Janine Wedel - Shadow Elite - How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market

27. The political scientist cited here is Simon Reich. See my joint article with Simon Reich, “Conspiracies, Clubs, Competitors, and Cliques: The Changing Character of American Politics,” forthcoming. The study cited of American political power from the Civil War to the New Deal is by Philip H. Burch, Jr., The Civil War to the New Deal (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1981). C. Wright Mills’s The Power Elite was first published in 1956 (New York: Oxford University Press). Following Mills, G. William Domhoff, in Who Rules America? (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1967), asserted that a few rich Americans control the nation. See also Morton Keller’s America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), which argues that the endurance of American political institutions lies at the heart of its success, and that such endurance depends upon a degree of continuity and exclusivity among political leaders.

28. Author’s interview with Jack Blum, November 2, 2004.

Notes to Chapter 2

1. The quote is contained in an e-mail sent by Steve Clemons, director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. Addressed to “Dear Friends and Colleagues,” the message refers to a recent “note to my regular friends and colleagues around the world.”

For discussion of how players both make and mirror the environment, or, put another way, how behavior changes the environment—what has been called “coevolution”—see the work of political scientist Robert Jervis, such as, System Effects: Complexity in Political and Social Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 48–58.

2. Author’s interview with Ešref-Kenan Rašidagić, June 1, 2006.

3. Author’s conversations with Greg Callman, 2006.

4. Comments of Paul Stubbs, Conference on “Multi-Level Governance: Emerging Transnational Governmentality in South East Europe: Intermediaries and Translation in Interstitial Spaces,” Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia, April 30, 2006. In his work on donor programs and development in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Stubbs suggests the “need to explore the complexities and the rise of more flexible and rather unstable practices.” Paul Stubbs, “Flexible Agencification on the Sovereign Frontier: Poverty Reduction and Development Strategies in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” Paper prepared for the Association for the Study of Nationalities, 2007 World Convention, New York, April 2007, Introduction.

5. Comments of Ana Devic, Conference on “Multi-Level Governance: Emerging Transnational Governmentality in South East Europe: Intermediaries and Translation in Interstitial Spaces,” Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia, April 30, 2006.

6. With regard to the baby boomers, the Department of Labor also reported that “job duration tends to be longer the older a worker is when starting the job.” U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Number of Jobs Held, Labor Market Activity, and Earnings Growth Among the Youngest Baby Boomers: Results from a Longitudinal Survey,” Economic News Release , USDL 08–0860, June 27, 2008, p. 2. With regard to workers aged 33 to 37 years old, 42.8 percent ended their employment in a particular job in less than one year, while 80.6 percent ended it in less than five years. When first interviewed in 1979, participants in the study were ages 14 to 22; in 2006–2007, they were ages 41 to 50. United States Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Table 2. Duration of employment relationships with a single employer for all jobs started from age 18 to age 42 in 1978–2006 by age at start of job, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity.” Economic News Release , June 27, 2008, http://www.bls.gov/news.release/nlsoy.t02.htm. Job tenure has been falling in the United States. Since the 1970s, “job tenure and the incidence of long-term employment have declined sharply,” according to data analyzed for the National Bureau of Economic Research (Henry S. Farber, “Job Loss and the Decline in Job Security in the United States,” Princeton University, Industrial Relations Section, Working Paper No. 520, September 2007). See also David Neumark, “Changes in Job Stability and Job Security: A Collective Effort to Untangle, Reconcile, and Interpret the Evidence,” NBER Working Paper No. 7472, January 2000.

With respect to new flexibility demanded of workers, see, for example, Anthony Giddens, Runaway World: How Globalization is Reshaping Our Lives (London, UK: Taylor and Francis, 2003); Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation (New York: Basic Books, 1993); and Emily Martin, “Flexible Survivors,” Bipolar Expeditions: Mania and Depression in American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), especially chapter 1.

7. With regard to flexible identities, see Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999).

8. The source for David Osborne and Ted Gaebler’s quote is Osborne and Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1992), pp. 11–12.

9. Political scientist Susan Strange elaborates on the development of the neoliberal project by delineating five crucial political choices, made mostly by the United States from 1971 to 1985, which propelled the neoliberal financial agenda. Strange’s five choices are the following: (1) the “extreme withdrawal” on the part of the United States “from any intervention in foreign exchange markets”; (2) the false but convincing claim that monetary reform remained a serious issue on the international policy agenda; (3) the U.S. “confrontational strategy of an oil-consumers’ coalition armed . . . with strategic stockpiles against any repetition of the 1973 oil price rise”; (4) the “stonewalling strategy . . . against the Conference on International Economic Cooperation,” which followed from the failure to negotiate with the Organization of Petroleum-Exporting Countries; and (5) the “positive” bolstering of “cooperation between central banks in their dual role as bank regulators and lenders of last resort” in response to two notable bank failures. Susan Strange, Mad Money: When Markets Outgrow Governments (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1998), pp. 6–7.

10. Deregulation actually began in 1978 under President Jimmy Carter. See Susan J. Tolchin and Martin Tolchin, Dismantling America: The Rush to Deregulate (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1983), especially pp. 45–56, 60, 107, 272. “The key to Reagan’s regulatory policy,” explain Tolchin and Tolchin, “was a three-pronged attack, consisting of a regulatory rollback, budget cuts, and the appointment of key personnel dedicated to the Reagan philosophy of ‘getting the government off the backs of the people’” (p. 41). The Tolchins’ work on deregulation describes not only the breadth of Reagan’s deregulation regime and its capture of the regulators but also presciently lays out the consequences.

11. Geographer Wendy Lerner notes that “neoliberalism” is used to describe vastly different political projects across the global North and South—from welfare state restructuring to structural adjustment programs. Lerner observes that “neoliberalism doesn’t necessarily travel in the directions we assume, take on the forms we expect, or have the consequences we expect.” She clarifies that, while neoliberalism should not be confused with “neoconservatism” (a movement that began in the United States roughly four decades ago), neoliberal and neoconservative concepts are sometimes intertwined. See Wendy Lerner, “Situating Neoliberalism: Geographics of a Contested Concept,” presented at the workshop on “Transnational Governmentality in South East Europe: Translating Neo-Liberalism on the Sovereign Frontier,” Rabac, Croatia, cosponsored by the Institute of Economics, Zagreb, Croatia, and the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, June 1, 2007.