Back in the limo, Walker said he could tell the group hadn’t really grasped or connected with his new gospel material. He had found solace, however, in two women toward the back of the room who were “nodding on all of those issues.” He said, “The white guys at the front table, they were, like, sort of motionless.” They had been, except when one of them heard a variant of the phrase “paid no taxes,” which came up a few times in describing the setup of the Ford Foundation. Then he had nodded.
Walker knew of course that he had been speaking to the associates of the firm, not its “rainmakers.” He had been addressing people still in the fearful, climbing season of their lives. To get the rainmakers, he said, you had to be in more private settings. “You get the people like that in one-on-ones or at an event, you know, like the one where I was the other night where there was a bunch of very rich white guys,” he said. “And so they’re all together at somebody’s house for a drink, whatever. And it’s safe.” He added a moment later, “These people don’t sit around and go to a talk at the library.”
This thought led Walker to the observation that America was becoming privatized now. The American public had their big conversation out there in the messy democracy, and the elite had its own ongoing intramural chat. He mentioned the proliferation of idea salons in his social universe. He brought up the people who spend tens of thousands of dollars on a batch of theater tickets, and have the director come to their home to give their guests a little preview lecture before the show. It reminded him of a trip he had taken to Brazil. He had met someone who grew up in a tightly secured gated community—nothing unusual in that country. What struck him was that, as children, the man and his friends had had their own disco within the building. “They couldn’t go into town to disco because it was too dangerous,” he said. “So they created their own little disco.”
Walker looked at America today and saw his rich friends building their metaphorical buildings with gates on the outside and discos indoors. Gated communities. Home theaters. Private schools. Private jets. Privately run public parks. Private world-saving behind the backs of those to be saved. “Life goes more and more behind the gate,” he said. “More and more of our civic activities and public activities become private activities.”
Inequality gave some the resources to build their own discos and sequester themselves indoors. But it took the further ingredient of culture to make this way of life desirable. People chose to live in this way when they lacked faith in what lay beyond their gates—in the public. They felt this way when “public” had been allowed to tumble to lower status than “private” in our imaginations, in a reversal of their historic rankings: There was a time, as the legal scholar Jedediah Purdy has observed, when we loved “public” enough to place our most elevated hopes in republics, and when “private” reminded us of its cousins “privation” and “deprived.” An achievement of modernity has been its gradual persuasion of citizens to expand the circle of their concern beyond family and tribe, to encompass the fellow citizen. Inequality was reversing that, eating away at Walker’s beloved country. Government still had the responsibility, but, more and more, the wealthy made the rules.
One had to wonder if Walker had the stamina and the ability to make the Sacklers and Coles and Tisches and KKRs of the world think more like him. Almost a year after his new gospel came out, it was announced that he had joined the board of PepsiCo. The move attracted some criticism, in part because this warrior against inequality would now be earning more than a million dollars a year from the Ford presidency and this new, very occasional role, and in part because he now bore formal responsibility for what Pepsi did, including the company’s continuing choice to sell its harmful sugary drinks. The critics could console, or depress, themselves with the thought that he was far from alone: Several of his counterparts at the major foundations served on the boards of firms like Citigroup and Facebook. The fear was that, yet again, MarketWorld would infiltrate and win. “The best tactic is to bring your critics into the fold,” a former Ford Foundation executive told the New York Times. But Walker promised and seemed to believe that he would change them, not the other way around. “I will bring my perspective as the leader of a social justice organization,” he told the Times. “I will bring my perspective as someone who is deeply concerned about the welfare of people in poor and vulnerable communities.” His only compromise so far had been to switch his habit from Diet Coke to Diet Pepsi.
CHAPTER 7
ALL THAT WORKS IN THE MODERN WORLD
Many of these people had been coming to Bill Clinton’s conference for years. Though they tended to label themselves such things as givers, philanthropists, social innovators, impact investors, and the like, recent political upheavals had given their tribe a new name that was sticking. They were coming to be known, by their friends and enemies alike, as globalists. Those arriving at the Clinton Global Initiative on that September morning in 2016 were looking forward to a week that had become a kind of family reunion for the globalists. And yet they were aware of gathering at a time when they were ever more despised. Around the world, a suspicion seemed to be taking hold that jet-setters solving humanity’s problems in private conclaves was as much a problem as it was a solution.
The conference was one of many events taking place during what was known, somewhat anachronistically, as UN Week. The week got its name from the convening of most of the world’s heads of state in the city of New York. They went before the UN General Assembly one by one and there, standing before its famous green backdrop, sought to speak to the world. Because of their presence, the security in New York on this September morning was virtually militaristic, provided by darkly clad men whose scowling eyes presumed guilt. Every few minutes, a motorcade sped past in a coned-off lane reserved for heads of state and ministers. Here on Second Avenue, a group of protestors was seeking to warn the visiting dignitaries to keep their “Hands Off Syria.” On another corner, a pair of women in West African robes stood with clipboards, seeking signatories for a petition about health. They were positioned strategically close to the United Nations. Perhaps no one had told them that, thanks in large part to Bill Clinton, the United Nations was no longer where the action was during UN Week.
Clinton had left the American presidency in January 2001 as a late-middle-aged man needing redemption. He had survived two terms haunted by scandal, an impeachment vote by the House of Representatives, and an exit marred by dubiously given pardons and claims of stolen White House furniture. In Man of the World, an inside account of Clinton’s post-presidency, the journalist Joe Conason portrays the former president as anguished and under siege in the first months of his new life. The talk of scandal continued—first the fallout from the pardon and furniture affairs, then from the former president’s bid to set up his taxpayer-funded offices in a midtown Manhattan building whose rent would exceed that of the offices of the four other living ex-presidents combined. Clinton recovered from the outcry by instead setting up his office on West 125th Street in Harlem, where he tried to help the surrounding African American community by enlisting protocol-bearing business consultants to help shopkeepers pro bono. Still, the negativity was hard to escape. Clinton’s new speaking agent booked him gigs for up to $250,000 each, only to see many canceled thanks to what Conason calls “the deluge of public scorn.” Few foreign invitations were rescinded, though. There was a lesson in that for Clinton. “Soon he and his staff came to realize that however diminished his popularity might be in his native land, much of the rest of the world was ready to welcome and even celebrate him,” Conason writes.
Guided by this insight, Clinton began to make his first post-presidential forays overseas, which would set him on a path to becoming an icon of global philanthropy and the eventual subject of a made-for-television documentary titled President of the World: The Bill Clinton Phenomenon. He raised money for the earthquake in the western Indian state of Gujarat. He brokered complex deals to lower the costs
of HIV/AIDS drugs in developing countries. Then, in 2005, attuned to the currents of his time, Clinton decided that if you wanted truly to change the world now, you needed the help of companies and plutocrats, and thus you needed your own conference on the MarketWorld circuit.
The idea that formed was to host a conference during UN Week in New York, to take advantage of all the world leaders in town, who could perhaps serve as lures to attract the rich and generous to the city. Clinton credited his longtime aide Doug Band with the idea of this timing. Clinton later recalled his own reaction: “I said, ‘Yeah. And everybody would have the exquisite joy of driving in New York City during the opening of the UN.’ Then I did probably an impulsive thing and said, ‘I’ll try this.’ ”
In January 2005, on a stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos, one of the original conferences on the MarketWorld circuit, where corporate types paid vast sums of money to mingle with political leaders and others of similar social position, Clinton announced the Clinton Global Initiative. It would, he said, be like Davos, except it would require the rich and powerful people it brought together to commit, as a condition of showing up, to tangible projects for the global good. “I’m a big supporter of Davos, but the world leaders of the rich and the poor countries and everybody in between come to the UN every year in September,” Clinton said, according to Conason, adding, “So what I thought we would do this year is to have a somewhat smaller version of what we do at the World Economic Forum, but that it would be focused very much on specific things all the participants could do.” Decisions and actions, the actual solving of problems, would be the distinguishing feature of CGI. “Everybody who comes needs to know on the front end that you’re going to be asked your opinion about what we should do on AIDS, TB, malaria; what the private sector can do about global warming,” he said. Moreover, “you’re going to be asked to participate in very specific decisions about that and to make very specific commitments.”
The first CGI got many warm reviews. Tina Brown, the veteran magazine editor, wrote, “Clinton seems to have found his role as facilitator-in-chief, urging us to give up our deadly national passivity and start thinking things through for ourselves.” She made a pointed comment about CGI as an alternative to the public, governmental way of solving problems, in light of the colossal state failure exposed by Hurricane Katrina the month before. “Commandeering the role of government through civic action suddenly feels like a very empowering notion—the alternative being to find oneself stranded in a flood waving a shirt from a rooftop,” she wrote. Indeed, as CGI developed, it brought together a growing number of people interested in “commandeering the role of government”: investors, entrepreneurs, social innovators, activists, entertainers, philanthropists, nonprofit executives, protocol-equipped consultants, and others, who came to brainstorm new double-bottom-line funds, plot against malaria, and also, since they were in town and so was everyone else, cut their own deals. And with every passing year, their growing presence seemed to shift the center of gravity of UN Week.
As CGI developed, two words came to define it: partnerships and commitments. Clinton invited people from various sectors—entrepreneurs, philanthropists, political leaders, labor unions, civil society—to work together on initiatives for societal betterment, and to make public promises about what they planned to achieve. This approach spoke of an emerging view of how progress is made that Bill Clinton hugely endorsed and actively evangelized. Clinton had as a young man gone to Yale Law School, and for decades afterward he pursued the improvement of the world through the instrument of politics and the law. He had embraced a liberalism that was, in the words of the writer Nathan Heller, a “systems-building philosophy,” whose revelation was “that society, left alone, tended toward entropy and extremes, not because people were inherently awful but because they thought locally.” Private individuals couldn’t be relied on to see the big picture of their society, Heller writes, but “a larger entity such as government could.” When he started in public office, Clinton believed public problems were best solved through public service and collective action. During his White House years, though, and even more decisively afterward, he had been won over by the theory that it was preferable to solve problems through markets and partnerships among entities private and public, which would find areas of common cause and work together on win-win solutions.
Early on, Clinton wondered if people would pay money to attend an event whose purpose was to get them to contribute more money, and volunteer on top of that. “I mean, who’s ever heard of paying a membership fee to be asked to spend more money or spend more time?” he joked.
He underestimated himself. The commitments brought rewards. If you worked for a consumer products company and committed to making water filters available to millions, or a foundation that committed to restore some hearing to hundreds of thousands, you might be invited to come up to the CGI stage. There Bill Clinton would stand beside you and read your commitment to the room and praise you. This moment would become, among the doing-well-by-doing-good set, the coveted capstone to a career: People who were influential and/or rich but relatively unknown would bask in the celebrity-like glow. It was also a good way to get your face before a lot of rich and powerful people if, say, you were seeking investors for your new fund. If you owned a plane and had a lot more money where that charitable commitment came from, as the Canadian mining magnate Frank Giustra did, you could soon find yourself trotting the planet with Bill Clinton as your door-opener and bro. You would help him with his foundation, and he might let you into his inner circle, and being in his inner circle might benefit you the next time you bid on a mining project.
By Clinton’s count, the twelve CGI meetings had inspired some 3,600 commitments. The organization claimed that these commitments had improved more than 435 million lives in 180 countries—a figure that was as impressive as it was hard to verify, since this new mode of world-saving was private, voluntary, and accountable to no one. One commitment, titled “Creating Prosperity with Major Corporations,” was put forward by TechnoServe, the antipoverty consulting firm, in partnership with companies such as Walmart, Coca-Cola, Cargill, McDonald’s, and SABMiller; it later submitted a progress report claiming to have implemented a “business plan competition program for entrepreneurs at the ‘bottom of the pyramid.’ ” Another commitment was titled “WeTech.” Drawing on partners such as McKinsey, Google, and Goldman Sachs, the initiative promised education and mentoring programs for girls and women seeking careers in science and technology.
This general approach to change jibed with what Clinton had stood for while in power: the championing of globalization, the embrace of markets, compassion, the declared end of labor/capital conflict, the promise of the rich and poor rising together—the insistence that loosened regulations good for Wall Street would also be good for Main Street; the marketing of trade deals craved by large corporations as being ideal for workers. The country was two months away from a referendum on Clintonism. Hillary Clinton had beaten Bernie Sanders, who spoke of putting the “billionaire class” in their place in order to make the working class thrive, whereas Clinton had spoken of wanting everyone to do better. Now she found herself up against the ultimate win-losey opponent, though this time of the race-baiting, authoritarian, ethno-nationalist sort. Donald Trump had harnessed an intuition that those people who believed you could crusade for justice and get super-rich and save lives and be very powerful and give a lot back, that you could have it all and then some, were phonies. He had harnessed these feelings, to the bafflement of many, despite embodying the pseudo-concern he decried.
The criticism of what CGI did and represented had been building over the years, fueled by never-ending questions about whether the philanthropy was an end in itself for many of the attendees or rather a means to more self-serving ends. “It’s Davos for the social do-good set,” Darren Walker said one morning that week, sitting in his Ford Foundation office. The new UN Week
lived at “this intersection of doing well and doing well by doing good.” He credited Clinton, whose event Ford was sponsoring, with the change. “It really was through the vehicle of CGI that so many new actors were mobilized and so many different modalities like impact investing—all of these other things started.” Clinton had used his extraordinary powers of convening to bring improbable partners together, and creative solutions to poverty and suffering had been born. However, Walker said, it was also the case that “philanthropists and commercial enterprises saw in CGI a platform that they could leverage for both doing good and building their brands.” As a result, self-service flirted dangerously with altruism at CGI, in Walker’s view. Why were all these CEOs flying in? “They fly here because they see investment opportunities; they see branding opportunities,” Walker said. Clinton’s brilliance had been in using his gathering “as a way to give people a profile” if they agreed to help people. But this had, by Walker’s lights, clouded the motives of the giving that CGI unleashed. Now others were following its example of barnacling themselves onto UN Week, and “hundreds of side events,” as Walker put it somewhat exaggeratedly, had come into being. “The risk in this is the potential canceling out,” he said. “It’s this idea that you can support a health initiative in Nigeria on the Niger Delta to reduce disease or diarrhea or whatever, and you can also make an investment in a company that is a polluter in the Niger Delta.”
The blurring of public good and private desire during UN Week, if seeded by CGI, was no longer confined to it. Indeed, other public-private world-changing events in its mold, if not remotely at its scale, had sprouted across the city, growing more numerous every year: a meeting called Make a Difference, Invest with Impact; the GODAN Summit, inviting you to “Join the Open Data Revolution to end global hunger”; another called Leveraging the SDGs for Inclusive Growth at George Soros’s foundations (the SDGs being the new Sustainable Development Goals); a meeting on “sustainable finance” at HSBC; the Concordia Summit, where “thought leaders and innovators” meet to “examine the world’s most pressing challenges and identify avenues for collaboration,” sponsored by Coca-Cola and J.P. Morgan; and, courtesy of sponsors Citi, Mars, and SABMiller, an event called Business Collaborating to Deliver the SDGs; the Africa Alternative Investment Intensive Forum; Catalyzing Climate Change Innovation Through Charitable and Impact Investment; a networking event called Scaling the Clean Economy, hosted at the international law firm of Baker McKenzie; the U.S.-Africa Business Forum, convened by Bloomberg Philanthropies; and the Every Woman Every Child Private Sector-Innovation high-level luncheon.
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World Page 23