1. https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/uploads/InnovationStrategy.pdf.
2. On the allure of San Francisco and the tech industry for members of the Obama administration, see Edward-Isaac Dovere, “The City on the Hill(s) for Obama Alums,” Politico, July 5, 2015. For a comprehensive list of all the Obama personnel who came from or departed to Silicon Valley, see Cecilia Kang and Juliet Eilperin, “Why Silicon Valley Is the New Revolving Door for Obama Staffers,” Washington Post, February 28, 2015. “Obama’s lean startup” is also known as “18F”; it’s a unit of the General Services Administration. See Elaine Chen, “Building Obama’s Lean Startup in America’s Biggest Bureaucracy,” TechBeacon, July 23, 2015; Jon Gertner, “Inside Obama’s Stealth Startup,” Fast Company, June 15, 2015.
3. The exchange can be watched on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8URYPna1lhw.
4. This last is called The Groundwork; very little is known about it at present. See “Hillary Clinton Leans on Eric Schmidt’s Startup for Campaign Technology,” Quartz, October 16, 2015.
5. Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg with Alan Eagle, How Google Works (Grand Central Publishing, 2014), pp. 5, 42.
6. Ibid., pp. 17, 18–19.
7. See “Only Connect,” an “Annotation” on the subject by Whitney Terrell and Shannon Jackson, Harper’s Magazine, April 2013. See also Scott Canon, “Within its Fiberhoods, Google Rules the Roost, Survey Says,” Kansas City Star, May 6, 2014.
8. Jaron Lanier, Who Owns the Future? (Simon & Schuster, 2013), pp. 44, 52.
9. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business (Knopf, 2013), p. 36.
10. Interview with Maria Bartiromo, December 3, 2009.
11. Andreessen: Alessandra Stanley, “The Tech Gods Giveth,” New York Times, November 1, 2015. Lehane: Conor Dougherty and Mike Isaac, “Airbnb and Uber Mobilize Vast User Base to Sway Policy,” New York Times, November 5, 2015.
12. “Uber and the American Worker,” a speech Plouffe delivered at “the DC tech incubator 1776,” dated November 3, 2015, and available on the Uber website. http://newsroom.uber.com/2015/11/1776.
13. Schmidt can be seen making these statements in a YouTube recording of his SXSW talk, which also featured his coauthor, Jared Cohen, and the interviewer Steven Levy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bmzcCSF_zXQ.
14. It Takes a Village: And Other Lessons Children Teach Us (Simon & Schuster, 1996), p. 294.
15. The economist Dean Baker suggested to me this interpretation of inno-as-circumvention. See “The Opportunities and Risks of the Sharing Economy,” his testimony before the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing, and Trade, September 29, 2015.
16. Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, chapter 7. See also Astra Taylor’s account in The People’s Platform.
17. On Amazon, see Franklin Foer, “Amazon Must Be Stopped,” New Republic, October 9, 2014. On the retailer’s dispute with Hachette, see David Streitfeld, “Literary Lions Unite in Protest Over Amazon’s E-Book Tactics,” New York Times, September 29, 2014. On Google and the FTC, see Brody Mullins, “Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google,” Wall Street Journal, March 19, 2015.
18. Pharma executives often use innovation to justify their pricing decisions. Consider the innovation remarks of Martin Shkreli, the former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, a company that in 2015 dramatically raised the price of an old drug it had acquired. Asked Shkreli of Bernie Sanders, a Democratic presidential candidate who had criticized him, “Is he willing to sort of accept that there is a tradeoff, that to take risks for innovation, companies have to invest lots of money and they need some kind of return for that, and what does he think that should look like?” See David Nather, “Bernie Sanders Rejects Donation from Drug Company CEO,” Boston Globe, October 15, 2015.
Another good example of this sort of thinking can be found in a 2003 speech by Sidney Taurel, then the CEO of Eli Lilly, at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. Taurel warned that “under a regime of weaker I[ntellectual] P[roperty] protection or harsher market controls, our R&D would no longer be able to deliver true innovation.” Read the whole thing at: http://www.lilly.com/news/speeches/Pages/030318.aspx.
19. See Mark Ames, “The Techtopus,” Pando Daily, January 23, 2014, and Mark Ames, “Newly Unsealed Documents Show Steve Jobs’ Brutal Response after Getting a Google Employee Fired,” Pando Daily, March 25, 2014.
20. White collar: “Inside Amazon,” New York Times, August 16, 2015. Blue collar: See Dave Jamieson’s excellent Huffington Post article, “The Life and Death of an Amazon Warehouse Temp,” n.d. [2015], http://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/life-and-death-amazon-temp.
See also “Amazon workers face ‘increased risk of mental illness,’” an article on the BBC’s website dated November 25, 2013, in which an English worker reports, “We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we’re holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves.”
21. The CEO in question is named Lukas Biewald. He is quoted in a shocking article by Moshe Z. Marvit, “How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine,” The Nation, February 24, 2014.
22. Describing Harper Reed, the chief technology officer of Obama’s 2012 campaign, Biewald writes as follows: “I remember meeting with him as he worked with me and other Silicon Valley tech CEOs asking for techniques to deal with the large databases of voter and donors the Obama campaign was dealing with.” “Three Levels of Big Data,” November 20, 2013; https://www.crowdflower.com/blog/2013/11/three-levels-of-big-data.
23. This is from the second sentence of an address by Belinda A. Barnett, senior counsel to the deputy assistant attorney general for criminal enforcement of the Antitrust Division called “Criminalization of Cartel Conduct—The Changing Landscape,” given in Adelaide, Australia, April 3, 2009, and available on the DOJ website: http://www.justice.gov/atr/public/speeches/247824.htm.
24. See the DOJ’s statement on the matter, http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-six-high-tech-companies-stop-entering-anticompetitive-employee. On the class-action lawsuit and its result, see Jeff Elder, “Judge Approves Final Settlement in Silicon Valley Wage Case,” Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2015.
25. Cuomo as quoted in the New York Post, “Cuomo Drops Bombshell on de Blasio over Uber,” July 22, 2015.
26. Robert Reich, “The ‘Sharing Economy’? More Like the ‘Share the Crumbs’ Economy,” In These Times, February 4, 2015.
11: LIBERAL GILT
1. John Mack interviewed by Neil Cavuto of Fox Business, June 8, 2015. Watch it here: http://video.foxbusiness.com/v/4283714937001/john-mack-standing-by-hillary-clinton/?#sp=show-clips.
2. William Cohan, “Why Wall Street Loves Hillary,” Politico, November 11, 2014.
3. Rubin, In an Uncertain World, pp. 128, 353.
4. Deploring the revolving door: See “To Restore Trust in Government, Slow Wall Street’s Revolving Door,” an article HRC cowrote with Senator Tammy Baldwin for the Huffington Post, August 31, 2015. Her hires from Wall Street included Thomas Nides, described above, and Jack Lew. Trade: Her opinions on trade are summarized in a story by Domenico Montanaro on the website of NPR, “A Timeline of Hillary Clinton’s Evolution on Trade,” dated April 21, 2015. See http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/04/21/401123124/a-timeline-of-hillary-clintons-evolution-on-trade.
5. More prison: These are HRC’s remarks to a Women in Policing Awards Ceremony in 1994. She continued:
We need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep them off the streets.… We will be able to say, loudly and clearly, that for repeat, violent, criminal offenders—three strikes and you’re out. We are tired of putting you back in through the revolving door.
HRC as quoted in Eli Hager, “A (More or Less) Definitive Gui
de to Hillary Clinton’s Record on Law and Order,” an article on the website of the Marshall Project dated May 7, 2015. A nearly identical transcription of this particular Clinton speech appears on p. 189 of The Unique Voice of Hillary Rodham Clinton, a compendium of HRC quotes assembled by Clair G. Osborne (Avon, 1997). “Dare to care”: From HRC’s Class Day speech at Yale University, 2001.
6. Hillary describes her role in the welfare-reform debate in her 2003 book, Living History. The old Aid to Families with Dependent Children system, she writes, “had helped to create generations of welfare-dependent Americans.… I strongly argued that we had to change the system, although my endorsement of welfare reform came at some personal cost.” She then recounts how the Republicans in Congress passed two versions of welfare reform that she found too punitive, but that their third try was acceptable. Bill Clinton signed this third version. “Even with its flaws,” Hillary continues, this bill “was a critical first step to reforming our nation’s welfare system. I agreed that he should sign it and worked hard to round up votes for its passage—though he and the legislation were roundly criticized by some liberals, advocacy groups for immigrants and most people who worked with the welfare system.”
Hillary then goes into a meditation on her favorite subject—how “Principles and values in politics should not be compromised, but strategies and tactics must be flexible enough to make progress possible, especially under the difficult political conditions we faced.” Living History, pp. 365, 368, 369.
7. Stephanie Hannon, “What I Heard from Hillary about the Sharing Economy,” a post on Medium dated July 13, 2015.
8. From the New York Times transcript of the Democratic presidential debate: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/us/politics/democratic-debate-transcript.html.
9. How she made the hard choice between law schools: See her speech on Class Day 2001 at Yale. “Talent is universal”: See her remarks at the Female Heads of State and Foreign Ministers Luncheon, September 24, 2009, http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2009a/09/129598.htm. Clinton used this phrase on many occasions as secretary of state. For example, see her speech about Haiti dated April 14, 2009, or her speech in Vietnam dated July 10, 2012, also available on the State Department website.
10. Sheehy, Hillary’s Choice (Random House, 1999), p. 38. Brock, The Seduction of Hillary Rodham (Free Press, 1996), p. 147. Ann Lewis, quoted in Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson, The Battle for America: The Story of an Extraordinary Election (Penguin, 2010), p. 140. NB: Lewis attributes this famous saying to John Wesley, but Methodist scholars deny he ever said it. See Josh Tinley, “Checking our Facts,” Ministry Matters, May 12, 2011.
11. Bernstein, A Woman in Charge, p. 62.
12. Ibid., p. 79.
13. These quotations and the ones that follow are all from my own transcription of the “No Ceilings” event at the Best Buy Theater, New York City, March 9, 2015.
14. Joby Warrick, “Hillary’s War: How Conviction Replaced Skepticism in Libya Intervention,” Washington Post, October 30, 2011.
15. The State Department press release is called “21st Century Statecraft”; it is unsigned and undated but the State Department informed my research assistant that it was issued in 2011 by the office of Alec Ross, Secretary Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation. High-profile speech: “Remarks on Internet Freedom,” a speech delivered by Secretary Clinton on January 21, 2010, at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., the text is available on the website of the State Department.
16. On this subject, see my 2000 book, One Market Under God. The “Twitter Revolution” in Iran, by the way, turned out to have little to do with Twitter at all. See Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (PublicAffairs, 2011), chapter 1.
17. More quotes from Clinton’s speech of January 21, 2010.
18. “Conference on Internet Freedom,” remarks by Hillary Rodham Clinton, secretary of state, Fokker Terminal, The Hague, Netherlands, December 8, 2011, available on the State Department’s website as of August 31, 2015. Schmidt’s introduction is described by Steven Lee Myers, “Hillary Clinton’s Last Tour as a Rock-Star Diplomat,” New York Times Magazine, June 27, 2012.
19. Read it yourself at http://www.state.gov/statecraft/overview/index.htm. The document on the State Department website is undated; in an email to my researcher, the State Department confirmed that it was initially posted in 2011.
20. Valerie Hudson and Patricia Leidl, The Hillary Doctrine: Sex and American Foreign Policy (Columbia, 2015).
21. TEDWomen, Washington, D.C., 2010: http://blog.ted.com/ted-blog-exclusive-hillary-rodham-clinton-at-tedwomen.
22. Ibid. See also Clinton’s essay, “Leading Through Civilian Power: Redefining American Diplomacy and Development,” Foreign Affairs, November/December 2010.
23. These quotations are drawn from “Remarks at Breakfast with Women Entrepreneurs Attending the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship,” dated April 28, 2010, and available on the State Department website.
24. See the TV remarks of George W. Bush, “Bush: Stay in Afghanistan for Women’s Sake,” Politico, April 1, 2011. For an amusing example of how the Hillary Doctrine was implemented in Iraq, see Peter Van Buren, We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People (Metropolitan, 2011), especially the chapter “Widowed Tractors, Bees for Widows.”
25. Here I am following the narratives of Milford Bateman, Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work?: The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism (Zed Books, 2010), and Philip Mader, The Political Economy of Microfinance: Financializing Poverty (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
26. “This is a big idea, an idea with vast potential,” Hillary Clinton said. “Whether we are talking about a rural area in South Asia or an inner city in the United States, microcredit is an invaluable tool in alleviating poverty, promoting self-sufficiency and stimulating economic activity in some of the world’s most destitute and disadvantaged communities.”
The president of the Citicorp Foundation at the time was Paul Ostergard. His remarks are found on p. 21 of “The Microcredit Summit Report,” a booklet dated April 1997 and apparently published by the RESULTS Educational Fund. Hillary Clinton’s remarks are found on p. 29. A pdf of the report may be downloaded here: http://www.microcreditsummit.org/resource/59/1997-microcredit-summit-report.html.
27. Verveer: “Launch of the State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2011,” March 7, 2011. Otero: “Keynote Address to the Mobile Money Policy Forum,” Nairobi, Kenya, November 30, 2010. Hillary herself: Hard Choices, p. 149.
28. On microcredit in Bosnia, see Bateman’s blog post, “A New Balkan Tragedy? The Case of Microcredit in Bosnia,” April 8, 2014. In “From Poverty to Power,” an Oxfam blog post dated April 20, 2011, Bateman poses the following rhetorical question: “With so many countries having achieved microfinance ‘saturation’ this last decade or so (notably Bolivia, Bosnia, Mexico, Peru, Cambodia and others), why is it that in none of these countries can we see obvious substantive poverty reduction and ‘bottom-up’ development gains?”
29. See Bateman, Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? The Destructive Rise of Local Neoliberalism (Zed Books), chapter 5. The headline-making development here was a Mexican microlender that decided to go public in 2007, revealing along the way that it charged its clients (nearly all of them poor women) the kinds of interest rates that would be unusual in the U.S. See also Hugh Sinclair, Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic: How Microlending Lost Its Way and Betrayed the Poor (Barrett-Koehler, 2012).
30. See “Public Private Partnerships & Social Entrepreneurship: Building Solutions for Good,” remarks by Nancy Smith Nissley delivered on September 10, 2012, and available on the website of the State Department.
31. See the “Women’s Entrepreneurship in the Americas” factsheet, dated April 13, 2012, and available on the website of the State Department. See also the Wal-Mart press release from the same da
y: “Walmart, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the Inter-American Development Bank Partner to Change the Lives of Women and Youth.” http://corporate.walmart.com/_news_/news-archive/2012/04/13/walmart-us-secretary-of-state-hillary-clinton-the-inter-american-development-bank-partner-to-change-the-lives-of-women-youth.
32. Did you catch it, reader? I took this metaphor from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who used it in This Side of Paradise to describe not liberalism but youth: “Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That’s what’s called ingenuousness.… That’s why a ‘good man going wrong’ attracts people. They stand around and literally warm themselves at the calories of virtue he gives off.” (Scribner’s, 1921, p. 277)
33. Matthew Bishop and Michael Green, Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World (Bloomsbury, 2009), p. xii. Bill Clinton wrote the Foreword to the paperback edition of this book, which originally bore the subtitle, “How the Rich Can Save the World.”
CONCLUSION
1. Tom Rowley, “On Martha’s Vineyard, Casual Meets Political,” Washington Post, August 15, 2015.
2. Remy Tumin, “A Peek Past the Gate of Key Beaches,” Vineyard Gazette, August 2, 2012.
3. Reporter Carol Felsenthal gave a good description of Schulte’s biography and political activities in Chicago Magazine: “What You Need to Know About the Guy Who Owns the Obamas’ Vineyard Rental,” August 2013.
4. Michelle Higgins, “Politics at Play,” New York Times, August 17, 2007. There were other complications as well. The Boston tycoon who owns the Vineyard house in which the Clintons vacationed during their presidential days was, in 2007, helping the long-shot presidential campaign of Chris Dodd.
5. There is an interesting story behind the Clinton-Rothschild relationship. Once Obama had triumphed in 2008, Lady de Rothschild publicly denounced him as a kind of secret radical, determined to wreck the American Dream with his unspoken leftist policies. Then, in a 2010 email to Hillary Clinton that was released by the State Department, Lynn Forester de Rothschild could be found signing herself “Your loyal adoring pal.” And in 2015, this same Lady de Rothschild was reportedly asking $1,000 a head to attend “A Conversation with Hillary” at a Martha’s Vineyard estate. If you wanted to get your picture taken with the candidate, the price was higher.
Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? Page 27
