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

As you get your “information” and “news” across digital venues, it’s also key to make sure you know the source—which these days isn’t always easy—and to see the original piece as it was written. Stories nowadays, of course, are shared and retweeted with various colorations that more partisan “sharers” or self-interested power brokers might be adding. Sometimes these shadings are quite subtle—and you won’t notice until you take one click more and see the original piece. Recall that in Chapter 5 we noted that much news is still originating from “old” media where there are still some standards; you might find that the conclusions reached by your powerful “sharer” aren’t exactly borne out in the original piece. And sometimes you’ll see that the original piece did not come from old media at all, but rather from a corporate entity trying to look like it’s putting out news, or a think tank that’s just a front for certain ideological warriors.

Watch out, too, for coordinated campaigns and networks of power brokers. (Also, groups that acquire nicknames—such as Rubinites, COINdinistas, Neocons, Locomotives—deserve more scrutiny.) Sometimes a group of officials and allied “talking heads” will descend in multiple venues spouting the same general message, perhaps best seen in the 2003 run-up to the Iraq war. Neoconservatives agitating for war began using alarming imagery in their rhetoric on all sorts of outlets, some warning that they didn’t want “the smoking gun” to be “a mushroom cloud.” (The speechwriter behind that rhetoric, Michael Gerson, went on to take an op-ed perch at the Washington Post . 25)

Keep a lookout, too, not just for formulaic and repeated language across media, but also for metaphors used to justify a course of action. As we saw in Chapter 4, they are commonly employed to sell public policies, and, while they pervade public debate, metaphors routinely highlight or hide the issue they are deployed to explain. What does a specific metaphor highlight? What does it hide?

And when it comes to spotting a coordinated group, like, say, the Locomotives who led Iceland to ruin, this is one of the cases where it does make sense to look backwards. Identifying them after the fact matters because they may well have moved on to another more current opportunity to exert stealth influence. Are the players with exclusive inside access and information also the very same people who were branding the information for the public? Were the players—“who is involved” in the action?—just as important as the action itself? Would the action never happen without the particular players?

After a big push like the Iraq invasion, those in the network often decamp to think tanks, universities, corporations, lobbying firms, and op-ed pages. They might review each other’s books, or promote each other with a so-called blurb endorsement. You might see them trying to brand their actions in the previous fight as they gear up for the next opportunity. In the case of the Neoconservatives, some saw them moving on to Iran as the next threat to drum up in various venues. Deciphering these networks often requires not just experience, but also computing power, because of the amount of data and its complexity.

That is very much the case for shadow elites and shadow lobbyists. The object of analysis must be the players themselves, because their influence derives from their ability to blend and blur such boundaries as official and private, international and national. 26Focusing on one or the other misses the point, since it loses the connection. Instead, the focus must be the players’ roles, activities, and sponsors; their networks; and the organizations that they and their networks empower. How do these players and networks operate within and across borders and link to each other? 27

No Magic Bullet, But Some Practical Measures

Those are some ideas about how to spot accountability-challenged power brokers; but how can we diminish their reach and impact?

First of all, no one person or institution can provide a quick fix. Holding any one power broker to certain account would require a team of investigators and public servants tracking his activities, networks, and funding sources over time: reporters connecting the dots; attorneys and regulators picking up on reporters’ work and subpoenaing documents that reporters cannot; and legislators dedicating themselves to passing laws to reflect changes in the environment and hold culprits to account. Because the potential influence and “corruption” of these players are interrelated, that would involve a holistic approach, one that considers all the components collectively and how they interact.

In the broadest sense, it would be wise for us all to take an interest in legislation that involves accountability and disclosure. These are not traditionally sexy topics that you see very often on the nightly news or “trending” on Twitter, and yet they are important. That said, as we have noted, there are considerable limits to what legislation can do. Moreover, regulation often results in unintended consequences and even can be counterproductive. The influence of these players is often embedded in the power structure, no matter the political party in power, so such measures are likely to meet with significant resistance or be outgamed.

And even when tougher laws are enacted, the players are adept at skirting the rules. (One need only look at how big banks are circumventing financial-reform provisions.)

So when pressing for legislation, voters should demand that regulations encompass the new forms of influence that might not fall into existing parameters: when a former politician joins a lobbying firm and tells his younger colleagues who to call and to use his name, is that politician not a lobbyist? Perhaps he should be compelled to register as one.

We should also press for legislation to crack down on political activities by those political-influence groups that proliferated after Citizens United . In the fall of 2013, the Obama administration proposed a crackdown. While Republicans took the lead early on creating these groups, Democrats of course are trying their hand as well, with the president’s own former campaign machine, now called Organizing for Action, being one. 28

Aside from legislation, we should encourage codes of professional conduct among consultancies, academe, government, business, media, and think tanks. Even the American Economic Association adopted a code, but only after shaming by the 2010 documentary Inside Job , which exposed blatant conflicts on the part of certain star economists. Aside from requiring more disclosure when submitting research papers, “the AEA urges its members and other economists to apply the . . . principles [of greater disclosure] in other publications: scholarly journals, op-ed pieces, newspaper and magazine columns, radio and television commentaries, as well as in testimony before federal and state legislative committees and other agencies.” 29

Of course, no one can expect that “urging” will be a magic bullet. But as anthropologists have shown in research on ethics in financial conduct, people are very much motivated by what their peers and neighbors think of them. 30

One profession that is vital in restoring accountability is the old or “legacy” media. Journalists and producers should commit to stricter standards when they quote and feature prominent players. It is helpful to directly ask a guest or source if they have any obvious conflict of interest, and many reporters still do of course try to determine conflicts. It might make sense to go one step farther and ask what affiliations they have; sometimes the players themselves, immersed in a near-hermetically sealed professional world, are only dimly aware of their own multi-layered agendas. Reporters and producers should also be made more aware of informal roles and how these can be used in ways that evade accountability.