The First HuffPost Book Club Pick of 2010: Shadow Elite by Janine Wedel

[Joanne98]

My first HuffPost Book Club selection of 2010 is Janine Wedel's Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. It's a gripping, disquieting book that exposes and explains why it's been so hard to bring about any real change in our country -- why Washington no longer seems capable of addressing the problems our nation faces. Fingers have been pointed at everything from gerrymandering to partisan polarization to the misuse of the filibuster. But, according to Wedel, the real problem is much deeper -- and more disturbing -- than any of these.

As she writes in Shadow Elite, a new "transnational" class of elites has taken over our country: "The mover and shaker who serves at one and the same time as business consultant, think-tanker, TV pundit, and government adviser glides in and around the organizations that enlist his services. It is not just his time that is divided. His loyalties, too, are often flexible."

Wedel dubs this new class of influencers "flexians," and the closed system they've created for themselves the "flex net." She attributes their power, among other factors, to the "embrace of 'truthiness,' which allows people to play with how they present themselves to the world, regardless of fact or track record."

Wedel cites retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey as one example of this new international super-class -- a member of the shadow elite that serves in government posts, moves to the private sector, goes on TV, and collects a healthy paycheck from companies that benefit when the power broker's advice is taken. McCaffrey was one of the Pentagon-pundits-for-pay exposed by two Pulitzer-winning front-page stories in the New York Times last year. Yet even as I write this, he's on TV giving us his wisdom on how to fight terrorism. Because, as Wedel points out again and again, members of the shadow elite keep morphing into their next incarnation no matter how often their conflicts of interest and their undermining of the public interest are revealed.

Another key flexian, former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, is on full display right now in Newsweek's special "Issues 2010" edition, in which he pens a lengthy essay on "Getting the Economy Back on Track," failing, in a very flexian way, to explain or acknowledge -- let alone apologize for -- the key role he played in getting the economy off track in the first place.

Rubin's resume is the personification of the flex net in action, as he seamlessly moved between political positions (Director of the National Economic Council, Treasury Secretary), private positions (as a board member and senior counselor at Citigroup, he received over $126 million in cash and stock), advisory positions (including serving on the President's Advisory Committee for Trade Negotiations and the SEC's Market Oversight and Financial Services Advisory Committee), and stints on a World Bank task force on Growth and Development, work as an unofficial economic advisor to President Obama, and his current position as co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.

You can read Rubin's 2,500+ word Newsweek piece here. But I was much more interested in the 28-word bio at the end of it: "Rubin is a former secretary of the Treasury (1995-99). He now serves as co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and is a fellow of the Harvard Corporation." Given that the piece is about the economic meltdown, it's telling that the bio doesn't include his nearly ten years at Citibank -- during the very time that ended with the bank having to be saved by the American taxpayers.

But that's how the flex net works: you are able to wreak destruction, bank a tidy profit, then go along your merry way, pontificating about how "markets have an inherent and inevitable tendency -- probably rooted in human nature -- to go to excess, both on the upside and the downside." And how many people remember key details in Rubin's career like his vociferous opposition, during the Clinton years, to the regulation of derivatives -- a key factor in the meltdown? Or his lobbying the Treasury during the Bush years to prevent the downgrading of the credit rating of Enron -- a debtor of Citigroup?

Last month, Janine Wedel came to HuffPost's D.C. office to talk about her book. Our team was riveted as she painted a portrait of our political culture not from the perspective of a political scientist but from that of a social anthropologist. As a professor of public policy and social anthropology at George Mason, Wedel spent years studying what happened in Eastern Europe after the fall of communism, and sees a similar co-mingling of state power and private power at work here.

Take the health care fight. Though Wedel completed her book before the most recent twists and turns in the legislative process, reading Shadow Elite you get the feeling you are being given a peek at the how-to manual the insurance and drug companies -- and their water-carriers in Congress -- used to ensure that what may well have started out as a push for real reform ended up as an industry windfall.

After all, the final Senate bill (which looks like it will be the base for the final bill sent to Obama), is essentially the same bill that was drawn up months ago in Max Baucus' office by Baucus staffers who used to be health care executives, and by health care lobbyists who used to be Baucus staffers.

The shadow elite clearly knew that the months and months of so-called debate over the issue was nothing more than a charade -- the ultimate outcome never in doubt. The bill was created in the shadows. The public process since then has essentially been like a Hollywood adaptation -- complete with the requisite third act happy ending (or, in the words of our elected officials, a "historic" ending).

"The new breed of players," writes Wedel, "who operate at the nexus of official and private power, cannot only co-opt public policy agendas, crafting policy with their own purposes in mind. They test the time-honored principles of both the canons of accountability of the modern state and the codes of competition of the free market. In so doing, they reorganize relations between bureaucracy and business to their advantage, and challenge the walls erected to separate them. As these walls erode, players are better able to use official power and resources without public oversight."

Continued>>>
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/the-first-huffpost-book-c_b_412999.html

[Goldstein1984]

1. "Pentagon-pundits-for-pay"...

...political-pundit-for-pay...corporate-pundit-for-pay...

[truedelphi]

2. Any discussion of the new "flexible" transnationals"

Brings two very important people to mind.

One is Tim Geithner, who when questioned about justifying his scheming to help Wall Street,not Main Street, told the Representative addressing him that "her government" not his government, but "hers" had no ability to do what she suggested. (That was an out and out lie - the government had the ability to do exactly as she, Issa and Kucinich had suggested! Simply start following the pesky laws still on the books and written at the time of the Savings and Loan Debacle in the late eighties.)

Then we the taxpayers would not have to be taxed for the twelve trillion dollar "saving" of Wall Street, while getting no credit relief from the Big Boys we are bailing out.

Geithner spent a total of SIX MONTHS in the USA while growing up.


The other such a flexible human being is good ol Barack Obama himself. He was a progressive when running for the Senate, then a conservative when writing his autobiography, then a progressive when running for President, then within three weeks of his election, he was embracing Hank Paulson
and thinking up his US Treasury appointment, Tim Geithner, and his FDA and Department of Agriculture Monsanto appointments.

Mr Flexible!! He can spin his political policies in total reliance on whether he is running for office or already elected!