social movements, social inequality, and workforce issues in the entertainment industry. Gautney was a senior policy advisor to Sen. Bernie Sanders on his presidential campaign and in the US Senate Budget Committee. In 2020, she served on the Democratic Party's platform drafting committee and was co-chair of the Biden-Sanders Task Force on Education.
Gautney applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, The New Power Elite, and reported the following:
Page 99 of The New Power Elite recounts the Bill Clinton administration’s NATO-led “humanitarian intervention” in Kosovo, and UN “peacekeeping” in Somalia, in discussing how American and other western political and corporate elites have used militarism—including the mass air-bombing of civilian targets—to realize their interests under the pretense of “just war” and “human security.” Does page 99 epitomize the entire book? The answer is both yes and no.Follow Heather Gautney on Twitter.
On the one hand, the contents of page 99 exemplify the book’s general tone and historical approach by offering evidence and insight into the brutal, violent face of global capitalism and power elites’ wanton profiteering through repression and social control. On the other hand, it is not the most compelling example of these trends. Following page 99 is a history of U.S. militarism that covers George W. Bush’s exploitation of the 9/11 tragedy to enrich defense contractors vis-à-vis his War on Terror (including the CIA’s sadistic torture program); Obama’s proliferation of apocalyptic drone strikes to “secure” the Middle East (including the assassination of U.S. citizens abroad); Trump’s corrupt arms dealing and “diplomacy” with right-wing forces; and Biden’s continuation of secret drone strikes and profligate arms dealing and defense spending. Put together, this history attests to the greed and cruelty of the American empire; the antidemocratic consolidation of executive power in the U.S. government; and mass manipulation by the corporate media.
The New Power Elite is a sequel to C. Wright Mills’s classic text, The Power Elite, written in the early years of the Cold War. Mills was troubled by the advance of nuclear weaponry and the fact that high-stakes decisions affecting the future of human and planetary life lay in the hands of “irresponsible elites.” America’s obsession with communism, he argued, was the work of “crackpot realists” who had created “a paranoid reality all their own” to justify their abuses of power and many atrocities. The New Power Elite takes up this critique by exposing how, over the last forty years, a new generation of crackpot realists—proffering a view of foreign policy that reduces all human relations to capitalist competition and maximizing profits—are inventing their own paranoid reality to legitimize torture, secret wars, and repression. Like Mills’s book, moreover, it is an urgent call to democratic action and stark warning against the dangers of elite power.
--Marshal Zeringue
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