 unaccountable. Dr. Waddell is a professor of international commerce and policy in the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. A social anthropologist by training, she writes about governance, development, forum policy, and corruption through the lens of social anthropology. Her book, Collusion and Collusion, the Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe in 2001, won the Gravemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. She has been a four-time Fulbright Fellow, has won awards from the National Science Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the German Marshall Fund, the United States Institute of Peace, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and has been an associate producer of three PBS documentaries. And perhaps closest to our heart, she has been a senior research fellow with the American Strategy Program of the New America Foundation in the past, working on the Outsourcing National Security Initiative funded in part by the Ford Foundation. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Jeanine Waddell. Thank you very much for the kind introduction. I'm delighted to be back here and to also welcome all of you and see many familiar faces. Let's begin with this. What do you think of when you hear the word corruption? A bribe? Virginia Governor McDonnell and his wife convicted of bribery and fraud? A jury found that they broke the law, but did they distort public policy in any meaningful way? Will their actions compromise our health, pocket-bicks, or security, or lead to deep and lasting inequalities? When compared with practitioners of what I call the new corruption, the answer I think is no. In the new corruption, no envelope is passed under the table, no laws are clearly broken. Yet those who practice it violate our trust, and their actions reap consequences far more damaging than, say, McDonald's accepting and engraved Rolex. More and more, the modus operandi of these practitioners seems to be just the way business is done. And more and more, I'm seeing the same lack of accountability in our organizations and among top players that I saw as an anthropologist in Eastern Europe, both during and after communism. Unaccountability is a necessary, though not sufficient, condition of the new corruption. And so today I'd like to address these points. One, structured unaccountability. How is unaccountability structured into our organizations? Two, how is unaccountability become pr- whoops, wrong slide. Okay, so two, how is, how has unaccountability become practically endemic among top power brokers? I guess the first slide disappeared, sorry, that is supposed to have all four of them. Three, why do players not fall under the expert's definition of corruption? And four, what can we do about it? So let's turn to one, how is unaccountability structured into the organizations upon which we daily rely, corporate and government organizations? I began my grasp, began my journey to understanding structured unaccountability, not just through research and theory, but when it began to threaten my own finances. I learned that my otherwise stellar credit history, which I hoped would win me a favorable interest rate in refinancing my mortgage, had been wrecked by an overdue Bank of America credit card balance, of which I was completely unaware. When I'd canceled or I thought I canceled my credit card, my Bank of America, Bank of America told me that I had a zero balance. I had a cancellation number and the name of the person and the ID number of the person to prove it. I thought straightening things would, the straightening things out would be easy. Thus began 20 plus hours on the phone with no fewer than 20 plus different individuals in different places. I proceeded from Derek and Dina in customer service in Southern California, to John, a customer service supervisor, to Philippe in the privacy source department, and while he wasn't 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 wizard card services in Georgia, to Julia and external customer relations, to Delia in escalations department, the name of which alone tells you something, to Sophia also in escalation, and to Carol in credit analysis in Ohio. Back to customer services, Dan, and then Heather in card services, Kenton in credit analysis, Susan in online banking in South Carolina, and sandwiched in there somewhere, Jim, a manager in a call center. My journey transported me back to an unlikely place, Communist Poland in the early 1980s under martial law. I recalled one afternoon when I spent six hours on the phone trying to replace an international call. Was I now up against the same kind of behemoth? And did I mention that the charge that wrecked such havoc was a $13.69 bill, and that it was for a credit protection plan? That is the package I bought to alert me to any problems had actually upended it. Exasperated, I tried to fix my problem the old fashioned way, hoping to appeal face to face to a physically present person. Look him in the eye and establish a sense of trust. Just as I would have in the old Poland. I walked into a local Bank of America branch. I was greeted by Charles. We were joined by Bob who called in Ronald, the bank manager, all tried to help. But what could they do? Only get on the phone and call into that same phone tree. Through this puzzling maze, I saw firsthand how many organizations now immunize themselves from accountability, leaving anyone subject to their organization. In this case, me helpless. I couldn't help but wonder about the fates of so many other people who work three minimum wage jobs. Wouldn't they just have given up in my situation? In the old world, it was easier the old world several decades ago. It was easier to identify who was in charge. In the new world, the interactions of the digital age have disconnected the bureaucrat from the client in ways never before possible. And with the bulk of technological expertise and data in the hands of big government and corporations, the system can reach out and touch you. But you can't it. Bureaucracy is organized into silos and information universes with bits and bytes separated from each other, treading in a sea of digital routines. In the Bank of America example, Carol in Ohio in credit analysis had never heard of the bank that assigned me the cancer of the bank unit that assigned me cancellation numbers and station numbers. Carol and others working in such silos are incentivized to have a stake only in their own little cubicles, not in the larger outcome for the client or the public. Carol is no doubt evaluated by how well she performs on this checklist before passing me and can I help you with anything else today before passing me on to the next checklist and the next silo. She's not the only siloized bureaucrat ruled by a checklist. Think banking in the run up to the 2008 financial crisis. The banker repackaging mortgages and selling them is focused on clicking off the number of deals, his eyes on a bonus with little stake in the eventual outcome of the deal, even for his client, let alone society. Sociologists and anthropologists of finance have argued that this kind of siloization and splintering of information facilitated actually facilitated the financial meltdown. In fact, it was sociologists who coined the term structured unaccountability to describe how banks trading and exotic derivatives were organized. Exotic derivatives, by the way, signal a crisis of truth that runs deep. In the old world, banks knew much more than today about what holdings they had and traders knew more about the value of what they were trading. Recall the expression. Let's listen to what the market says. Markets were said to function as harbingers of truth and barometers of the state of the world. But today prices are much more disconnected from reality. The value of complex derivatives is often unclear. Madame Boregarde might be able to tell you with the crystal ball might be able to tell you what's in your derivative. In the financial collapse, people saw their investment sink. Not quite aware that bankers were slicing and dicing mortgages into financial Frankensteins. Just months after my odyssey with Bank of America, its CEO faced protests for years of shoddy lending and bad service as people struggle to refinance their mortgages. His response, you can call us and we'll figure it out. He urged people to try the toll free number. Accountability has been structured out of the system to such a degree that even the CEO can claim quite conveniently that he is as helpless as the rest of us. Denyability is the great new perk of power. Hear nothing, see nothing, speak nothing. Welcome to the new world of 21st century corruption where the buck stops nowhere. This corruption centers on unaccountability, structured unaccountability, and it's pervasive, which is not at all to say that Carol in Ohio and others working in these organizations are themselves corrupt. So two, how is it that today's top players have become so unaccountable? Players today have a multiplicity of affiliations and motives. Our culture has changed so fast and furiously over the past several decades that most people don't even pause to think about the affiliations they take on. In the old world, it would have been unthinkable for former leaders of the free world to use the prestige of their former office to create a highly lucrative and influential brand, emphasis on the word brand. But in the new world, Tony Blair created what's been dubbed Blair Inc., which the Telegraph describes as a confusing mix of business politics and philanthropy that's administered by a complex system of companies. Blair has advised Wall Street bankers, European insurers, the government of Kazakhstan, among others, and even the late Gaddafi of Libya. While counseling Gaddafi, apparently on deals that J.P. Morgan wanted, he also served as an advisor to J.P. Morgan and additionally as an official peace envoy to the Middle East, as an official peace envoy. Also in the new world, Bill Clinton after leaving office, in addition to creating the Clinton Foundation and its global initiative, has served as a paid advisor to the global private equity and consulting firm, to a global private equity and consulting firm, among many other ventures. His close aid recruited philanthropic donors to be clients, and as the New York Times put it, some Clinton aides and foundation employees began to wonder where the foundation ended and the business began. And think of the potential boundary issues represented by that band of gold. What seems to be new is that Clinton Blair are emerging business philanthropy and policy and the boundaries are either not there or they shift conveniently. That's what seems to be new. One finding that emerges from my work. Today's top power brokers are agile and highly flexible and operate informally. They often use think tanks, other than this one, of course, and university affiliations, other than my other than my own, of course, not true. As vehicles of influence, they often use them as vehicles of influence. Some even set up top down grass roots, so called grass roots organizations or nonprofits. These organizations help them launder their images and give them the veneer of impartiality. All this signals a seismic change over the past several decades wrought by privatization, the dispersion of global authority with the end of the Cold War, and digital technology. The rise of a new type of flexible power broker and the move of power and influence underground is a signature feature of our era. Here's a power broker with multiple roles symbolized by multiple cards. Professor, think tank, Republic policymaker, CEO, media pundit, member of advisory board, you name it. He casts his influence net far and wide. This aids in deniability. So if question in his role as X, he can always say, I was operating in my role as Y. Such players can float above and across organizations and silos. Of course, what these players do is not necessarily unethical. But there's an information problem. We the public can't know what they're up to. They're unaccountable by conventional means. And that's why, despite the accountability systems in place, we all have them at the workplace and everywhere. And today's emphasis on transparency, true accountability seems in short supply, whether we're talking about corporate and government organizations or major leaders and influencers. These players operate in arenas from health care and homeland security to finance and foreign policy. Take, for instance, so called key opinion leaders or KOLs. KOLs are high status physicians or medical researchers who are paid or perked by pharmaceutical or medical device companies to convince their fellow professionals, their fellow doctors, to convince them that a particular company's product is the most efficacious. But KOLs don't disclose their sponsorship, hence the information problem. According to a Queen's University study, KOLs by certain measures have tripled in the past decade plus. Or consider the activities of 19 highly regarded academic economists who promoted specific financial reform proposals and gave expert advice to government bodies and the media in the run up to and just after the 2008 financial crisis. A university of mass Amherst study found that the vast majority of the time the economists did not identify their private affiliations in possible conflicts of interest when, for instance, they were testifying before congressional agencies or congressional bodies. All these experts define the terms of the debate and they act as gatekeepers for the debate. We, the public, are led to believe that they're playing on our team and they may be, but they may not be. While appearing as impartial authorities, they can champion a particular policy or product without divulging that it benefits the industry or the company for which they consult. Is this not a violation of our trust? Consider two retired generals and admirals. My mapping shadow influence project has been given privileged access to two databases, one in the military arena, the other in finance, that illustrate these power brokers in action and how unaccountability has grown. The data I'll show you now is of retired generals and admirals. A groundbreaking study by the Boston Globe in 2010 amassed a database of nearly 800 retired senior military officers, which my project is added to, and looked at the post-retirement careers of these former public public servants. It used to be that they retired to play golf or with their grandkids, but over the past several decades they've gone mostly from retirement when they retired, to mostly continued service. These senior officers typically retire at a relatively young age and they live longer than in the past. They've been thoroughly schooled in the military code of ethics and no doubt believe that they can police themselves. That's the standard explanation, whether we're talking about the KOLs or the academic economists or the retired generals. And while it may be perfectly reasonable that they continue working, and we shouldn't imply that their only motivation is money, should we the public simply look the other way? Some of them pursue a multi-prong strategy that affords them money and influence. This image shows a network of corporations, government entities, and non-profits that are connected through senior retired officers. As the Boston Globes and other investigations have found, some retired officers are paid advisors and military agencies while at the same time consultants to defense and intelligence contractors. Others sit on government advisory boards and can parlay that information and access from the inside to their consultancies with contractors. This long-term trend has been accelerating. So this is 1992. Each slide represents, that I'm going to show you, represents a change of two years. The circles and dots on here are individuals. The lines between circles represent business relationships between individuals, like these two might sit on, say, the Defense Policy Board or the Defense Business Board together, or they might work together in the same defense contractor. So let me show you what happened over 20-year period, how this looks over 20-year period. So these images show how many of the senior retired officers followed each other into the same firm, started consultancy or venture capital companies together or served on the same boards. Reflecting on this trend, Senator Jack Reed, a West Point graduate, said this, when I was an officer in the 1970s, most general officers went off to some sunny place and retired. Now the definition of success is to move on and become successful in the business world. Even in the military, where devotion to the institution is paramount, there's been a shift from institution to self. What does this mean for accountability? The process of vetting defense projects should serve the public interest. Let's take, for instance, the senior mentors program set up by the Pentagon, in which retired officers were enlisted to advise their former colleagues in defense agencies. Note the innocuous civic sounding name, senior mentors program. Whenever you run across such a name, your Geiger counter should go way up. USA Today found that 80% of the senior mentors were also working in some capacity for defense contractors, advising military services, even as they were consulting for companies seeking to sell military products, even when they might also have financial ties to the companies peddling the services. In these and other arenas, many most likely haven't considered the unaccountability inherent in the overlapping roles they craft for themselves. They're mostly not bad apples, but their patterns of activity leave us, the public, without crucial information, without an easy way to untangle their roles. How can we know whether they're more concerned about their company's financial interests or those of the taxpayers or the nation? We can't know. And we used to have more help from journalism, which has been decimated in recent years. We have to rely on the few investigative reporters left standing to unearth some of this. And I have a whole chapter in my book about how journalism, the demise of investigative reporting and the implications for unaccountability. I started off by talking about online pornography and trends in online pornography. So you'll certainly want to take a look, two are not unrelated. So then there are players I call shadow lobbyists. Linda Keenan and I coined this term in the Huffington Post a few years ago. Shadow lobbyists choose not to register as lobbyists when they're quite obviously wielding influence that we can't see or trace. So prevalent have their activities become that shadow lobbyists may actually be overtaking registered lobbyists. The number of registered lobbyists peaked in 2007, 2007 at nearly 15,000, and fell to a little over 11,000 in 2014, just seven years later according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The business of influencing has changed so much in a few short years that the American League of Lobbyists decided late last year to adopt the more innocuous association of government relations professionals. As the president of the organization said in a letter to members, we discovered that a vast majority of our membership no longer identified themselves as only lobbyists. Shadow lobbyists are often former high government officials, now with consulting or law firms, often in by the way the public sector or the government affairs group. They take on obstruous roles of influence within the corporate world. Many appear in the media as disinterested experts nearly always identified nearly always identified with their former public service title, even if they get paid huge sums in the service of an unrevealed client. Joining the legions of shadow lobbyists too are A-list firms that take business from unsavory regimes to burnish their images. Activity that not very long ago might have been considered treasonous. One firm employs quote all sorts of dark arts, their words on the internet. Editing Wikipedia entries deemed damaging to their clients. Setting up third-party blogs that appear to be independent but of course aren't. Gaming search results to ensure that positive content outweighs the negative. Such efforts sway public perception and they mold policy, yet are virtually invisible even to a trained observer. Prominent academics are also susceptible to being enlisted as shadow lobbyists. Before Arab Spring, Libya's outlaw image began improving and all probability because it hired the monitor group powered by Harvard and Washington power brokers for a quarter of a million dollars a month to engage in a stealth propaganda campaign. Again, the players and the companies and organizations that sponsor them fail to reveal their real agendas and networks while we the public have no easy way of knowing what they are up to. And perhaps this is why people from Turkey and Greece to India Brazil Ukraine and even the United States are sensing that something is amiss. But not surprisingly have difficulty in identifying just who is responsible just like I did in the Bank of America case. Perhaps this is why people are rapidly losing faith in their country's institutions and leaders. Public opinion polls the world over show a striking loss of confidence in formal institutions from governments, parliaments and courts to banks and corporations to the media. Of course straightforward corruption like bribery is still common and causes outcry in countries across the globe. But the new unaccountability is leading to grass roots ire in many of these same countries. Classic and I think more relevant notions of corruption as the violation of public trust appear to be closer to the hearts of many many protesters and at the hearts of of today's most damaging of some of much of today's most damaging corruption. But while every regular people everywhere have been noticing this new style pervasive unaccountability and beginning to call out corruption many of the corruption experts have not and this brings me to point three. Why do these players not fall under the experts definition of corruption? Corruption as the abuse of public office for private gain which is often taken as a synonym for bribery. Clues can be found in the evolution of the post-Cold War anti-corruption industry which I saw up close in the 1990s as an anthropologist in Eastern Europe and as an occasional consultant to the World Bank. That industry developed under the influence of economists whose models and metrics often led to missing the bigger and perhaps more important picture. A 1999 Washington conference on corruption organized by an array of U.S. and international entities embodies the zeitgeist of the industry. The venue this Washington upscale hotel. A keynote speaker at the opening session the honorable Robert Rubin, secretary of the U.S. Treasury and past co-chairman of Goldman Sachs. Just a week earlier he and his deputy secretary Larry Summers along with Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan were mugging triumphantly on the cover of Time Magazine, hailed as the committee to save the world. At the conference Rubin lent his heft to one saving the world project, anti-corruption in developing countries and emerging economies. The lineup with stars like Rubin also included the world's top business lobbies and heavyweights from the UN and the OACD. Transparency International a non-governmental organization and the World Bank were pioneering efforts to combat corruption. Transparency's corporate sponsors in this era included AIG, Arthur Anderson Bank of America, Enron Lockheed Martin and Pfizer and who wouldn't want to join the party. The U.S. economy was roaring at full blast despite some market tremors overseas. Wall Street was going like gangbusters and the conventional wisdom was that they could best police themselves like the players we just discussed. In this heady atmosphere the conference participants and their brethren in the business and investment community could crack the problem of corruption in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the former Soviet Union Eastern Bloc do good and make countries out there more hospitable to investment. The new corruption potentially much more harmful to the United States and the West did not even enter their thinking even though Washington insiderism and Wall Street malfeasance were already thriving only to reach their calamitous peak in 2008. Players were engaging in what one Polish sociologist called dirty togetherness the informal exchange system that pushed the envelope of propriety but that nearly everyone under communism participated in. Indeed while some of the world's most publicly engaged economists were the brains behind the anti-corruption industry other economists were serving as handmaidens for investment banks and credit rating agencies as these institutions engaged in some of the boldest violations of the public trust in history. Several unspoken tenants of the of the anti-corruption industry are palpable one is privatization they believed in privatizing as a cure all for corruption. We all know how well that worked out in Russia and Eastern Europe. Another is metrics. Economists at the World Bank and a transparency had devised metrics to make sense of corruption in terms of a single number or score. By the time of the conference transparency one of the conference partners organizations was in its fifth year of publicizing its corruption perceptions index. That annual list measures corruption in countries around the world as perceived by experts and business leaders and it was focusing public attention on corruption. A single score the storylines imply conveys the corruption of an entire country. Ordering countries by rank shows us how one country compares to another. In 1999 a typical year Scandinavian and West European countries ranked the highest meaning the most clean with the United States not far behind. Economies like Indonesia, Nigerian, Cameroon were added close to the bottom. It's easy to see the appeal of corruption merely as bribery and of ranking systems. Single numbers released each year are easy to grasp, seductive in their clarity and media friendly. But does this make sense as public policy? The mid or low level Nigerian or Ukrainian bureaucrat earning many times less than his western counterpart is disparaged for taking bribes that feed his family. Meanwhile, prestige cloaked practitioners of the new corruption whose undisclosed roles and influence helped shape policy get a pass. My point is not that the corruption targets of the economists and the anti-corruption industry don't deserve our attention. They do. Old style corruption is a huge problem for those who face it. But the anti-corruption industry in its heyday focused so narrowly that by definition the new corruption and the massive unaccountability inherent in it was nearly excluded. However unaware of their blinders and however well intentioned many of the anti-corruption economists and their acolytes may have been their contracted view of corruption offered the perfect intellectual cover and enabled them to ignore the new corruption right under their noses. We too eat up and the media focus on images of traditional corruption and its prosecution. These are headlines separate stories from the Washington Post very well done stories. Washington Post is one of the world's most esteemed papers. This dazzle can distract us from seeing the new corruption but ordinary people still sense something is awry. Opinion polls as we said show that Americans trust in leaders and institutions has plummeted. This recalls Eastern Europe during late communism where I witnessed a pervasive feeling of helplessness fatalism and gallows humor. Now I'm seeing similar responses here in a supposedly much more transparent west. Another parallel worth noting quickly between the United States today and late Soviet late Soviet Union under late communism is the mainstream media particularly TV. A couple of scholars who've studied this in depth note the formulaic quality of messaging in the media that is the predictable and repetitive narratives that we see from channel to channel. This is a parallel between the United States today and late communism even even with our seemingly infinite choices of media outlets. So what can we do about it? We need to understand that the most damaging corruption today in the United States is organized differently than the bribe-taking Nigerian official. If we're to deal with it we must incorporate that understanding into policy and culture. We have to follow the players not just the money. Remember that the players don't operate in just one sphere or another in just the government or the private sector. They specialize indeed their strength is blending and blurring the state and the private sectors. It's not a quid pro quo. It's not a quid pro quo. A lot of what the players are doing is building their portfolio for exploit exploitation later. We have to go back to basics. To track the influence for instance of the retired generals we need to chart their roles, activities, networks, organizations, and sponsors and to look at how these building blocks interact. We need to cross-reference their positions and the bases they cover connect the dots. We also need to rethink the approach to accountability. The approach to accountability has failed us in the same way that the silo-wise structure of Bank of America failed me. It suffers from the same problem of the silos of structured and accountability. True accountability can't be reduced to checklist systems and metrics. It can't be a mere performance for the external auditor whether that auditor is our is our donors or whether it's our boss. True accountability can't be simply imposed from the outside severed from its original spirit and from larger institutional knowledge. I'm sure what happened to my slides. Whoops, the lines have disappeared. Well what about tougher regulation? I'd love to be able to suggest like the progressive reformers a host of legislative fixes but the book has a number of examples of players who have gone informal and private precisely in response to new laws and regulation. We need to understand the regulatory process as a fluid situation that doesn't end with the president's signature. Dodd-Frank would be an excellent example of how lobbyists have obfuscated the implementation. We need to be hyper-vigilant in looking for indeed anticipating and indeed anticipating the consequences of regulation. Witness the 2007 regulation on lobbying that sent many lobbyists underground. In conclusion I want to emphasize public trust. If we ourselves are a multiple role player with overlapping roles we might subject them to a smell test. What would the plumber or the mailman say? We might start a discussion within our own community or circle or profession about our own activities and how we're perceived by others. At the very least we can be transparent about our roles. Today's most damaging corruption is the violation of public trust needs to be restored. And if you'd like to see my FICO scores see me afterwards. Thank you. Well thank you Janine. So what you're talking about is corruption is not anything illegal. It's what has been called influence peddling or lobbying although we learn from you now this is going to be government professional relations or something like this in the future. Well listening to your talk I'm sort of in the middle of this having been in the the nonprofit sector journalism and even the academy over the years. And I think one of the real problems we face is the increasing funding by interesting sources interested sources of experts. So that you get the retired general who's working for a defense contractor but they don't tell you this right or the health care expert who's most of whose income comes from the pharmaceutical industry which is fine if they identified it but there's no way that the the reader or the television watcher will ever know this. And this has changed in the last 30 years that I've been around in Washington and I think the single factor that has led to the greatest change is the slashing of payment to three groups of individuals journalists academics and nonprofit sector people. Back in the 1980s and 1990s there were fewer of these jobs but if you got a job at the Washington Post or the New York Times or whatever you were actually paid a living salary that's it was very difficult there were far fewer think tanks than there were than there are today. But if you were one of the lucky few to get a to be a think tank fellow you had a professorial income and you didn't need to do consulting on the side if you were satisfied with that. And the same thing with professors some of you may know that a majority of students now in the United States are not taught by tenured professors they are taught by lecturers often graduate students who are paid on average something what is it like fifteen thousand dollars a year it's essentially the minimum wage that's the majority of undergraduate college and in research university in research and actually in research universities in research universities this is this is the case it's not just the community college. Well in the other day I met a research professor from from a university I said well you're really lucky to have a tenured position nowadays there are fewer and fewer turns out it's just a title this individual raises all of his own money every single year. So he said you could be a research professor too you just go to this university and say I'll raise my own income from whatever source you know industry foundations whatever I'll pay you the university so essentially it's buying titles right and I'm just I don't know how in the case of journalism there's clearly a reason why this took place it was Craig's List in eBay killed off journalism because what what funded journalism from the 18th century up to the 21st were the ads in the back and because you had these monopoly rents if you wanted to get a use lawnmower in the DC area you had to go to the Washington Post the Washington Star in the old days whatever so therefore you could fund Woodward and Bernstein and they would do all this investigating report once you have Craig's List in eBay boom that's gone so then you you essentially get the the rolling bankruptcy of these these media corporates so I understand there's a technological economic reason for why you don't pay reporters anymore what I don't understand is there's more philanthropic money than there has ever been sloshing around with Silicon Valley and Wall Street and all of that if they wanted to every single professor in the US could be paid a six-figure salary you know they could you could endow think tanks with where you're not and just to wrap up I don't want to go on too far once you are not paying people a living wage you're just paying them a partial stipend to be experts and then you say well we expect you to raise your own money on the outside well where's the money the money is with the lobbies in the trade associations right I mean there's just not that much nonprofit pure money out there but see the other insidious thing is if you have institutions whether they're universities which sell professorships or think tanks which sell fellowships and there are some that do this we don't but you know but there are some where essentially they will make you a fellow you just you know pay in whatever the fee is and they'll give you the title that means that suddenly you're multiplying there's ever grading number of these experts most of whom are actually subsidized by interested groups and there's no way the general public can tell who's actually deriving their income from the university or the think tank and who just has this title but is actually working for a pharmaceutical company or defense contract or something like that so that's just my no no I mean exactly so this again the issue is the information problem we the public what what these players are what these people are doing is not necessarily unethical it's certainly not illegal but everybody is under tremendous perfect tremendous pressure practically every every profession every every sphere whether it's medicine or or academia or I mean you name it and so where do people where people getting their money people have to support their family so they get it from where the money is is available and philanthropy is actually one of is is very interesting thing to watch because first for several reasons of course philanthropists are giving the money where they're giving it very often because they have their own agenda so journalism funded by philanthropists may be a wonderful thing and there are many you know nonprofit entities that are that are funded now that do investigative reporting and that are trying to take over where where the traditional media is left off but we always have to look at who are there who are their funders what might be their what might be their agendas what might be their what might be their biases it's an information problem the back justice I was uh 15 years on the staff of the senate banking committee I worked for bill proxmire who wrote the foreign corrupt practices act I was in a political appointee in the clinton administration I was 10 years on the US china commission on the US china commission a bipartisan group a think tank for congress paid for by the public for thinking about china and our economic and trade policies and how it impacts american national security but here are two things i've seen through the years one when you're in government now but the the money is outside of government it it affects the people and how they behave in government because if you're going to want to get the job outside of government you got to play ball so that's one so it really corrupts the whole government system and that's what these generals well even these generals are going to look for their big they won't hire any general they hire the generals that are but that are favorable to their point of view that's one thing let me make one more point ken leberthal who was on the national security staff under clinton is now at brookings he wrote a book about china-us relations and he said this in his book when the chinese government sees legislation developing in our congress like to deal with the exchange rate manipulation they will encourage us multinational corporations to lobby against that legislation so other countries are now playing on this corruption in our system and these companies that we think are american companies are lobbying on behalf of foreign interest we got a real terrific problem and i'm so glad that you're writing about this now because i've seen it very well from a lot of different places in the government thank you thank you can just respond to that so so i think the first point is is very interesting and important that that that i think that what you're describing is that the profile of today's top power broker has has changed so so today the top government job is very often just one rung on the ladder to making a lot of money and to the ultimate success so public service doesn't seem to be a value in its own right in the way that it that it used to be and and getting the you know secretary of the treasury or um what have you is is just one rung that you need to achieve the the the ultimate goal well i would put it differently yeah being a member of congress is a great internship for k street yeah uh but what nothing i was wondering about was when george marshall the former uh you know who supervised the us victory in world war two secretary of state under truman when he retired from government service uh he was offered a million dollars which would be much larger in inflation adjusted terms now for his memoirs and he refused because it would be dishonorable uh you know has has something happened to western society you've studied eastern europe and so on uh there used to be the professions the military the law medicine they used to be held in great prestige and so you had two status hierarchies there's money but there's also the professions and so you're and the people in money always made you know business always made vastly more money than the people in the professions but you could be a respectable former general or former civil servant or something and this was an honorable thing right and it seems now that that moral system is collapsing you know the professors lawyers soldiers and essentially the moral system that is universal is what was one part of the system it's now the whole system it's essentially private business where you're judged by purely economic how rich you are how much money you make right and celebrity hood what i may be another has is another is another element of of this so so celebrity hood seems to have replaced in some sense prestige so in that in combination with with the with the money but it's been a huge cultural shift just over the past 20 30 years that has has happened so quickly that i think most of us i mean we see it around us happening around us but it's it's very difficult to really put it together and figure out what's happening and that's really why i wrote the book because i'm i'm trying to to to to get across that this is these are patterns that it isn't just some happening over here over here over here it's happening across the board and we need to understand it as a systemic issue that we need to deal with head-on what's ko what's ko l and secondly i think i heard you say that this behavior like i go to a doctor and he recommends a particular course of action or surgery or whatever and i'm not aware that he has interest in some you know i think i heard you said that's not on that's not unethical and to me that is unethical okay yeah so so so let me explain so so that the ko ls are the key opinion leaders who are paid or perked by pharmaceutical companies or medical device companies and they're not usually you're i mean at a big teaching high prestige hospital that you might actually encounter them but but so so the real problem the real issue there is that these are high status people who are often on sit on medical journals editors of medical journals they're at the you know the the most prestigious medical universities teaching teaching universities and they're they're they're being paid essentially to sway the opinion of other physicians so so now you go to your doctor and he or she is is is prescribing you a course of action in good faith what he or she doesn't necessarily get is that so-and-so high status person is who's recommending this course of treatment and who's really the gatekeeper acting as a gatekeeper for for the discussion it's very insidious and subtle connection with other but your doctor your direct doctor doesn't know may not know either is my is my point yes and i and i think that is i i just i don't mean to but i the doctor i see for prostate he told me i think this medicine might work for you or help you i need to tell you that i'm i'm on the board of that but i also take that medication myself he said it's your choice what you do but so we actually that was to me ethical yeah i'm saying if you don't tell me that is unethical yeah yeah yeah no i would agree but just to clarify that the the ko wells are not i mean there the and and so your physicians don't necessarily know because they're reading all that like we all are reading these things we don't know where it comes from necessarily we just know that high status person x said it and then there's other information out there if they're the gatekeepers for the discussion yeah hi um most of the people you mentioned that tony blair bill clinton could be considered people on the make not those who've made it um i don't think any of anyone you mentioned would be included in the top hundred richest people in america or probably even the top 500 richest to what extent should we look at these people as power brokers versus apparatus checks for the real power brokers well i i mentioned um you know blair and and clinton just as a way of of of showing that the the the you know the trend has changed they were not my real you know but but so right so so so so when ford stick let's stick with this for so so when president ford retired as president he went to be on boards of of of companies when president carter retired he began to got involved in all kinds of philanthropic activities what's new what seems to be new is the the blending of philanthropy and indeed philanthropy has to be one of the things that you do or not has to be but almost very often is something that you do if you're a top power broker you have this consultancy and that consultancy and then you also have a philanthropic role so the the what i'm trying to say is that all these fears the profile has changed so when that the people that i talked about more in the top were were people the the in the different professions the kowals for instance the academic economists the the the military generals and admirals and there we can see too just in the past several decades that things have have have changed changed quite quite dramatically a couple in the back okay i i apologize i came in late because of acella and you may have gone through this already but it offends me a lot more when people bend the government than when they get rich off it i mean i think the real issue is how they influence policy bend the government when people bend yeah i don't care if somebody pays off a congressperson to do something that will favor people's companies that's not what she's at i think it's very important point she's after that it's not just quid pro quo bribes it's the way it influence even your behavior when you're in office and carrying out the public interest if you want to make money you got to play the ball game to be able to position yourself to be able to be acceptable to the money people outside when you leave well if i can weigh into this emerging free for all i think it's a mistake looking at where you work before you went into government it's your future employers so you may never ever have been through the revolving door before but if you're thinking you know that you're going to go in the defense industry if you're a military officer if you're going to go into finance if you're at a you know in treasury something like that then even if you have no record whatsoever of so that's why we'll see what dr whittle thinks but that's why they does make a difference what happens to politicians and civil servants after they leave because if that becomes the normal career path and they're all thinking you know this is my tryout you know for wall street or you know whatever right so yeah well so yes so so what we have to look at is how people are building very often they're they're building their portfolios so the retired general on who's on cnn he may or may not be i mean the most egregious would be if he's if he's um advocating the course of action that is being promoted by his company or a product that that that his company's producing that sort of thing and where he's just of course identified only as a retired retired general but but just getting on cnn and becoming known what does that do for him well that means that people are going to take his calls if he's known right so it's part of building that it's what he's doing is not is not unethical just appearing on cnn and and and and providing his expertise but that's part of building building the portfolio and that's why this whole state of affairs is is so is so insidious gentleman two gentlemen blue shirts one after the other uh my question relates a little bit to the other gentleman's question you call these people power brokers but i consider them just mercenaries as to book back in the sixties the super the super rich don't look at the mercenaries look at the people who have the money now a couple of days ago i looked at the top 400 richest people in america and most of them were total unknowns to me i don't know who are the most egregious of the rich in trying to influence the government not not their henchmen um although i agree with uh your description of what the situation is today i'm a little confused about how you see it came about because it seems to me that uh there was a brief period of time where you had uh countervailing powers and people like professors actually had influence on public policy and everything and when business realized that they didn't weren't dominating anymore the economy and what was going on they made a very concerted effort and spent a great amount of resources over 30 40 years now to dominate all these other institutions like academics and think tanks and professions and now new the neoliberal ideology totally dominates this country if you talk to young people they don't really think there's any alternative and a lot of what you've described is to me is like the end result uh of what's happened over 30 years and i i don't think that information in itself would change anything i mean more and more people i know realize what's going on but they don't think that there's anything else to do except play the game we'll take a few more questions sure thank you thank you jenine for a very interesting and fun and enjoyable and informative presentation um but i wanted to echo this gentleman here and and what was just said back there ultimately a broker is just a broker right there are people beyond and above and more significant than than those brokers for organizing power and society congress has only been mentioned as a path to wealth rather than the corrupt institution it has become in terms of failing to pass regulatory appropriate regulatory nobody has mentioned the supreme court and citizens united which has just unleashed the the flow of money in this society to facilitate to enable uh the folks that you talk about one last theoretical question so how does then this differ besides scale and intensity and the ability of of these lower level somebody call them mercenaries we can call them willing servants of the cope brothers and the like how does the the scale besides scale and intensity and degree of connectedness how does how does your thesis differ from c right mills 1950s right where's where's what's what's new well i wish i had my slides back on because i could show you so c right mills had the three pillars of power he had the military industry he had the he had government and he had business right he had three three pillars of power so what we have today and here's where the brokers come in and these brokers by the way many of them are very rich whether we've heard of them are not as was was pointed out the brokers are influential in in in in in in policy even if they don't wield direct power so what you would see if i had my my other slides up is you would see this the the power broker in the center so instead of the three pillars of power you'd see the power broker in the center in around him are the think tank and the defense industry and the government consultancy and it's and it's him who's connecting all these dots and therein lies his influence not direct power but his influence the ability to to to work to work the system so for example we found when we're looking at the retired retired generals we're looking at some specific policy decisions that were that were that were made that were made precisely because there was a confluence of of these retired senior officers we can i think we can we we can show who were who were working the multiplicity of these different places so so the profile of how power and influence has has has worked works has changed and it's changed dramatically and the reason has to do with the i mean there are four overarching transformational developments that have led to this one has to do with the the the privatizing and the outsourcing of government which started in in in a or was gained great impetus in the 1980s in the united states in the united kingdom and then was spread around the world another is the end of the cold war that opened up many new spheres for private individuals to have to play public roles the proliferation of consultants and experts and and and so on and then you get the digital digital age i mean this is what is undeniable is is is the role of the of the of the of the digital age in all of this and social media social media is only 10 years old and look at how it is it is absolutely upended the media and how power brokers are having to respond to it well i would push back to you a little bit on on i think your old world was a bit idealized i think us has always been corrupt uh just incredibly corrupt like most countries the big difference in the last half century has been the historic american pattern was it was extremely regional and local so harry truman was a product of the pender gas machine this kind of mafia in kansas city you know linden johnson comes out of brown and rude and the par brothers in south texas and all of that and all of the politicians but generally it was either the state level or at the local level so there were these rich interests uh the rich family owns the big city newspaper and they and even back then you know they had all this power if you were an investigative reporter for the in chicago in the 1920s and you ran abreast of the uh the interest you know that that story never appeared back then but the difference was there was a kind of pluralism right because it wasn't just the same few billionaires didn't control everything you had lots of rich crooked local millionaires instead of a few very powerful people that everybody's going to from for money they were easier to see yeah and they were really everybody they were they were visible colonel mccormick right he was the guy who's the big player and publisher in chicago and in much of the 20th century so you know what really illustrated this for me was a retired senator told me who'd been a senator in the 70s and 80s and 90s that now whatever your party is the dnc or the rnc they give you a list of the rich people and they're mostly in a couple of cities it's mostly in new york and and palo alto and so no matter what your state is right as a senator congressman you just go to these rich people in california new york right and maybe i don't know in some cases it might be houston if it's energy industry yeah right yeah and so and that is that is a new development in american history because in the old days if you were from illinois you represented the corrupt interests of illinois to the best of your ability now we seem to be moving to this system where everyone is getting money from the same wall street people in the same tech billionaires yeah look the the role of of locality has been diminished the role of of of place yeah front row here oh yeah i just wanted to go back to your original problem with bank of america and credit cards because you called in the hope or in the belief that you would be able most efficiently to pursue that course and straighten it out but you have to wonder about what kind of structure how many people whose incentive was it to have a structure that you had to spend or that they had to spend that much time working on your problem and it also makes me wonder how many people like you don't get it squirt i mean you had the same wonder if if i just don't get how that could be cost effective and i mean you wonder if there's accountability on the phone versus if you'd sat down and written a letter but you don't have any promise that you'll ever get a return letter who do you write the letter to exactly that but but something's got it it's cost effective if people give up absolutely that's what i'm saying right yeah i mean i think there's a lot of work to be done on on on bureaucracy and trying to understand how the this bureaucracy works in in the in the in the digital age because it's it's very different from vaporian bureaucracy which of course vapor's bureaucracy which was which was an ideal type but i mean if you even think of the you know big bad communist bureaucracy to you know to give a bit of a a bit of a stereotype but the behemoth bureaucracy at least i could go and i could find somebody to bribe right you could find and you could pay i mean it was an efficient system right but what i mean i even tried at one point on the phone just as a kind of experiment i said you know i i'm really desperate i'd be i'd be happy to send you eight hundred dollars and you know of course it's all being recorded for you know but you know but i mean it was it was kind of a but but the the only way i event i got it resolved was because i pleaded i said i said to somebody finally it was probably middle-aged person like myself i said you know this is just like living under communism except there i you know i could eventually i had this run around when i ordered a tv set yeah and then the store just gave me the endless loop yeah so i just got so angry i seldom do this so i i looked up this the company that sold it online and it turned out that in the midwest and in a medium-sized city in the midwest i think it's mid-ampleus or something they had the headquarters so i went there i got the executive secretary of the ceo direct somehow i directly got through and explained my problem and within 15 minutes the problem was solved yeah yeah but few people are going to right i mean it's only through those sort of quirky not linear processes that you can you know that you that you're able to solve these sort of difficult problems so there's a lot to be done to understand how bureaucracy is now working in the digital because and this is not an American story this is a fairly universal story and everybody has a story so what i mean the the the upshot is that the customer has much less power to actually intervene and and make and make a difference then then then then we used to because of this massive bureaucracy so i mean a lot of other elements to it not just the siloization but there's been so much so much of it gets outsourced and and and and and again you have the ambiguity because between who's in the system and who isn't who's working for the company who isn't so that's another another issue that has been alluded to already hi thank you very much you said wonderful presentation i have a question on your let's say ideal type because it seems you're describing two different or at least two different moments within the same phenomenon the first one has to do with the siloing right and the lack of connections but then when you're describing the power brokers they are the glue across the silos so so exactly so so so you got it so how can these two things exist in the same world we're on on the one hand we have this you know super siloized you know where nobody can you know where nobody can intervene well on the other hand that creates the need i mean this is this is only one you know one reason that that you that you need these people there are all these other developments that that i talked about but yeah that creates the need for people who can move across the silos who can move across these organizations who are in them but they're not of them right so that's exactly right i'd like to go back to general marshall and what he did and when he did it and i would like to ask the question clearly what he did was a moral thing to do at least from his morality standpoint have we entered over the years a different morality is this really the basic problem that we're looking at well morality doesn't exist in um and and ethics don't exist um separate from from society and culture and culture doesn't lie it's been said so there's there's an inner relationship of course between all these developments which have happened so quickly the end of the cold war the advent of the of the digital age social media we we can't keep up with it we can't even keep up with what we're we ourselves um um um are doing so i think we haven't really had the time to think about this and what is needed is a is a is a is a discussion is a is a societal discussion what's happening here one more question uh right here i just want to dovetail on a few things that were said so gene would seem to be emerging is that in the new bureaucracy there are people who work in silos in a new bureaucracy there are people who work in silos and when you deal with these people these people themselves are pretty powerless because you know you're based you judge on your matrix you check a point you may have a job or not depends how you do on your matrix then they are power brokers these people never try to work in silos because they know that the money and power are more connections you make between the silos and these people consciously joined between the industrial military and business world and then they are last really powerful people which move the power brokers which we don't know their names they are really moving the global economy and these people have a real power that's what it really sometimes we know they're sometimes we know their names sometimes we sometimes we billgate period but if you look i look at the same list we don't know really names of huge so that's i think the structure i don't know i'd have to think about i mean it's it's it's um i don't know i mean what i've charted and what i've tried to understand and put out is is the is the way in which influence and power are operating today and how that's changed and of course those power brokers are are are how they're operating says a lot about income inequality because the power the policies that they have promoted have led to income inequality have led to this this this state of affairs but we there's a ton of new money that's a ton of new money as we've as we've said that's that's just lurking around waiting to be to be to be spent and i think that's that's a lot of what what we we we have to look at and that's where the the nexus of of policy and money comes together but in very subtle very often in subtle ways that that that we haven't thought of so no i don't think it's enough just to to figure out who has all the who has all the the money we have to look at at how they're operating and how the people around them are operating and the organizations that they're setting up and the building blocks i mean it's basically the building blocks at every level the building blocks how they how they fit together we have to follow the players it's too little and too incomplete to understand just the money we have to follow how these players move around we're going to get an incomplete picture if we don't follow the players the book is unaccountable please join me in thanking janine widow