The Power Elite
What a strange world we live in. I feel it is even stranger for me than it is for most. I am a white male born of privilege, but raised with a liberal ideology. My paternal grandfather was a fascist, one of Mussolini’s men from the region of northern Italy near Bassano del Grappa in the Tyrol. He was either a bully like young Benito or more likely just a sycophant trying to gain advantage like so many of those who aspire without the ability to inspire. It is somewhat unfair of me to denigrate Alberto in that way since I know so little of his life other than that he was a camp follower of Il Duce who skedaddled to the obscurity of backwater Venezuela with his wife and sons (one of them, my father Andre) when, in April, 1945, Benito and his mistress Claretta were strung up in the Piazza Loreto in Milan. So go the fortunes of the Power Elite when people grow wary and weary of “men of the people”.
My maternal grandfather was a man of the people, a working class man who emigrated to America at the turn of the Twentieth Century to work in the salt mines. He used the era of the Volstead Act, the Republican attempt to control the morals and lives of the people (the Elite do like to try to do that every so often), to bootleg his way to his modest fortune. It allowed him to own a farm and operate a gas station and road house while his youngest daughter (my mother Millie) went on to live a life of purpose and assistance to humanity through her lifelong international development work.
Millie met Andre in Caracas in 1948. I was born in 1954 in the golden years of the post-war American liberal democracy. My mother flew to Florida (of all places) to make sure that I would be born on the hallowed ground of the United States so that I could one day have the opportunity to be President. I was born to a mother who was a first generation American who turned her American Dream into a gig with the Rockefeller Foundation. What an irony that the granddaddy of monied American Power Elite gave rise to the vehicle for spreading liberal democracy to places like the jungles of Venezuela. And what a further irony that my father all the while was groveling for business and courting the ruthless autocrat and head of the Venezuelan Power Elite, President Marcos Perez Jimenez.
While my paternal roots held plenty of propensity towards honoring the Power Elite, my mother is the person who raised me, so the overwhelming influence was one of hard liberal immigrant working class values played out through higher education and serving mankind. My upbringing was as conflicted as my origins. The best example of that was my years in Maine. While my mother set up the first women’s Job Corps Center as part of the Johnson Great Society programs, she did so as an employee of the AVCO Corporation, which was the Corporate Elite that held sway in the Beltway with the Office of Economic Opportunity. I spent two years going to a small rural backwoods public junior high school in Poland, Maine. I followed that with a year at Hebron Academy, a nearby boarding prep school where the Brahmin of Boston’s Power Elite sent their boys to learn how to become members of that Power Elite. Strangely enough, Hebron Academy’s most famous graduate was Hannibal Hamlin, the Vice President during the first term of our nation’s most egalitarian president, Abraham Lincoln.
There is no mistaking me as anything but a white male of privilege. My mother was Ivy League educated (albeit bootstrapping herself through the land grant college at Cornell) and both with the Rockefeller Foundation and AVCO as well as her acquired Doctorate along the way, had become decidedly upper middle class. As a UN Diplomat and the highest ranking woman in any UN Agency for many years, it would be hard not to say that in her own liberal democratic way, she had become a member of a version of the Power Elite. As I headed off from my graduating prep school in Rome, Italy to join the freshman class at Cornell, I too was on my way into that realm of the Power Elite though I never thought of it as such.
I studied development economics and third world government, even going so far as to contemplate an opportunity to do graduate work in modern revolutions. But alas, reality bit me as it does many, and I veered right to business school and chose to study finance. Few fields are more aimed at the Power Elite than finance. When I graduated to join the ranks of one of the “white shoe” firms of Wall Street, a firm started by none other than J.P. Morgan himself, my UN Diplomat mother was more pleased than not and never once said I had somehow betrayed my upbringing. On the contrary, she fell quickly into that argument that if people of conscience (which she clearly thought I was, I suppose) did not join the corporate world, who would insure that the Power Elite did not forget that they were supposed to serve all the people, not just those at the prep schools, the Ivy League Universities, and the “white shoe” Wall Street banks?
I further tested the contradictions when, ten years into my career, I was asked by my bank to take over all of the bank’s Latin American sovereign debt exposure (some $4 billion, which was outsized for our $1 billion in capital). While my mother had stopped telling me what to do when I was fourteen, she did like to understand what I did. She sat me down and said, “so, after I’ve spent forty years putting money into Latin America, you plan to make a career out of taking money out of Latin America?” I don’t think my “sanctity of contracts” speech and “Global market access” speech moved her, but she was worldly enough and trusting enough in my conscience to let the issue pass. Meanwhile, I used my new role as justification for joining the Board of CARE (the international relief and development NGO) and spending the next fifteen years working for and donating to that cause in her name.
Today, as I sit on my upper middle class but ungated hilltop in California (the most liberal state in the nation), I read about the latest travesty of our political system. The $1.6 billion tax scheme that donated dark money to an ultra-right-wing advocacy group that seeks to promote all the things I rabidly stand against. This was a piece of financial engineering that would get an A+ in my Advanced Corporate Finance course set to start in a week. It would also get an F with prejudice in my Law, Policy and Ethics course that is starting a week later. When I asked myself how we as a nation ever got to this place, I have to stop and remind myself that my own history of liberal yet elitist privilege is exactly how it happens. The Forrest Gump movie ends with a feather being blown here and there randomly on the wind. We are no different, I guess. I could have gone in the paternal direction of autocracy and elitism, but instead I drifted through the chambers of the Power Elite and still came out on the side of liberal democracy. Thank you, Mom, for giving me the advantages of the Power Elite but the conscience of the people.