Why hopeful may not ‘bank’ on mayoral bid
Ray McGuire, the former Citigroup executive who’s running for mayor, once served as the banker for Koch Industries, the multibillion-dollar company owned by industrialists Charles and David Koch.
The Koch brothers financed ultraconservative causes for years and are roundly reviled among moderate and progressive Democrats.
McGuire’s connection to the Kochs will not endear him to those on the city’s left, many of whom are Democratic primary voters — voters McGuire will need to win over if he wants to become the next mayor.
“It’s very damaging,” said Ed Ott, former executive director of the New York City Central Labor Council. “He’s a nonstarter with labor. I think he’s a nonstarter with 85% of the Democratic Party right off the bat.”
Veteran political consultant Neal Kwatra put it even more bluntly.
“If I am Ray’s opponents, I would be pounding him relentlessly to hear his explanation for why, in the heart of the Bush administration when Democrats were struggling to regain power, were you helping to advance the empire of a viciously anti-union, anti-Democratic company that laid off thousands of its unionized workers,” he said. “It’s a decidedly
suboptimal way to introduce yourselves to millions of New Yorkers who also have just suffered through a traumatic year of layoffs.”
McGuire, who’s running as a Democrat, represented the family-owned multibillion-dollar Koch Industries in its $21 billion acquisition of the Georgia-Pacific paper company in 2005, telling Forbes magazine at the time that “they are investing in their own strategic ideas.”
“These people are as global as it gets,” he said then.
Since the deal, Georgia-Pacific has laid off more than 2,000 workers and saw its roll of union workers cut nearly in half. Meanwhile, Koch Industries poured $1 billion into a factory in China to manufacture a chemical for another subsidiary, INVISTA, which specializes in synthetic fibers.
In political circles, the Koch brothers have been most known for huge donations to conservative causes. David Koch died in 2019.
They used their financial largesse over the years to bankroll the highly influential Americans for Prosperity political action committee, which in turn has succeeded in helping roll back measures to address global warming, providing tax cuts for the rich and pushing for the passage of anti-union laws in states including Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin.
City University of New York political science Prof. Doug Muzzio called the brothers an “axis of evil” within American politics, but said McGuire’s role as a banker working for them more than a decade ago might not penetrate the psyche of voters as much as his opponents may hope.
“What he has done individually will be more relevant,” Muzzio said.
McGuire, who made a splash last month when he rolled out his run with a Spike Lee-narrated campaign video, has pitched himself to voters as an up-from-his-bootstraps success story who grew up poor in Dayton, Ohio, worked hard and rose through the ranks to the highest reaches of corporate America.
At Citigroup, McGuire helped lead the bank’s investment banking division, starting in 2005, and went on to be named vice chairman of the bank in 2018. But the years that marked his climb up the corporate ladder also coincided with the bank’s travails through the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis and its aftermath, which included having to shell out billions of dollars in fines.
McGuire had no role in the bank’s management of subprime mortgage investments, according to campaign spokeswoman Lupe Todd-Medina.
“Fifteen years ago, Ray rose to the top of the investment banking industry, a field where he was often the only Black person in the room.
“His job was to find and make deals that helped companies survive and grow in a highly competitive, global economy,” she said.