessed with an opponent who has often been on the buy side of the type of access she sells. This weakens his ability to call out her corporatism. But Trump’s cronyism doesn’t alter who Clinton is. And you can tell who she is by looking at those donors.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
