Wonder Why Presidential Candidates are Silent on Standing Rock? Follow the Money

October 27, 2016 by Barbara With

Wonder why presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are not speaking up on the crisis at Standing Rock and climate change? Let’s follow the money.

According to ABC News, Trump has $1 million dollars invested in Energy Transfer Partners. The Dallas-based corporation’s subsidiary Dakota Access is pushing their crude oil pipeline across four states, including North Dakota, where the Standing Rock Sioux have set up water protectors camps. According to his Public Financial Disclosure Report, Trump is making anywhere from $15,000 to $50,000 in interest, dividends, and capital gains from his investment in DAPL

As for Clinton, many of the same banks that are financing Dakota Access Pipeline are supporting her. In a report published in September 2016, Food and Water Watch outlines the global investors in the pipeline, which include over $10 billion of revolving credit being issued by 38 banks from around the world. (See below)

Cross checking these investors with contributors to Clinton found on Open Secrets, we find many have been actively supporting her with hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations. These banks have underwritten Clinton since 1999:

Goldman Sachs: $234,000,000 invested in revolving credit line for DAPL; $947,000 in Clinton

Morgan Stanley, $225,000,000 in DAPL; $927,000 in Clinton

JP Morgan Chase, $312,000,000 DAPL; $998,000 in Clinton

Citigroup, Inc: $522,000,000 in DAPL; $990,000 in Clinton

Bank of America: $350,000,000 in DAPL; $536,000 in Clinton

Wells Fargo, the disgraced bank who was recently caught opening millions of fake accounts and fined $185,000,000, gave $379,000 to Clinton’s 2016 campaign, at the same time providing $467,000,000 to DAPL.

DAPL not only threatens the water supply of millions of people and is creating an urgent crisis of human rights, but according to EcoWatch, would generate the equivalent of almost 30 coal-burning power plants. Trump has made it clear that he does not believe in man-made climate change. His transparency gives him his justification for profiting off the DAPL by denying its impact.

2013: A protester holds a ‘Stop Chevron’ flag at a makeshift camp near the village of Pungesti, Romania, where the US firm wants to drill for shale gas. Photograph: Daniel Mihailescu/AFP/Getty Images

Clinton, however, calls climate change an “urgent threat” and claims to want to uphold the Paris Agreement to reverse the threats of global warming. But she also supports fracking, another danger to accelerating climate change, and has promised she would not ban the practice. As Secretary of State, Clinton traveled the world with Chevron representatives, pushing fracking in countries like Romania and Bulgaria. She also chose former Colorado Democratic Senator and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to be the chair of her presidential transition team. Salazar has pushed back against curbs on fracking since his return to the private sector, and as interior secretary, opened the arctic to oil drilling.

Clinton’s silence on Standing Rock and DAPL, and the absence of any talk of climate change in any of her speeches and debates indicate that perhaps keeping her donors happy is more important than actually working to address this crucial issue. This should be a warning to supporters who parrot her talking points but fail to mention her lack of action and the millions in donations she is accepting from the fossil fuel industries.

Either way, neither Trump nor Clinton have commented on Standing Rock. But of the two candidates on this issue, Trump is being decidedly more transparent.