BY ELAINE KLAASSEN
Sometimes you want to hide away from all the forces that play and prey upon you. As the imminent election looms over us with a 100-ton shadow, one might want to not even vote and just read the Bible or watch “Star Trek.” Some religious groups don’t vote. Their attempt at purity kind of appeals to me right now.
If the Republican candidate were a decent, upstanding human, he could easily win the election as an outsider outraged by the corruption of government as practiced today. There is a huge contingent of citizens in the U.S. that is frustrated and disillusioned with how the government operates and they need a leader. They are willing to overlook character flaws and ignorance in order to follow that leader. Those of us who support Bernie Sanders, would, of course, prefer to choose Bernie.
I just read the new introduction to Janine R. Wedel’s 2014 book, “Unaccountable, How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt our Finances, Freedom, and Security.” The book, which I read last year, was named in Bloomberg’s survey of 2014 favorite reads. Although it doesn’t tell anybody how to vote, it will help to explain how we arrived at the weirdness of this election. The title of the preface to the paperback release, which came out in October 2016, is “How the Likes of Hillary Clinton Led to the Likes of Donald Trump.”
Wedel is an anthropologist and university professor in the School of Policy, Government and International Affairs at George Mason University. Her preceding book, “Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government and the Free Market (2009),” lays the groundwork for “Unaccountable.”
As a social anthropologist, her job is to see and articulate patterns in cultures. Her writing is clear and fluid. It’s also very specific and hard to paraphrase. She has coined terms such as “flexion” and “shadow lobbyist” to describe the players in what she calls the “new corruption.”
We already know that we don’t know who we can trust or what we can believe. She helps us understand why that is.
She shows how decisions in government, business, news stories and even medical decisions are made by influencers behind the scenes that can’t be traced. The forces at work are unnamed and largely unaccountable. The possibilities for corruption are rampant. She calls it the new corruption, most of which is legal, unlike the old, identifiable and punishable corruption, such as that of Bernie Madoff, or the McDonnells of Virginia sentenced to federal prison for accepting gifts and bribes.
In the U.S., there has been, over the past 15 or 20 years, a “sea change,” Wedel writes. Public trust in established institutions has reached a point of erosion similar to what she saw as a young scholar in Poland in the 1980s.
With the new corruption, ordinary people’s lives are affected, but they don’t truly know whom to blame.
Wedel gives the reader masses of information describing much behind-the-scenes information generally hidden from the public eye. For example: “In the United States, for instance, three quarters of the people working for the federal government actually now work directly for private companies, sometimes with a lot of influence and often with little oversight—but always focused first on the bottom line, not the public interest. Contractors (think Edward Snowden) run intelligence operations, control crucial databases, screen airport security and law-enforcement officials, choose and oversee other contractors, and draft official documents. And there’s been an increase in the numbers and influence of think tanks and quasi-official bodies like government advisory boards.”
This book gives a striking analysis of the social and political and economic times in which we live. It gives us a notion of where the power lies and doesn’t lie.
Wede’s writing is a genuine search for truth. She is just trying to figure out what is going on, that is, she isn’t writing this to try to manipulate the reader. I trust her research because I know her, I know her family and trust their values and integrity. She says in her book that in our times, the only information anyone trusts is that which they acquire via personal trusting relationships; people get the “real” news from their friends—what their friends have personally seen and heard, or what their friends have heard from people they trust. It’s because people don’t know how much of what we hear from experts or in the news is manipulated or manufactured for a certain purpose.
