'Shadow Elite': Do You Know Whose Agenda You're Being Sold?

With the shadow elite, we don't know how and when we're being maneuvered.

Take, for instance, former Homeland Security secretary Michael Chertoff, who has taken to the airwaves virtually nonstop since Christmas day. Pushing for full body scanners as a cure-all for lax airport security, he revealed only belatedly that he also represents the only company to have initially qualified for the government contract to manufacture the full-body scanners. Before this came out, how would we have known if we were being directed to a certain viewpoint? The public had no way to sort this out because the public didn't know there was something to sort out. And even after the revelation, the public will likely remember Chertoff's warnings more than any caveat.

Or Ambassador Peter Galbraith. He engaged in insider self-dealing while supposedly serving an altruistic agenda for the Kurdish people. Galbraith, a longtime champion of Kurdish autonomy, has worn many hats vis-a-vis Iraqi Kurdistan in the last decade. He advised Bush's Deputy Secretary of Defense on Kurdistan and helped draft the Iraqi constitution. Presenting himself as a disinterested expert, he published opinion pieces in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other outlets staunchly advocating Kurdish independence and the right of the Kurds to control oil resources in their region. At the same time, we now know, he acquired the potential to make up to $100 million in business dealings involving these same oil reserves. Even associates in Galbraith's non-business Iraq activities said they were unaware of his business goals. As one former Iraqi diplomat and legal advisor put it: "The idea that a foreign oil company was in the room drafting the Iraqi Constitution has me reeling....It casts a tremendous pall on the legitimacy of the process."

The public trusts such people for expertise about everything from the financial system and national security to health care reform and where we should keep our money. Meanwhile, the public, which tends to take these players at face value, much as they might be able to do in a small community, has virtually no way of knowing that the players have incentives to be less than impartial, much less means to do something about it. There is no real-time or almost real-time mechanism of information flow as there is in a small town. And the full range of flexian activity is almost always difficult to detect.

A democratic society looks to the media--a cornerstone of accountability--for such detection. Yet full (or any) disclosure of a flexian's array of affiliations may not be in the interest of a given media outlet. "Experts" like Chertoff and Galbraith are continually given air time without their relevant roles, relationships, and sponsors being fully revealed. Last Sunday the New York Times' public editor Clark Hoyt chastised these two, as well as two other players, for not revealing roles that might affect the impartiality of their public pronouncements. He also took to task the journalists who interviewed them for not asking for such information.

When attention is paid after the fact, the damage has already been done. The public has been influenced. For instance, the revelations about Galbraith are too late to avert bad PR. They give fodder to those, Iraqi or otherwise, who believe that the United States and its allies invaded the Middle East for oil.

To make matters worse, the public's acceptance of truthiness enables public figures to make whatever claims that suit them at the moment; track records vanish. My most recent favorite is "the economy is getting better." Not when one out of six people who want to work full time can't find a full time job. In today's world of 24-7 news, investigative journalism has virtually gone by the wayside and viewers' memories of the resumes of influencers they see on television dissipate into the here and now--because that's what counts in the truthiness society. [link to both my and Arianna blog on truthiness]

Until we find a way of creating a credible information system that holds flexians and flex nets accountable, these power brokers will only become more influential as the next generation of shadow elite gathers steam. Steadily, they will keep breaking down the walls of separation that were erected in the name of democracy.