Former Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel is taking a break from politics to join a Wall Street investment bank.
Emanuel, 59, a former senior aide in President Bill Clinton’s White House who became a congressman and then chief of staff to President Barack Obama, will work for Centerview Partners on company mergers, according to Bloomberg.
Many prominent Democrats have been quick to criticize Emanuel for his decision. Freshman Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, 29, was among them, writing in a tweet “not all Democrats are the same.”
Not all Democrats are the same. https://t.co/C6Uj8KrcqW
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) June 5, 2019
Matt Stoller, a fellow at the Open Markets Institute, was also critical, saying that Emanuel would be “working to raise [drug prices]” despite promises of the opposite.
Emanuel became mayor in 2010 after leaving as chief of staff in the Obama White House. In 1998, Emanuel left the Clinton administration to join the investment banking firm Wasserstein Perella, even though he had no finance or banking background. He became a managing director at the firm’s Chicago office in 1999, and congressional disclosures revealed he made $16.2 million under three years there.
As mayor, Emanuel dealt with plenty of controversy as mayor, dealing with closing down some of and strikes at Chicago’s public school system and incidents of alleged police brutality. He notably fought against the release of the video of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald’s death after being shot 16 times by a Chicago police officer, which led many to call for his resignation from the office.
Most recently, he became a contributing editor at the Atlantic. His most recent piece, titled “It’s Time to Hold American Elites Accountable for Their Abuses,” argued that elites were not “standing up” for the middle class enough. Now he will be negotiating deals among the elites themselves.
Centerview Partners has a successful track record. In 2016, it was ranked as the number one consulting firm on Wall Street. Founded in 2006, it has dealt with mergers and deals between CVS and Aetna and Disney and Fox.
