Monitor Group's academic campaign helps explain why Libya's image softened in recent years. And it also underscores the emergence of a new breed of power broker: "shadow lobbyists".

Our government, on the federal level, has already been upended by small government ideology, beholden to private interests as never before in our memory. But we can't just blame the Tea Party.

Questionable behavior became commonplace in innumerable corners of the financial industry over the past 20 years. And at key moments, it was an outsider like Elizabeth Warren who had the common-sense perspective to cry foul.

The deep scandal of government contracting goes far beyond the actions of a handful of bad actors and products that can seen and touched. It is systemic, insidious, potentially damaging to national security -- and perfectly legal.

When government contractors hire former directors of intelligence and defense-related government agencies, they are banking on coincidences of interest between their hires and their hires' former (government) employers.

When information that is supposedly of and for government is in private hands, the power of that information can be used to serve private agendas with the risk of corporate and private players influencing policy to suit those agendas.

The shadow elite in America are adept at creating novel alternative structures and new venues of power that suit their agenda, and Organizing for America seems to be a case in point.

Democracy must be counted as one of the casualties of this new century's wars, and more broadly, of an era where an elite few have become masters at pressing their own self-interested agendas with impunity.

Americans justifiably furious with Wall Street conduct, and the havoc it's caused, might be comforted by news that regulators are taking Goldman Sachs to court, alleging fraud. They shouldn't be.

With a new emergent phase of democratic and quasi democratic regimes, can enhanced executive power linked to globalization be reoriented to better, noncommercial goals, like climate change, global hunger, or poverty?

Today upwards of three-quarters of the work of federal government, measured in terms of jobs, is contracted out. This has been part of a fundamental redesign of governing towards privatization and industry self-regulation.

One wishes that Iraq was now simply a matter of historian research. But the reality is that we're still there and the country is still dangerously unstable. No amount of truthiness can make that hard fact go away.

In December, the top U.S. intelligence officer in Afghanistan bypassed traditional boundaries and used a think tank to deliver a blistering report on the state of intelligence-gathering in that country.

Mayors and governors staring down massive budget gaps are putting bridges, buildings, parking lots, and more up for sale. Who's buying? Wall Street, which, in turn, wants to sell off your public assets to investors.