"Not only is the fox guarding the henhouse, it's doing blow and sleeping with the hens. But it's middle-class Americans who are getting screwed."
-Third World America, Arianna Huffington
That riotous metaphor should give you a sense of Arianna Huffington's engaging and insightful call-to-arms -- her new book, Third World America. In it, she catalogues the alarming signs of decay in American life -- the "better life" she admired so deeply as a child in Greece now seems in dire straits: the vanishing industrial base, the crumbling infrastructure, the failing schools, the economy battered by rogue corporations, and the political system controlled by a small elite -- the foxes, if you will -- dominating both parties.
In my book, Shadow Elite, I have another name for the foxes -- flexians -- the most agile of a new breed of movers and shakers who glide effortlessly in and out and around government, corporate, media, and think tank roles. The cachet of these new power brokers is in information: their access to and control of official (or should-be official) information, their ability to use information gleaned in one venue in other venues, their skill at getting their own version of the truth branded as the most authoritative one and using the media to promote it.
In pressing personal agendas regardless of the broader impact, these power brokers, who've risen over the past few decades, have been "shorting the middle class," as Arianna aptly puts, to devastating results. In the economic arena alone, she demonstrates, the decisions made by this new breed -- from those who ruined Enron to those who wrought more recent Wall Street wreckage -- have had a huge impact on the lives and futures of Americans. They have shown disdain for shareholders and ordinary people, and by extension, the American dream. To quote an anonymous email called "We Are Wall Street" that circulated this spring, directed at Main Street America: "We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that."
The 21st century power brokers -- less stable, less visible, more peripatetic, and more global in reach than their elite forebears -- are potentially more insidious and dangerous to democracy. Their maneuverings are largely beyond the reach of traditional monitors. Unlike the rest of us, these players are virtually immune to accountability to voters or government or corporate overseers, because the full range of their activities and their true agendas are more difficult to detect.
And, without the accountability and transparency that a well-functioning first-world democracy demands, they are, as Arianna details, growing the ranks of "Third World Americans." With a small group of self-interested players at the helm," democracy goes on the auction block," she writes. Middle-class Americans are deprived of the livelihoods and benefits that should rightfully be theirs as citizens of a democratic, free-market nation, and they have been summarily shut out of the process on policy decisions that would affect not just us, but also our children and grandchildren.
Some examples:
The Neocon Core: a tiny circle of longtime ideological allies used their interlocking relationships across government, think tanks, business, and national borders to achieve their vision of asserting American power, and firepower, to remake the Middle East. These players helped created an alternative version of the truth -- that Saddam Hussein posed an immediate risk to American security and abetted the 9/11 terrorists -- branded it as the most authoritative and sold it to the American government, media, and public. The result was that they helped take the United States to war in Iraq, with consequences for the budget, America's international standing, and world stability that will be reaped for generations to come.
The BP Oil Disaster: With a high-powered advisory board peopled by some top Washington players, BP was well-placed to ensure that safety standards remained lax. Its regulator was a perfect specimen of the shadow elite era: the Minerals Management Service was so embedded in the industry and its mission so conflicted that it is sometimes hard to tell who was the regulated and who was the regulator. As Arianna writes, "the problem isn't a shortage of regulators. It's the way we've allowed the regulated to game the system... if you want to see 'overly cozy' run amok, look no further than the Minerals Management Service."
The Wall Street Collapse: Ironically, there were few policymakers more capable of understanding exotic derivatives and their real world impact than Clinton Treasury Secretary (and former Goldman Sachs chief) Robert Rubin and his deputy Lawrence Summers. And both were there when derivatives could have been at least partially reined in before they became, to quote Warren Buffett, "financial weapons of mass destruction." Instead these officials did exactly the opposite, blocking a key piece of derivatives regulation in 1998. Both players would go on to enjoy the fruits of their advocacy in Wall Street jobs after leaving Clinton-era policy roles.
Since the collapse, have these two figures quietly left roles of influence to "spend more time with their families?" Hardly: Summers is President Obama's Director of the National Economic Council. And Rubin, who Arianna calls "the state-of-the-art modern powerbroker" is co-chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations and founder of the economic policy think tank the Hamilton Project.
This last point goes to one of the more infuriating aspects of the shadow elite: that they are seemingly impervious to failure. While the rest of us walk an economic tightrope with no net, the power brokers of the shadow elite "fail upwards." Not only can they always find one more think-tank job, academic role, or corporate board to sit on, they often advance in their opportunities and standing. As Arianna writes: "The members of this shadow elite keep morphing into their next incarnation no matter how often their conflicts of interest and their undermining of the public good are revealed."
And as she notes, they're often impervious to shame as well. Witness the executives who preside over the worst economic calamity since the Depression and then still ask for billions in bonuses. Reflecting on "how short our collective memory is when it comes to holding the powerful accountable," Arianna quotes Milan Kundera in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."
What can be done about such "low people in high places"? For, as Arianna points out, "there are no lobbyists for the American dream." She says in the preface, "One of the characteristics I've come to love the most about my adopted country is its optimism. In fact, it melded perfectly with my own Greek temperament... The only downside of the optimistic spirit is that it can sometimes prevent us from seeing what is unfolding until it's too late." Her final chapter, "Saving Ourselves from a Third World Future," provides a litany of thoughtful innovations -- from experiments that bring technology and government together now being tried at the local level to fixing the broken educational system, creating jobs, and "closing down the Wall Street casino."
And she implores us as individuals to "look in the mirror" -- to break up with the big banks that failed us; to find happiness not in instant gratification, but in serving others; to use social networking and new technologies to help people connect and pursue service that befits their aspirations and abilities.
To do this, Americans will have to reclaim the best of that can-do spirit that so impressed Arianna as a child in Greece. Going to school, she would pass daily by a statue of President Harry Truman. And as Truman once said: "A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties." With all the difficulties facing a potential Third World America, it would seem to be a great time to be an optimist, but one with eyes wide open.
Linda Keenan edits the Shadow Elite column.
Follow Janine R. Wedel on Twitter: www.twitter.com/profjanine
I say 'derive THIS'. If Wall St. has become a national financial liability, then shut it down. Shut it down. Have em take a month off, while the wiser heads figure out a way to get the federal budget rebalanced. If that means actually just issuing blanket warrants for people's arrest, and asking for other people's resignations, then do what's necessary to restore order in our country's fiscal house. Advancing the national debt by a trillion a year translates as: Going into debt at the rate of about 2.5 billion dollars per day, including weekends. That's no way to run a railroad. People might not like reforms, probably won't, but, other countries are fixing their situations and doing what's necessary to get 'back in black'. Why should the United States be any exception? Will we need people from some foreign country to come in, and clean up our books? There's one word that jumps out at you about this whole thing: Incompetence.
Fox news does its best (which is pretty effective) to mislead those on the right; the left seems to want to magically change what is nominally a constitutional republic into a purely plutocratic paradise. The libertarians can't see the good of a little socialism (fire and water and sewer, education, and OMG, healthcare); the tea party folks want to dress funny and complain but have no agenda; what discontent there is... completely incoherent. Overall, there's no solid base of any size that is even *slightly* likely to rise up and do anything - and I mean *anything*, much less get violent.
Yes, we've got really troublesome classes; the rich, mostly everyone else, except the convicted criminals, who have become a permanent, unable to be hired, in some cases unable to even find a place to live, zero-privilege class. We don't do rehabilitation anymore, we just do retribution.
But do we have a large enough population segment with enough concerns to actually revolt? I'm not seeing it, that's all I can say. Work, eat, sleep, watch TV, perhaps a little sex. Sadly, that's America today.
It was 12 long years from the first British oppressions to 1776.
We suffered years of Vietnam before we rose up - but end it we did.
Americans may be slow to anger (which may generally be a good thing in a populace LOL), but when we do...oh, the righteous retribution.
The arrogant, greedy and powerful have already sown the seeds of their own destruction.
It's just a matter of time now...we're simmering.
They are going to finish that robbery by stealing our social security, it's happening now.
These oligarchs are shorting America - all of it. When they have taken everything from us, they will move on to China and India to rob their growing middle class. They won't think twice about it.
As a friend of mine in highschool used to say, “why would I work my butt off for an A, when I can do practically nothin and get a C?”
Or as so many unemployed are now saying, “why would I get a job paying $500/week, when I can sit at home and collect $425?”
The elites are preparing for the end-game, the global collapse as the human civilisations enter into the potential extinction era of severe--catastrophic resource-decline. this is why the accelerated carve-up of resource-rich territories has already begun to eat up national wealth worldwide. They're in a fortress mentality game of terrifying consequences for the rest of us. The future is a sharpened stick.......
It was The Federal Reserve that paid for World War I, though the real cost was borne in the lives of millions of our fellow human beings whose only crime was to be forcibly dragooned into a standing army to be run against machine-gun nests. It was the same Plutocrats that gave Hitler his money to build up the Nazi war machine and then pushed the world into another round of mindless bloodshed that killed over 50 million, most of them civilians. And on and on and on. War is the Health of the State and its blood is fiat money. The small fry like the Wall Street slime need to be taken down, but the root of the problem MUST be dealt with.
to interview a variety of people within the 1 percent or super wealthy, his parents included. What I found interesting was how dismissive and unwilling these people were not only in trying to understand the value of looking at the question of the phenomenal gap that has grown in the last 30 years between the 1% and the 99%, but their downright hostility toward him for even asking the legitimate question. Warren Buffet was asked to be interviewed and declined, his granddaughter
however agreed to be interviewed, she had nothing negative to say about her grandfather, nevertheless he threatened that if she participated she would be excommunicated from the family.
He followed through with that by sending her a scathing letter. It was clear that the rich were very
reluctant to be open or forthcoming in discussing their wealth and the potential conflicts it presents when living in a supposed democracy.
Sucker.
You are referring to neoliberals, who are kissing cousins of conservative Republicans. These two factions have alternated the presidency since 1945.
Left-liberals would like to pick up where Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt left off and create what renowned philosopher Erich Fromm called in a 1956 book, The Sane Society.
In Britain voters just ejected neoliberal hawkish New Labour in favor of a Liberal Democrat-Conservative coalition government. A similar coalition could take power here:
Eg. liberal Dems and sensible (honest local-Chamber-of-Commerce-type) conservatives could agree to reverse overnight the crazy idea of incentivizing American large corporations to make products with educated and disciplined but very cheap labor in China and India. This "free trade" policy (featuring no tariffs on such imports to speak of) has literally denuded America of "good jobs and good wages".
Free trade and America's equally insane pursuit of empire and world policing (also anathema to sensible Midwestern isolationist conservatives) have profoundly dis-served non-elites in America.
A coalition of liberal Dems and sensible conservatives could displace today's mainstream elected "professional" Dem and Repub pols who are all beholden to big business, large donors, the military industrial complex and their lobbyists.
Eric C. Jacobson
Public Interest Lawyer
Culver City, California
http://www.libdems.us
The Corporate State is coordinated to control the Senate and the Congress.
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) coordinates the control of the Administration.
The Council on Foreign Relations coordinates the control of the Corporate Media.
Applying "new names" or "new labels' to the state of affairs in the USA is not warranted and it only serves to muddy the waters. And the Corporate Media already distorts current and past history in the U.S..
If you want answers for todays events, just read pages 950-970 of Tragedy and Hope, Dr. Carrol Quigley (Bill Clinton's mentor on World Affairs). Quigley, himself a long time member of CFR, described in those 20 pages the interlocked group of private men whose impact on history is so profound that Quigley laments that history does in no way record that influence.
The only valid point in this article is that Robert Rubin is co-Chair of the Board of Directors at CFR.
Now take a look at the very despised Dick Cheney talking and joking to CFR: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbnpN07J_zg&feature=related .
U.S. history does not record the Rockefeller Syndicate's control and influence of its affairs.
I think that the answer is that given all the information that they have readily available, much of it hidden from the rest of us, they all know that a huge collapse is in the offing caused by environmental degradation, overpopulation, and their own willful manipulations of our financial and political systems. The elites are now in a sort of fortress mentality, accruing as much as they can for themselves, against the day when climate change wreaks its full havoc, famine sweeps great swaths of the world, wars break out over fresh water. That's why they bankroll the climate change deniers, that's why they killed the movement for population control in the 70s, that's why they cultivate the self-destructive ignorance of the Tea Party crowd. They are poised to push the rest of us over the edge of lifeboat when the time comes.
And what do you mean by "environmental fanaticsm [sic] and mythology"? Do you think that people are just making this stuff up? The collapse of fisheries worldwide is a documented fact, for example -- when was the last time that you had cod in your fish and chips? or seen abalone on a menu? We have been looking at a severe degradation in our environment and quality of life that has happened well within living memory, but we are all refusing to confront it. Yes, there is "widespread corruption between Wall Street and Capitol [and I assume you mean the Capitol in Washington DC and not "Capital" (which would mean Wall St., no?)], but how does that contradict what I said?