The Shadow Elite by Janine R. Wedel

The Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market by Janine R. Wedel

This title may sound like some conspiracy theory. But contrary to what the title may sound like, this expose was not written by some right or left wing pundit or some "over the edge" conspiracy theorist, who sees a conspiracy behind every major event. This is a scholarly work written by an anthropologist.

Janine R. Wedel is a Professor in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University and a fellow at the New America Foundation. Using her expertise in Eastern European communist governments, Wedel has pulled together a shocking expose of those individuals dismantling U.S. democracy from the inside.

I will warn you, it is a slow read and the first chapter might discourage you from reading on. But once you get through the first chapter, where Wedel labels the new breed of U.S. political operators as "flexians," and their personal networks as "flex nets", the rest of the book flows a little easier. She defines "flexians" as lobbyists, government insiders or elected officials that converge into a single network "snaking through official and private organizations, creating a loop that is closed to democratic processes."

Wedel shows how a flexian can gain extraordinary insider knowledge and influence in order to custom-tailor a version of the "truth" benefitting the highest bidder. In this way, they not only "co-opt public policy agendas" but "craft policy with their benefactors' purposes in mind."

Wedel does more than just create descriptive labels, she names names and provides concrete examples of the connections between these flexians and their various organizations. These same influential people seem to reappear time after time in different professional guises, pressing their own agendas in one venue after another.

Wedel charts how this shadow elite, loyal only to their own, challenge both governments’ rules of accountability and business codes of competition to accomplish their own goals. From the Harvard economists who helped privatize post-Soviet Russia and the neoconservatives who have helped privatize American foreign policy (culminating with the debacle that is Iraq) to the many private players who daily make public decisions without public input, these manipulators both grace the front pages and operate behind the scenes. While you will recognize many of the names, it is their actions and how they manipulate events to their advantage that remain in the shadows.