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Alt press influential Arianna Huffington shines the spotlight on her first book pic of the year:

My first HuffPost Book Club selection of 2010 is Janine Wedel’s Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. It’s a gripping, disquieting book that exposes and explains why it’s been so hard to bring about any real change in our country — why Washington no longer seems capable of addressing the problems our nation faces.

It’s not an altogether new idea, but what’s notable is the divergence from the usual focus on corporate power and towards individual players. It will be interesting to read it and see how much overlap there is with conspiracy theories that target organizations like the Illuminati.

But the mere fact that books like these can still be published and then promoted on a alternative-mainstream site with a large audience gives me a glimmer of hope.

“The shadow elite clearly knew that the months and months of so-called debate over the issue was nothing more than a charade — the ultimate outcome never in doubt. The bill was created in the shadows. The public process since then has essentially been like a Hollywood adaptation — complete with the requisite third act happy ending (or, in the words of our elected officials, a “historic” ending).

“The new breed of players,” writes Wedel, “who operate at the nexus of official and private power, cannot only co-opt public policy agendas, crafting policy with their own purposes in mind. They test the time-honored principles of both the canons of accountability of the modern state and the codes of competition of the free market. In so doing, they reorganize relations between bureaucracy and business to their advantage, and challenge the walls erected to separate them. As these walls erode, players are better able to use official power and resources without public oversight.”