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

by Janine R. Wedel

Book Overview

It can feel like we're swimming in a sea of corruption. It's unclear who exactly is in charge and what role they play. The same influential people seem to reappear time after time in different... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0465091067
• ISBN13: 9780465091065
• Release Date: December 2009
• Publisher: Basic Books (AZ)
• Length: 283 Pages
• Weight: 1.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.6" x 9.5"
• Age Range: 18 years and up
• Grade Range: Postsecondary and higher

Customer Reviews

A timely book that must be read

If one wonders why we continue to do things the way we've always done things and you know those things could be done better; you may understand why after reading this book. The persons described in this book know exactly how to keep this country in fear. We should be in fear of the "Shadow Elite"... but they know how to make it be anyone who disagrees with them. The author points out how relentless they are - including things like a missile defense system when its generally agreed something like it is worthless. One might believe that the "Shadow Elite" were all CEO's of the defense industry. They certainly are the benefactors. But no, these are people who maintain their place in history because of what they provide these CEO's through their continuing fear campaigns. One can only hope that enough readership of this book will cause eyes to open and things to change.

Poor Reviews Miss the Mark and Throw Away a Powerful Ally

Poor Reviews Miss the Mark and Throw Away a Powerful Ally in "Shadow Elite: How the World's New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market" by Janine R. Wedel It is interesting that the one star and other lesser rated reviews were those expounded a global conspiracy and had no respect for an academic examination of the part of the Great Beast she was qualified to discuss. Some samples: - "A Disingenuous Apology for the JudeoCons" - "Not Even Close ....To write about the shadow elite, the author would have to investigate the Bilderbergs, but she was apparently off on several mindless tangents." - "Wedel's book protests too much that it is not "conspiracy theory'" so she can keep her job as a professor within a university system that is as politically gelded as any medieval monastery" and the rather unhelpful " I don't plan to read these Kindle books that are priced at greater than $9.99." This book is an amazing introduction to the largely self-serving and mutating web of alliances that operate in the New World Order connective tissue of NGOs , Government Agencies and Military Operations draining all these of resources and original purpose. Once you learn her language for all this - THEN you can go back and look at the traditional elites and Invisible-Powers-That-Be with an educated eye.

The DNA of the Malignant Political Organism that has been Stalking our Society has finally been Iden

The author, a social anthropologist, has finally identified what ails our culture, and our democratic way of life. Through intense research (much of it performed in the Eastern bloc), she has revealed why our political system has ceased to work - at least for ordinary citizens anyway; why it has devolved into little more than a pre-arranged, staged, symbolic set of primitive and now also obligatory set of rituals: "dog fights" between two meaningless political parties, and us their surrogates. She has identified why it is that we continue to go through the empty motions of voting, while everything meaningful goes on well above (or is it well below?) our heads; and why we are forced to listen to the same ethnically incestuous family of narrators beaming constantly across the spectrum of our media as if they were operating a neighborhood megaphone with a circular soundtrack to a bad movie. But as we conspiracy-minded thinkers always knew, it is due to an identifiable cabal -- my word, not the author's (who is almost Catholic in the restraint she shows in failing to call a spade-a-spade) of "Shadow Elite," a hydra-headed ethnically identifiable monster with the tentacles and all the aggressiveness of a metastasized malignant cancer. This systemic parasite invades the body politic by worming its way into the upper echelon of the most intimate parts of our political and economic system, where its members become counselors to the presidents, high level consultants, media moguls, contractors, soldiers of fortunes, spies, Hollywood film producers, newscasters and expert news commentators, members of all the boards of the major corporations, heads of all the major NGOs, tenured university professors, members of all of the most influential political pacs, most of the GS-15s and above, on the top floors of any government office buildings; and most of all, the proverbial "movers and shakers" of the wall street money tree, where together they coalesce to form an incestuous network of interlocking interests, roping in the talented where needed from the major universities, who are completely unaware of the fact that they been recruited into a club of which they are the "outsiders" ("in" but not "of" the internal cliques) and who are mostly impervious to the larger interests they have been enlisted to serve. Always operating in the gray zone, in the cracks between private and public interests, its ultimate goal is absolute power, apparently for the sake of power alone, to then be used to corrupt the arena in which power gets played out, and to do so, absolutely. Offering very little in the way of public good, and since evil is intrinsic to its very nature and purpose, this malignant organism has already caused, and promises to continue causing, a great deal more systemic harm to our political institutions and to our future than it has already. This creature has been sighted most prominently in an around the Washington D.C. environs, but may be seen hov

An important work

I was surprised to find a one-star review of this book after hearing so much about it and reading a very thorough positive review on the product page for the print edition. After realizing the one-star review had been written by someone who had not read SHADOW ELITE and was simply irritated by the e-book edition's price point, I purchased the e-book, read the introduction and first chapter, and have now returned here to post a five-star review simply so a one-star rating is no longer applied to SHADOW ELITE. This book is indeed an important work that deserves widespread attention and acclaim. It does not deserve a low rating that may lead potential readers to dismiss it without further consideration of its author, her many years of work, and her book's remarkable, revealing findings.

Nonpartisan, Fascinating, Revealing, and Important

Economists still don't know how the great recession could happen. Political scientists seem satisfied to analyze polls and use them to determine political strategies. Military leaders appear to be a political and purchasing arm of government that is unable to complete a military objective in today's environment. Can anyone untangle the complexity of how things really work and who is calling the shots? Janine R Wedel makes a strong case that it takes an Anthropologist - a scholar who studies people and cultures and networks - to see what is really going on. In this groundbreaking book, Dr. Wedel has identified what she calls "flex networks" of individuals who share a common ideology and, by playing an array of related and interwoven roles, work together to manipulate the policies and actions of governments, corporations, and NGOs. She labels these individuals "flexians" for the way they use multiple simultaneous and sequential roles to pursue the goals of their flex net, often to the detriment of the companies and governments they represent or advise. Dr. Wedel presents her thesis and then illustrates it using three detailed examples of flex nets, the individuals involved, and the global effects of their actions over time. She stresses that these are not conspiracies and often their actions are legal or at least not provably illegal. The first example is a flex net operating in Poland and Eastern Europe after the fall of the communists in Poland. Another chapter describes the "Harvard-Chubais" flex net that oversaw and bungled the privatization efforts in Russia in the early 90's. The third flex net she describes is the "Neocon core" consisting of individuals centered around Richard Perle, and how their activities, over a 30 year period, culminated most recently in helping to lead the USA into the Iraq war based on their preemptive war ideology and a campaign of manufactured disinformation. In all these cases, these flex nets, or "Shadow Elite," significantly determine policy and action at global levels and do so beyond the control, oversight, or even recognition of any national or international authority. Dr. Wedel does not claim to have answers to all the questions mentioned at the start of this review or even for the cases she presents. In fact, she makes a point of saying that her goal is to simply describe the reality of what is happening. It is up to us to understand this new insight and to determine if the results of this new form of organizing are compatible with the type of government, economy, and culture we want. If not, and that is likely the case, it will take a new type of recognition, oversight, and control to change the situation. Gary Lyndaker, Gravois Mills, Mo