One of the things that seems to emerge in some commentary about Clinton’s speeches before high-profile financial institutions is the idea that the money accrued through these activities had no discernible effect. Or, as Clinton herself put it in the most recent debate:
But time and time again, by innuendo, by insinuation, there is this attack that he is putting forth, which really comes down to -- you know, anybody who ever took donations or speaking fees from any interest group has to be bought.
And I just absolutely reject that, Senator. And I really don't think these kinds of attacks by insinuation are worthy of you. And enough is enough. If you've got something to say, say it directly.
But you will not find that I ever changed a view or a vote because of any donation that I ever received.
Essentially, her point here about the influence of campaign contributions, or money accrued through speechmaking or other activities, is that there is no “smoking gun” — no instance where can point, with assuredness, to a distinct moment of quid pro quo, a definitive transactional moment in Clinton’s relationship with the financial sector and with other high-profile donors from the nation’s wealthiest.
Closely tied to this — and in some sense this is the element of all this that allows Clinton to claim the mantle of progressivism, despite the sources of funding involved — is the idea that these discourses among the wealthiest actors in the tech sector, financial sector, and other members of the global financial elite can be harnessed in powerful ways to present solutions to our biggest problems. Far from compromising Clinton’s political efforts, we are told, these ties are bound up in the most forward-thinking initiatives of social amelioration.
Undoubtedly, the work done by the Clinton Foundation, or the Clinton Global Initiative, or (to expand the circle a bit) the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or those affiliated with the “Davos crowd,” from investment bankers to tech sector entrepreneurs — the work done in many of these spheres often proceeds from noble intentions. Public-private partnerships are mobilized to address climate change, as for example with the Clinton Climate Initiative, or Bill Gates' backing of efforts to address global warming by way of geoengineering. Investment banks, of the kind that solicit speeches from Hillary Clinton, tout their new attention to harnessing the private sector as a tool of social amelioration, through such devices as “social impact bonds.”
So we are told that Clinton’s participation in these lofty spheres is not just ethical, but noble — proceeding from the same progressive commitments that inform her advocacy of women’s reproductive rights or criminal justice reform.
Here’s the thing, though, about the lofty sphere of global capital, and its noble intentions:
Even in the highly likely event that the items discussed in such contexts are earnestly meant to address the world’s problems, to find solutions to our most intractable concerns (global warming, poverty, and so forth), they are necessarily compromised by the very fact of who gets to be in the room. Even the most earnest discussions of income inequality at Davos, for instance, are inexorably distorted by the tacit, often unconscious ideological commitments of those who have the bread, or the political or clout, to be in attendance.
Naomi Klein, in her excellent book This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate, points out, for instance, that the kind of tech-driven solutions that are put forward to address climate change — ideas like the firing of tiny particles into the upper atmosphere to filter sunlight — are frequently driven by the worldviews of those putting them forward. In part, these solutions are presented in the hope that they provide a workaround to the necessary step of drastically reducing carbon emissions, something which can only be done by revisiting the basic structural conditions of late capitalism. Moreover, in this case, our hubristic fetishization of technology could wind up being disastrous: Klein points out that we have no way of knowing what the long-term effects of geoengineering would be.
Elsewhere, we can point, too, to the TED-Talk-ish fetishism of things like microcredit or “social impact bonds” (a new financial instrument designed to intervene in social amelioration, where public funds are scarce) in the solving of development, economic inequality, and poverty issues both at home and abroad. (Both Hillary and Bill Clinton have spoken highly of microcredit as a potential tool for addressing poverty and local development.) In many cases (though certainly not all), these putative solutions are less likely to solve the problems at stake then they are to create a new set of markets for financial sector intermediaries, markets with the fig leaf of a superficial commitment to social responsibility. Microcredit, in particular, has been roundly criticized for its potential role in exposing its users to significant debt loads. While the jury is still out on the “impact” of social impact bonds, some commentators have argued that this instrument provides the investment banks with just another a means of leveraging private profits from the public sector.
So… these are the assumptions that drive the whole sphere of plutocratic do-gooderism; this is the perspective from which the Clintons must, of necessity, see the world, from the vantage point of their role as principal actors in a global leadership class of Davos attendees and affluent hyperphilanthropists. We need to be careful here in how we contextualize the idea of political “influence.” It’s not a matter of mustache-twirling nefariousness, dark, smoke-filled rooms in which evil plans are hatched, where death rays are constructed through the furtive exchange of bags of cash. It’s not even quid pro quo of the more banal sort, of promising to look the other way on a certain regulatory measure if someone will kick in enough campaign contributions.
Rather, it’s the fact that, however well-intentioned they may be individually, these figures move in a world so invested in a particular set of ideological coordinates, so unthinkingly grounded in an underlying neoliberal conventional wisdom, so unavoidably shaped by the context of wealth, that even their most well-meant strategies are compromised by their proximity to finance capital.
In other words, we shouldn’t celebrate even the most Upworthy-ready, viscerally inspiring speeches coming out of that whole nexus of activity. Not because they hide a secret agenda, not because they derive from “corruption” in the old-fashioned sense of the word — rather, because the accumulation of vested interests around specific issues is itself likely to produce results that adhere to a very narrow, distorted metric of “success.”