McKinsey (2003–2006)
After graduating high school, Chelsea goes to Stanford and gets a degree in history and then goes to Oxford and gets a degree in international relations. So far, so banal.
But after Oxford, Chelsea Clinton signed up with McKinsey, a consulting company known as an elite business training corps.
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/02/mckinsey-company-capitals-willing-executioners
The biggest, oldest, most influential, and most prestigious of the “Big Three” management consulting firms, McKinsey has played an outsized role in creating the world we occupy today. In its 90+ year history, McKinsey has been a whisperer to presidents and CEOs. McKinsey serves more than 2,000 institutions, including 90 of the top 100 corporations worldwide.
The firm’s willingness to work with despotic governments and corrupt business empires is the logical conclusion of seeking profit at all costs. Its advocacy of the primacy of the market has made governments more like businesses and businesses more like vampires. By claiming that they solve the world’s hardest problems, McKinsey shrinks the solution space to only those that preserve the status quo. And it is through this claim that the firm attracts thousands of “the best and the brightest” away from careers that actually serve the public.
How did things turn out this way? McKinsey consultants gave 27 times more money to Hillary Clinton’s campaign than to Donald Trump’s. The members of my team attended the Women’s March while serving an agency shaped by the man they marched against.
However, this line may no longer cut it in today’s political environment. This summer, the New York Times reported on McKinsey’s termination of its contract with ICE:
While stating that McKinsey’s work for the agency did not involve carrying out immigration policies, [Managing Director] Sneader wrote that the firm “will not, under any circumstances, engage in any work, anywhere in the world, that advances or assists policies that are at odds with our values.”
Note again the fiction that the firm isn’t involved in carrying out immigration policy (obviously, McKinsey analysts aren’t physically separating families). According to an award description for one of the ICE contracts, the firm was hired to assist the “ENFORCEMENT AND REMOVAL OPERATIONS (ERO) ORGANIZATIONAL TRANSFORMATION INTEGRATED CONSULTING SERVICES.” ERO is the “papers please” division of ICE, and any transformation and integrated consulting services—a catch-all that could mean literally anything—will have the goal of making the organization more effective at carrying out its stated mission, which will mean more people detained and deported and more families separated.