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

Whatever its virtues (and there are many), flexibility must be considered a chief culprit in today’s unaccountability and hence the new corruption. Flexibility offers deniability, enabling power brokers to hide, obscure, and wriggle out of responsibility for actions in one role, saying they were operating in the capacity of another. Unaccountability thrives when responsibility can be denied.

Meanwhile, we, the people, buy into this agility. We seem easily impressed by the peripatetic pundits and policy missionaries we see on TV, as well as the highfliers who float in and out of officialdom, and we don’t tend to look beyond their public presentations and personas. The “private” and the informal—players, networks, and solutions—seem more authentic, even as they may be supported, sponsored, or spawned by government or industry or other organizations. When we fail to look under the surface and are so readily seduced, we do nothing to slow—in fact, we advance —the march to unaccountability.

CALLING OUT THE NEW CORRUPTION

I return to the question I began with: What happens to society when trust, and the accountability needed to sustain that trust, is drained from the institutions, leaders, and the governmental and corporate organizations on which we depend? When Goldman Sachs settled the ABACUS case with the U.S. government, a well-known political gossip site ran this trenchant headline: “BREAKING—Goldman Did Not Break Any of Those Laws It Wrote.” 65

Of course, the use of the word “BREAKING” is part of the joke. Few were surprised that the U.S. government couldn’t prosecute the case with the current laws on the books. As the writer puts it in darkly comic fashion, it’s all part of the “new normal.”

This new normal is a far cry from the bureaucrat who took a bribe or who served his personal interests at the expense of the client and the public good; that corruption was the pathology of the system. That corruption clearly broke the rules, was against the law, and could be held to account. But as I’ve shown, corruption must now be understood differently because the system has undergone a sea change, and, as we’ll see in the next chapter, unaccountability is structured into it.

Now too, corruption must be understood differently because unaccountability allows the corruption of the new players to be far more indirect and difficult to detect. They flex and shift roles to suit their needs of the moment. They create organizations that morph as their needs change.

Now too, corruption must be understood differently because unaccountability has also emasculated the old ways of detecting, deterring, and punishing corruption. In the process, too, one of society’s mechanisms for exercising social control—shame—has fallen away. The players’ brazenness shows how widely their activities are tolerated, even accepted or admired.

Ethics have been reduced to individual choice, as political scientist Susan Strange famously noted as early as the 1990s. 66The only real control is social pressure exerted by the trust network.

But when the pressure is merely that of the networks of today’s informal power brokers, there will be the opposite effect. Far from bringing shame or sanction, the pressure they exert on and for each other instead enables them to “fail up.”

This will not do.

We need to reinvent shame. It must take its place in civic life again. Shame, of course, emanates from the inside. But today’s protesters, seeking to bypass the system and the institutions it comprises, consider themselves outsiders. Society runs the risk of producing a permanent class of outsiders.

That is one reason we need to redefine corruption as violation of the public trust and not just as simple bribery or illegal behavior. Reconceptualizing corruption as violation of the public trust moves us toward reestablishing the broken connection between people on the ground on the one hand and official and public institutions on the other.

As I learned in communist and post-communist eastern Europe, when people don’t trust the system, they create workarounds to get reliable information, obtain what they need, and maneuver the daily economy and bureaucracy. And the system that’s created by everyone working around obstacles leads people to see themselves as outsiders, even as they participate in, and are daily co-opted into, their own survival by the workaround system they collectively created . What is happening today is that the systems in place are (inadvertently) generating outsiders en masse (think the huge percentage of unemployed Greek youth). And these outsiders, understandably, have scant faith in the system.

The irony is that placing our faith in individuals instead of institutions mirrors the same impulse that produced the problem: the bypassing and disrespect of the system now practiced by the top players. When people have faith only in the personal or private realm, as we’ll explore next, that creates a systemic problem for democratic society. When the public realm and public institutions have become so discredited that people trust only others who can be marketed to them as “private,” there is little hope for the vital rebuilding of public institutions—and the public trust. Society gets reduced to bypassing and disrespecting these institutions, just the way many top power brokers do now.

In Eastern Europe during late communism, I witnessed a pervasive feeling of helplessness, fatalism, and gallows humor. Now I am seeing it here in the supposedly much more transparent West. “We” who are the victims of (and sometime collaborators in) all of this exhibit wide mood swings, oscillating between, as cultural analyst John Clarke tells me, “outraged (intermittently), complacent (much of the time), resigned (also much of the time) and cynical.” 67

Yet if trust in public institutions is to be reclaimed, mustn’t we call out the violation of the public trust—the new corruption?

CHAPTER 2

Unaccountability, Structured

The cornerstone of the new corruption is unaccountability. It is structured into the workings of modern-day government and corporate organizations in ways that wouldn’t have been possible before the waning years of the twentieth century. It pervades everything from bureaucracies and banks to even the way computers interact with us. Unaccountability means that the system has an unprecedented ability to get to us, while we can scarcely get to it.

Take, for a small example, my own odyssey in trying to clear my credit record with the Bank of America. My twenty-plus hours on the phone with no fewer than twenty Bank of America representatives illustrates how many organizations now immunize (while often enriching) those at the top, even as accountability disappears into a puzzling maze. No doubt those who tried to “help” me followed their prescribed checklist—amounting to a pantomime performance of accountability. Incredibly, even more than I had experienced decades before in Eastern Europe, the system was simply structured to defeat me.

My effort began when a mortgage lender told me that my otherwise stellar credit history—which I had hoped would win me a favorable interest rate—was severely damaged because of an overdue Bank of America credit card balance of which I was completely unaware. When I’d cancelled—or thought I’d cancelled—my card, Bank of America told me I had a zero balance. I had a cancellation number and the ID number of the customer service representative I had talked with to prove it. Straightening things out would be easy, I thought.

Not so fast. I proceeded from Derrick and Deena in customer service in southern California to John, a customer service supervisor, to Felipe in the privacy source department in _____ (he was not authorized to say) to Carolyn in the credit department (a totally different phone number) to Adam in credit protection (Omaha) to Elsa in the credit department (or was it card services?) in Georgia to Julia in external customer relations to Delia in the escalations department to Sophia, also in escalations (the name of which alone tells you something), and Carol in credit analysis in Ohio. Back to customer services (Dan) and then Heather in card services, Kenton in the credit department, Susan in online banking and deposits in South Carolina and—sandwiched somewhere in there—Jim, a manager at a call center.