Janine Wedel - Unaccountable - How Elite Power Brokers Corrupt Our Finances, Freedom, and Security

Boeing was apparently pleased with the State Department’s promotional help: among the donations or assistance that came in from the aerospace giant: $2 million to the U.S. government for a troubled American pavilion project for the 2010 Shanghai Expo (a donation which the paper says sidestepped ethics rules); $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, for Haiti relief; and then in 2014, a “Ready for Hillary” Super PAC fundraiser hosted by a top Boeing lobbyist and former aide to President Clinton. 87Hillary Clinton, of course, would rightfully say that it’s part of her job as secretary of state to promote American business abroad. But the Post notes that the Clinton Foundation has become a destination for corporate donations, which, should Mrs. Clinton run for president, will be an area of scrutiny—and deservedly so. And if she is elected president, it would make sense to probe her aerospace policy and ask whether it unduly favors Boeing.

The celebrity and gravitas of high office have also served former U.K. prime minister Tony Blair very well.

Blair, on the very day he resigned from office, picked up a new role: special envoy to the so-called Quartet on the Middle East, which is composed of the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, and Russia.

But that was hardly the only role he would assume. What the Telegraph dubs “Blair Inc.” features a wide array: 88there’s the African Governance Initiative, the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, the Tony Blair Sports Foundation, and the initiative called Breaking the Climate Deadlock. 89There’s Tony Blair Associates, which has advised the governments of Kuwait and Kazakhstan, among others. Blair can be seen in a Kazakh promotional clip called “In the Stirrups of Time,” which the New Republic calls a “dreary, neo-Stalinist propaganda video.” 90

He became an adviser to insurance giant Zurich International and JPMorgan Chase, which has brought him many millions of dollars as well as intense scrutiny over visits to Libya, a few of them apparently paid for by Muammar Gaddafi. JPMorgan Chase was trying to broker a deal between the Libyans and a Russian oligarch (which eventually fell through). Blair has strongly insisted that he does not lobby on behalf of JPMorgan Chase. Let’s assume, for a moment, that he is being entirely forthcoming. As the maker of a documentary on Blair wrote in the Telegraph: 91

Was Mr Blair in Libya—as the headed notepaper would suggest—to discuss Middle East peace with Gaddafi? Was he working on behalf of his Governance Initiative, which claims it “pioneers a new way of working with African countries”? Was he sounding out deals for J P Morgan, as the well-placed Telegraph source insists? Or was he there on behalf of his own very lucrative money-making concern, Tony Blair Associates (TBA), whose professed objective is to provide “strategic advice” on “political and economic trends and government reform”?

This confusion of motive and identity follows Mr Blair almost everywhere he goes, as we found when researching our forthcoming Channel 4 Dispatches film, The Wonderful World of Tony Blair.

At the very least, JPMorgan Chase is going to use the Blair brand. They are paying Blair a seven-figure fee for it. As The National Interest notes, “. . . JPMorgan Chase apparently invoked his name during the negotiations” for the unsuccessful Libyan-Russian deal. 92This is not unlike the way top lobbyists are able to evade the title of lobbyist: lower-level names get their phone calls answered because of the attachment to the more prestigious figure.

Adding to the Blair muddle: some of his “management companies” are organized as “liability partnership[s],” which means, so says the Telegraph , that Blair “does not have any legal obligation to publish accounts.” 93And, under British law, Blair can take money directly from governments with no disclosure. 94

Again it is important for us to assess motive, because sometimes the belief that your goals are pure can blind a power broker to his own conflicts or potential for conflicts.

Blair insists that he is helping autocratic governments learn the ways of good governance (you have heard this argument before from those consorting with despots). His business ventures, he says, fuel the philanthropy and he’s not in it for the money. As he stated: “I probably spend two-thirds of my time on pro-bono activity, I probably spend the biggest single chunk of my time on the Middle East peace process which I do unpaid.” 95

Blair’s prime goal, it seems, is to remain relevant and in the game. Yet aren’t his activities still problematic? These days, with power, money, politics, diplomacy, and even philanthropy inextricably bound, someone of the stature of a former U.K. prime minister, and current Mideast envoy, is going to be very hard to hold to account.

In what and whom do we trust?

Given the records of Clinton, Blair, and other such leaders, some of whose activities toy with accountability to the public, it’s not surprising that they support our declining faith in formal institutions, which inclined us toward the private sphere in the first place.

But that inclination comes with a price: what we imagine to be “grassroots” entities and efforts, as we have seen, are sometimes just the opposite.

What can be done to counteract this mode of influencing and restore accountability to the public sphere? The good news is that the influence around these entities and efforts exhibits clear signposts and patterns, and we can learn to identify them.

In the next and final chapter, we shall consider how recognizing when the public trust is being violated can be used to spot and take on the new corruption.

PART III:

RESTORING THE PUBLIC TRUST

CHAPTER 10

What Is to Be Done?

From the outset, we must recognize that there is no going back to that seemingly safer, more predictable place—that place before the end of the Cold War and the advent of the digital age—where how things might unfold was more linear and the rules were more firmly entrenched. 1Clearly, the new corruption, and the unaccountability that is its signature feature, have taken hold. What can be done in the shadow-elite era, the age of structured unaccountability of so many of our formal institutions, and of power brokers who “fail up”? In surpassing the old means of wielding influence—be they interest groups, registered lobbyists, bribery, or other means—today’s premier power brokers have also surpassed the old ways of holding them to account.

What can be done when the old remedies, ranging from government auditing to public shaming, no longer work nearly as well as they once did?

Oddly, an episode in my life on a Sunday in the spring of 2013 may go part way to answering this question. I was standing in the front of a “security” line at Reagan National Airport in Washington, D.C., in advance of a flight to Florida for a conference. Clad in a favorite pink dress with my hair recently coiffed, I believed I looked the picture of unobtrusive innocence. My luggage had already gone through the baggage scanner and awaited my pickup on the other side. But there I was, waiting and waiting for the “pat-down” by a Transportation Security Administration officer, and still waiting. . . . Other passengers were sending their luggage through the machine and passing through the body scanner in short order. But there I stood, holding out for a “female assist.” And waiting. . . .

I usually declined to go through the full-body scanner, not trusting that it was entirely safe, and all too aware that at least some were sold to the public and to the U.S. government in ways that defied some of the standards of accountability.