what does the term "power broker" mean?

Question

I'm reading a John Grisham novel, "The Broker". The character is a criminal. Are there legitimate Power Brokers or does the term go hand-in-hand with crime?

Answer 1

The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York is a Pulitzer Prize-winning 1974 biography of Robert Moses, "New York City's Master Builder", by Robert Caro. In the years since its publication, and especially since Moses's death in 1981, it has accomplished the neat trick, for a biography, of completely defining its subject. It has become impossible to talk about Moses without dealing with this book.

It has also come to be closely associated with Caro himself, and it figures prominently in discussions of the history of 20th-century New York as well.


Overview
Caro traces Moses's life from his childhood in Gay Nineties Connecticut to his early years as an idealistic advocate for Progressive reform of the city's corrupt civil service system. Moses's failures there, and later experience working for future mayor Jimmy Walker in the New York State Senate, taught him how power really worked, that he needed it to make his dreams of roads and bridges for the city reality, and that ideals and principles had to be set aside if necessary to make them happen, Caro says.

By the 1930s, he had earned a reputation as a creator of beautiful parks in both the city and state, and later long-sought projects like the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, but at the price of his earlier integrity. Caro ultimately paints a portrait of Moses as an unelected bureaucrat who, through his reputation for getting large construction projects done, amassed so much power over the years that the many elected officials whom he was supposedly responsive to instead became dependent on him. He consistently favored automobile traffic over human and community needs, and while making a big deal of the fact that he served in his many public jobs (save as New York City Parks Commissioner) without compensation, lived like a king and similarly enriched those individuals in public and private life who aided him.

While Caro pays ample tribute to Moses's intelligence, political shrewdness, eloquence and hands-on, if somewhat aggressive, management style, and indeed gives full credit to Moses for his earlier achievements, it is clear from the book's introduction onward that Caro's view of Moses is ambivalent (some of the readers of The Power Broker would conclude that Caro possessed only contempt for his subject, contempt the reader comes to share by the end).

At 1162 pages (reputedly edited from a manuscript three times that length), it provides documentation of its assertions in most instances, which Moses (and his supporters after his death) have consistently attempted to refute. Because Caro's narrative includes a great deal of history about New York City itself, the book is considered by many to be a monumental scholarly work in its own right, transcending the normal style of a biography that focuses on the life of a single person


Commercial and critical reception
The Power Broker caused quite a stir when it was published, after the "One Mile" chapter, about the difficulties in constructing one section of the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the way Moses ran roughshod over the interests of the East Tremont section the road effectively destroyed, ran as an excerpt in The New Yorker.

Moses' influence on New York City was undisputed, even though his political power had been cut off, and as it was shortly after President Nixon's unprecedented resignation, the public was receptive to accounts of public officials absolutely corrupted by the power they had attained. It received favorable reviews, and brought a host of forgotten scandals to new light, as well as some new ones (Moses's shabby treatment of his brother, for example) though some critics felt that Caro's insinuation of an extramarital affair between Moses and Manhattan congresswoman Ruth Pratt was a bit too gossipy and salacious for such a serious book.

It became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer in biography for that year, as well as the Francis Parkman Prize. It has remained in print ever since. In 1986 it was recognized by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 2000 the New American Library selected it as one of the hundred most important books of the 20th century.

Moses and his supporters considered the book to be overwhelmingly biased against him, to the point that Moses put out a 23-page typed statement disputing some of its assertions (he claimed he never used the anti-Italian slurs the book attributes to him about Fiorello LaGuardia, for instance) and what his supporters saw as a record of unprecedented accomplishment,

In later years, especially as some readers have come to be skeptical about some assertions Caro made in his multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson, some further criticisms have been made of the book, mainly that it overstates the extent of Moses's power in the 1960s, and that (as it is suggested he did with Coke Stevenson in Means of Ascent, the second of his LBJ books) Caro sanitizes some of Moses's antagonists to make Moses look even worse by comparison




Origins
As a reporter for Newsday in the early 1960s, Caro covered the preparations for the World's Fair and learned that everything involved ultimately came down to Moses. At the same time, his wife Ina was working on a graduate thesis about the Triborough Bridge, the early source of Moses's power, and he himself was taking some classes and reading The Death and Life of Great American Cities, by Jane Jacobs, an early critic of Moses and the effect he was having on New York and its neighborhoods.

He found that despite the man's illustrious career, no biography had been written save Builder for Democracy, a highly propagandistic one, in 1952. So he decided to undertake the task himself, beginning the seven-year process of hundreds of interviews meticulously documented in an appendix to the book.

Moses himself at first cooperated, providing much material about his early life in seven interviews with Caro, but then cutting him off completely when Caro asked about whether a deal had been cut with a wealthy landowner to reroute the Northern State Parkway.

Moses's brother Paul was about to provide Caro with the reason behind their decades-old family feud, but died of a heart attack hours before he could explain.

Answer 2

By definition a power broker is one who is strong politically or economically by virtue of controlling those in power in various areas. Using influence over one to help another which they have power over therefore brokering or trading so to speak. But the broker gets something out of this deal by being the "go to man" and becomes the one who everyone has to go to. It doesn't have to be criminal. It could be a senator who everybody owes favors to and has the ear and the connections to make things happen. Of course when power and influence are involved the grey line between legal and criminal is going to be there.

Answer 3

a larger skill or a larger Intelligence ought to actual be an advanced organic larger intelligence or skill from yet another planet or galaxy someplace contained in the universe, contained in the context of explaining from the position each and each and every of the undeniable layout originated contained in the international. foundation of existence scientists have come to the consensus that existence ought to no longer have originated by technique of mere probability. The circumstances and organic guidelines purely make it no longer plausible for each little thing to have self assembled. As one scientist defined existence bobbing up by technique of mere probability may be as unlikely as a 747 jet assembling from a twister in a junk backyard. the better skill is also a supernatural God. And as a Christian i believe that the better Intelligence, larger skill is the God of the Bible.