Crimes of the Rich and Powerful
Otherwise known as #cronycapitalism
www.icij.org (CC)
In the track of crimes of the rich and powerful, whose secrets are frequently unavailable in political history, we might discover different patterns of fraud involving political authority and its layers of supporters in any given geographical context. Hidden are their shifting wealth-income ratios, as rents get periodically amplified and made generationally secure through elaborately interlinked and interpersonal arrangements that normalize, as it were, day-to-day routines and institutions in insidious ways. Characterizing the rich and powerful in each culture while representing different societies as they change over time is, of course, a beguiling task.
Identifying these linked features with the covert arrangements such as those revealed in the Panama Papers might, however, help us interpret particular patterns. Nevertheless, precisely because these elite groupings and their mischief are mostly well hidden, it is valuable to use special tools from social and political analysis, like #socialnetworkanalysis to find signs of them. Perhaps the clue lies in the most powerful engines of slow but enduring social processes, which turn out to be networks of lineages of wealth and political leadership, both easily familiar today.
The flip side of elite privilege is the way society itself might slowly get transformed through pathologies of collective despair and disorder. Only occasionally in history have such peoples recovered sufficiently to recognize their own democratic freedoms. Those times have typically led to some sort of popular revolution, but more often than not with tragic outcomes. It is not just the well-meaning, but the poorly-motivated, who destroy democratic institutions.
Most often, elite configurations are sparse networks that operate in corridors of controlling influence across a vast landscape. With the recent revolutions in conquering space through time, elite networks have exploded in their planetary presence and ability to collect and multiply their wealth through an elaborate pattern of clientelist relationships. The ‘bow-tie’ patterns of the inner-circle and their strategic but sparse connections (weak ties) create bridging centrality, edges, islands, and so on that generate very special structures.
For instance, the power of networks in the inner circle lies in making exclusivity exceedingly scarce but equally rewarding:
Power networks have a decision capacity that can move matters forward but can also involve exchange based upon gatekeeping mechanisms and ‘favors of access’… Admission to a decision-making network tends to be exchanged for conformity with existing practices, thus making the decision-making more rigid, as well as for concealment of policy-sensitive information, thus making the decision-making more secretive.[i]
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It is worth quoting #MichaelJohnston to see how these syndromes operate:
In Influence Market societies powerful private interests threaten the integrity of public institutions, but may be checked by those institutions and by competing parties and groups. Elite Cartels stave off rising competition by building corrupt networks, but they are restrained by the need to balance off the interests of various elites and by the fundamental goal of maintaining the status quo. Oligarchs face few constraints but still must manage conflict among themselves and find ways to protect their gains. But where state elites operate in a setting of very weak institutions, little political competition, and expanding economic opportunities, the stage is set for corruption with impunity. There Official Moguls – powerful political figures and their favorites – hold all the cards.[ii]
If petty criminal activity and otherwise small-scale corrupt practices are where the light shines brightest, what potentially more significant and murky social institutions are thereby obscured? We do of course need to pay attention to the harmful actions of individuals, but however significant and eye-catching they may be, we need to focus on both elite and extremely powerful institutions that promote and proliferate more serious crimes, along with the normalized routines that sustain them.
[i] Alena Ledeneva, How Russia really works, (Ithaca: Cornell University Presss, 2011).
[ii]Michael Johnston, Syndromes of Corruption: Wealth, Power, and Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 155.