'Shadow Elite': Do You Know Whose Agenda You're Being Sold?

[StarfarerBill]

By Janine R. Wedel, author of "Shadow Elite"

In the community of fewer than 2,000 in which I grew up, the proverbial six degrees of separation melt away. You can't help but play multiple roles in a small town: A teenager babysits for her next-door neighbor's kids whose father is also her schoolteacher and a colleague of her father's and whose mother is also her Sunday school teacher. Is there potential for nepotism and corruption? Yes. But at the same time, everybody knows what everybody else is doing and it's difficult to hide agendas. In a small community, agendas, roles, relationships, and sponsors are pretty clear.

By contrast, among today's top power brokers--the shadow elite--agendas, roles, relationships, and sponsors are difficult, if not impossible, for the public to ascertain. We've looked at a number of these "flexians" and have seen that even when they've been sued for defrauding the government they somehow manage to take a seat back at the table. It didn't used to be this way. Where once power brokers had fewer and more stable affiliations, the new breed of players--whose ever-fluid and greater number of involvements reflect the multiplicity of enterprises today engaged in governing--are more global in reach and difficult to track.

Overlapping roles and interconnectedness can make a community vibrant and strong--and help explain why it can be at one and the same time insular and highly engaged with the world. This structure supports mobilization, whether for a community festival or relief efforts. My home community, which is steeped in the Mennonite tradition of service, has been very quick to organize aid to Haiti. That is at least in part because first-hand information and interdependencies are mainstays of community life.

On a small scale such interdependency of roles and relationships can be beneficial. But when applied to the shadow elite, the model can endanger democracy. Whereas, in a small community, an apparatus is in place to "out" hidden agendas and to sort out whose word counts for what--the source of the information and the reputation of the source is easily checked--no such system is available to the public with regard to the shadow elite. (The shadow elite relies, of course, on the same kind of first-hand information exchange but guards it closely.) The public is left without reliable means to know what flexians are up to--be it their overlapping roles, dense relationships, or undisclosed sponsors--which would, of course, be the basis for the public's ability to make informed judgments.

In a small community, when an acquaintance approaches you at a social gathering on the pretext of expressing condolences at a relative's passing and you've already heard that the acquaintance sells life insurance on the side, you can discern his agenda pretty quickly--and make a decision to smile and nod or turn away. He may be all about maneuvering you somewhere else. But with the shadow elite, we don't know how and when we're being maneuvered.

Take, for instance, former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, who has taken to the airwaves virtually nonstop since Christmas day. Pushing for full body scanners as a cure-all for lax airport security, he revealed only belatedly that he also represents the only company to have initially qualified for the government contract to manufacture the full-body scanners. Before this came out, how would we have known if we were being directed to a certain viewpoint? The public had no way to sort this out because the public didn't know there was something to sort out. And even after the revelation, the public will likely remember Chertoff's warnings more than any caveat.

Or Ambassador Peter Galbraith. He engaged in insider self-dealing while supposedly serving an altruistic agenda for the Kurdish people. Galbraith, a longtime champion of Kurdish autonomy, has worn many hats vis-a-vis Iraqi Kurdistan in the last decade. He advised Bush's Deputy Secretary of Defense on Kurdistan and helped draft the Iraqi constitution. Presenting himself as a disinterested expert, he published opinion pieces in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other outlets staunchly advocating Kurdish independence and the right of the Kurds to control oil resources in their region. At the same time, we now know, he acquired the potential to make up to $100 million in business dealings involving these same oil reserves. Even associates in Galbraith's non-business Iraq activities said they were unaware of his business goals. As one former Iraqi diplomat and legal advisor put it: "The idea that a foreign oil company was in the room drafting the Iraqi Constitution has me reeling....It casts a tremendous pall on the legitimacy of the process."

More:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/janine-r-wedel/shadow-elite-do-you-know_b_430998.html

[flyarm]

1. excellent read! Everyone should read..and thanks for posting! eom

[Myrina]

2. This should be a mandated hourly scroll on all the 'news' channels ...

... like at the beginning of Star Wars ...

[BanzaiBonnie]

3. In a small community, you know who to trust

In a large group that is spread out worldwide, more can be hidden for longer periods of time. You don't get the instant feedback that you do when a neighbor does business with someone who cheats him and then lets you know about what happened.