Administrations come and go, bureaucratic networks remain in place...

[JackRiddler]

http://janinewedel.info/shadowelite.html

SHADOW ELITE:
How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market
(Basic Books; December 1, 2009)

Janine R. Wedel

Governments and administrations come and go, but not so a new breed of power brokers, who always seem to pop up just where the action is. Wearing different hats, they press their agendas in venue after venue. According to award-winning public policy scholar and anthropologist Janine Wedel, these are the "shadow elite," the prime movers in a vexing new system of power and influence.

Wedel charts how these players make public decisions without public input—in realms from domestic to foreign and financial policy. Maneuvering through their many spheres of influence, they challenge both governments' rules of accountability and businesses' codes of competition, ultimately answering only to each other. From the Harvard economists who helped privatize post-Soviet Russia and the neoconservatives who helped privatize American foreign policy for thirty years (culminating with the debacle that is Iraq) to many lesser-known global operators, these players flout once-sacrosanct boundaries between state and private, bureaucracy and market. This new breed, unseen by most, is steadily gaining power.

Original and eye-opening, Shadow Elite gives us the tools we need to recognize these players and understand the new system—which we ignore at our peril.







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Sounds interesting - the book just came out.

The above are examples of how powerful and influential institutional positions interlock through networks of individuals - not master plans of everything. Seen from a distance and in the abstract, the correct term for it is class. The micro picture is networks, and you can't understand how the system works without including the micro as well as the macro view.

One of the most robust, long-running and powerful networks of the last 40 years has been what many people here call the BFEE or Bush mob. One of the key players in that has so far been allowed to head the Pentagon under Obama. (The Pentagon that once again represents the majority of discretionary spending in the new federal budget proposal.) What quid pro quo, ideological affinity or other motivation may lie behind that is basically speculative, but something's there.

[Ardent15]

1. This is Alex Jones bullshit

Take it to Prisonplanet.

[JackRiddler]

3. Obviously you're very glad to have him around as a bogeyman.

I don't like Prison Planet. I like Democratic Underground.

You can take your bullshit - which is a kind word, since you haven't even generated enough comment to call it bullshit - to the Wall Street Journal editorial page and Foreign Affairs.

I am glad to be in the tradition of FDR, who wasn't afraid to call out the banksters and economic royalists of his time by those names.

[Ardent15]

4. Your signature says otherwise

"Demand criminal investigation of 9/11!"

[JackRiddler]

5. Do you have anything to say about the OP? Obviously not.

Only illogical obfuscation and an attempted association with a bogeyman figure that I probably abhor more than you do.

Tell me, would you have been against the Nazis in the 1930s? By your loose logic, if you were anti-Nazi, I could have called you a dedicated Stalinist.

[fire_in_the_middle]

2. yep.

if you just follow the money you always find the same type of people. these bastards ok poisoning the food, water, shelter and clothes for the working and poor, the latter of which is about to increase in america exponentially. furthermore, the countdown to lock-up is coming. be ready.

[JackRiddler]

6. kick