The Wall Street ties of two top aides to Hillary Clinton at the State Department are raising concerns among progressives about the composition of a future Clinton White House.
The former aides, Tom Nides and Robert Hormats, have shuttled between government and Wall Street for years. Nides, who is frequently described as a Clinton confidant, is a longtime Morgan Stanley executive who served as deputy secretary of state for management and resources from 2011 to 2013 before returning to Morgan Stanley. Nides is also the former chairman of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (Sifma), the main lobbying group for Wall Street in Washington DC.
Hormats, a former vice-chairman of Goldman Sachs, served as under secretary of state for economic growth, energy and the environment from 2009 to 2013. He is currently vice-chairman of Kissinger Associates, the consulting firm founded by the former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.
Neil Sroka, a spokesman for the progressive advocacy group Democracy for America, expressed his angst about the influence of the two in Clinton world. “It’s hard to imagine how a presidential candidate is going to seriously confront the powerful, greed-driven interests on Wall Street when they’re taking advice and staffing cabinet posts with people who just clocked out of the same big banks and investment firms that made bundles from wrecking our economy,” Sroka said.
Both Nides and Hormats have a strong history of taking pro-business stances on financial regulation and other issues near and dear to progressives. While at Morgan Stanley, which received a federal bailout, Nides pushed for the Obama administration to “find the right balance” in avoiding criticism of Wall Street in the aftermath of the financial crisis. He also played an important role in the Bill Clinton administration lobbying members of Congress to vote for Nafta in 1993.
Hormats, who has been described as Clinton’s “economic guru”, boasted of the Clinton State Department’s support of the business community in a 2013 interview. He is also on the record being supportive of partial privatization of social security. Hormats also touted the benefits of “widescale deregulation” in the 1990s and strongly supported increased trade with China.
Nides, in particular, has played a major role in Clinton’s current campaign. He has been one of the campaign’s top bundlers of contributions and responsible for raising over $100,000 for the former secretary of state. He has been tipped as a future White House chief of staff in a Clinton administration. Further, employees of Morgan Stanley, where Nides serves as vice-chairman, have given Clinton more than $90,000 in the past quarter. This is more than every Republican candidate combined has received from the firm.
Both Nides and Hormats’ ties to Clinton are likely to face scrutiny should the former secretary of state be elected president. In recent years, progressives have become increasingly concerned about former Wall Street executives entering the executive branch. Earlier this year, the Obama administration was forced to withdraw the nomination of former Lazard banker Antonio Weiss to be a top official at the Treasury Department after a liberal uprising led by Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Sroka said: “Democrats want and the American people need a president who truly understands that the problem isn’t that Wall Street firms or even Wall Street front groups like the Third Way have too little power in Washington, and that one very easy way to curb Wall Street’s insatiable greed is to make sure that their former employees aren’t on your payroll advising you.”
Sroka was echoed by Kurt Walters, spokesman for the progressive campaign finance reform group Rootstrikers, who expressed his trepidation about potential staffers in a Clinton administration based on her past track record. “There’s a lot of interest in the kind of people Secretary Clinton would hire in the executive branch, but the reality is she’s already been in the executive branch and she surrounded herself with Wall Street insiders.”
While Clinton has given several speeches on economic policy, including one on Friday on combating “quarterly capitalism”, the former secretary of state has yet to explicitly address the “revolving door” between Wall Street and Washington and the Clinton campaign did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian on the subject.
Concern about that “revolving door” has led to a petition jointly pushed by Democracy for America and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee that has accumulated 50,000 signatures. Further, Martin O’Malley, one of Clinton’s rivals for the Democratic nomination, gave a speech on Wall Street yesterday in which he pledged to “close the revolving door” and institute a three-year waiting period before government officials at agencies that regulate the financial sector can take jobs in the industry. Fellow Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders has also long been vocal in condemning Wall Street executives joining the federal government.
