Hillary Clinton: The Entergy Connection
Everybody has obsessions. Very occasionally those obsessions intersect, which can be very good news, or very bad news. And once in a blue moon, those obsessions don’t merely intersect but overlap, in a way that alters the world entire. That’s the way we felt yesterday, when a stray line in a reader email prompted us to run a standard search, linking the terms “Entergy” and “Hillary Clinton.”
We’ve written hundreds of thousands of words here about both those subjects, independently of one another: Entergy’s corporate shell games and linguistic obfuscation; Hillary’s disingenuousness on the campaign trail; Entergy’s poor safety record and ham-handed corporate spin; Hillary’s manufactured outrage, her willingness to change the rules of the game, her win-at-all-costs approach.
But what we ran across was an article that appeared originally in the Guardian, an article that links Entergy with the Clintons going way back, deep into the Clinton years.
And it was like someone fired off 50,000 flashbulbs with no warning. Everything was illuminated.
Turns out that Entergy began in Arkansas; only later did it expand into Louisiana, to take advantage of large deposits of natural gas there.
Turns out that during the 80’s, Hillary and her firm successfully defended Entergy in court against a major drive to curb their rate increases — a drive mounted by Bill Clinton, who used the issue to win a tough race for Attorney General. Not the first time the couple would mix aggressively populist campaign rhetoric with dexterous corporate outreach.
Turns out that by the 90’s, all was forgiven and forgotten: during the Clinton Presidency, the power company developed deep ties to the infamous Indonesian Riady family. In fact, they were partners and worked hand in glove with Ron Brown, Bill Clinton’s Commerce Secretary, to secure a billion-dollar power contract with China.
The Riady family, of course, would also pony up $100,000 for Web Hubbell when his ongoing legal troubles stopped his personal income stream.
You can read the article, which has been fairly widely distributed, for yourself. It’s a bit lurid, and not as impeccably sourced as we’d like. And it’s worth noting that since becoming Senator of New York, Clinton has talked tough on Entergy and their Indian Point facility, which sits just over the horizon from the Clinton residence in Chappaqua.
But man, did it rock our world.
It was like Batman suddenly discovering that the Joker and the Penguin were actually one guy, or like running a routine search for “Rick Santorum” and bringing up a single grainy, black-and-white photo of the ex-Pennsylvania Senator leaving an “RU12?” dance in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco with an anonymous white-haired gentlemen who turns out, under closer inspection, to be a leather-clad Joe Lieberman.
God love Google. For the cheap thrills, if nothing else.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.
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