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Title: The Global 1%: Exposing the Transnational Ruling Class
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URL Source: http://www.opednews.com/articles/8/ ... Peter-Phillips-120819-734.html
Published: Aug 20, 2012
Author: Peter Phillips (about the author) (Page
Post Date: 2012-08-20 18:15:22 by tom007
Keywords: None
Views: 45
Comments: 2
The Global 1%: Exposing the Transnational Ruling Class Add this Page to Facebook! Submit to Twitter Submit to Reddit submit Submit to Stumble Upon Tell A Friend Become a Fan SAVE AS FAVORITE VIEW FAVORITES Get Embed HTML Code By Peter Phillips (about the author) Become a Fan Become a Fan -- Page 8 of 11 page(s) As seen in our extractor sector and investment sector samples, corporate elites are interconnected through direct board connections with some seventy major multinational corporations, policy groups, media organizations, and other academic or nonprofit institutions. The investment sector sample shows much more powerful financial links than the extractor sample; nonetheless, both represent vast networks of resources concentrated within each company's board of directors. The short sample of directors and resources from eight other of the superconnected companies replicates this pattern of multiple board corporate connections, policy groups, media and government, controlling vast global resources. These interlock relationships recur across the top interconnected companies among the transnational corporate class, resulting in a highly concentrated and powerful network of individuals who share a common interest in preserving their elite domination. Sociological research shows that interlocking directorates have the potential to faciliate political cohesion. A sense of a collective "we" emerges within such power networks, whereby members think and act in unison, not just for themselves and their individual firms, but for a larger sense of purpose--the good of the order, so to speak. [xxviii] Transnational corporate boards meet on a regular basis to encourage the maximunization of profit and the long-term viability of their firm's business plans. If they arrange for payments to government officials, conduct activities that undermine labor organizations, seek to manipulate the price of commodies (e.g. gold), or engage in insider trading in some capacity, they are in fact forming conspiratorial alliances inside those boards of directors. Our sample of thirty directors inside two connected companies have influence with some of the most powerful policy groups in the world, including British--American Business Council, US--Japan Business Council, Business Roundtable, Business Council, and the Kissinger Institute. They influence some ten trillion dollars in monetery resouces and control the working lives of many hundreds of thousands of people. All in all, they are a power elite unto themselves, operating in a world of power elite networks as the de facto ruling class of the capitalist world. Moreover, this 1 percent global elite dominates and controls public relations firms and the corporate media. Global corporate media protect the interests of the 1 percent by serving as a propaganda machine for the superclass. The corporate media provide entertainment for the masses and distorts the realities of inequality. Corporate news is managed by the 1 percent to maintain illusions of hope and to divert blame from the powerful for hard times. [xxix] Four of the thirty directors in our two-firm sample are directly connected with public relations and media. Thomas H. O'Brien and Ivan G. Seidenberg are both on the board of Verizon Communications, where Seidenberg serves as chairman. Verizon reported over $110 billion in operating revenues in 2011. [xxx] David H. Komansky and Linda Gosden Robinson are on the board of WPP Group, which describes itself as the world leader in marketing communications services, grossing over $65 billion in 2011. WPP is a conglomerate of many of the world's leading PR and marketing firms, in fields that include advertising, media investment management, consumer insight, branding and identity, health care communications, and direct digital promotion and relationship marketing. [xxxi] Even deeper inside the 1 percent of wealthy elites is what David Rothkopf calls the superclass. David Rothkopf, former managing director of Kissinger Associates and deputy undersecretary of commerce for international trade policies, published his book Superclass: the Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, in 2008. [xxxii] According to Rothkopf, the superclass constitutes approximately 0.0001 percent of the world's population, comprised of 6,000 to 7,000 people--some say 6,660. They are the Davos-attending, Gulfstream/private jet--flying, money-incrusted, megacorporation-interlocked, policy-building elites of the world, people at the absolute peak of the global power pyramid. They are 94 percent male, predominantly white, and mostly from North America and Europe. These are the people setting the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, G-8, G-20, NATO, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization. They are from the highest levels of finance capital, transnational corporations, the government, the military, the academy, nongovernmental organizations, spiritual leaders, and other shadow elites. Shadow elites include, for instance, the deep politics of national security organizations in connection with international drug cartels, who extract 8,000 tons of opium from US war zones annually, then launder $500 billion through transnational banks, half of which are US-based. [xxxiii] Rothkoft's understanding of the superclass is one based on influence and power. Although there are over 1,000 billionaires in the world, not all are necessarily part of the superclass in terms of influencing global policies. Yet these 1,000 billionaires have twice as much wealth as the 2.5 billion least wealthy people, and they are fully aware of the vast inequalities in the world. The billionaires and the global 1 percent are similar to colonial plantation owners. They know they are a small minority with vast resources and power, yet they must continually worry about the unruly exploited masses rising in rebellion. As a result of these class insecurities, the superclass works hard to protect this structure of concentrated wealth. Protection of capital is the prime reason that NATO countries now account for 85 percent of the world's defense spending, with the US spending more on military than the rest of the world combined. [xxxiv] Fears of inequality rebellions and other forms of unrest motivate NATO's global agenda in the war on terror. [xxxv] The Chicago 2012 NATO Summit Declaration reads: As Alliance leaders, we are determined to ensure that NATO retains and develops the capabilities necessary to perform its essential core tasks collective defence, crisis management and cooperative security--and thereby to play an essential role promoting security in the world. We must meet this responsibility while dealing with an acute financial crisis and responding to evolving geo-strategic challenges. NATO allows us to achieve greater security than any one Ally could attain acting alone. We confirm the continued importance of a strong transatlantic link and Alliance solidarity as well as the significance of sharing responsibilities, roles, and risks to meet the challenges North-American and European Allies face together . . . we have confidently set ourselves the goal of NATO Forces 2020: modern, tightly connected forces equipped, trained, exercised and commanded so that they can operate together and with partners in any (emphaisis added) environment. [xxxvi] NATO is quickly emerging as the police force for the transnational corporate class. As the TCC more fully emerged in the 1980s, coinciding with the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), NATO began broader operations. NATO first ventured into the Balkans, where it remains, and then moved into Afghanistan. NATO started a training mission in Iraq in 2005, has recently conducted operations in Libya, and, as of July 2012, is considering military action in Syria. It has become clear that the superclass uses NATO for its global security. This is part of an expanding strategy of US military domination around the world, wherby the US/NATO military-industrial-media empire operates in service to the transnational corporate class for the protection of international capital anywhere in the world. [xxxvii] Sociologists William Robinson and Jerry Harris anticipated this situation in 2000, when they described "a shift from the social welfare state to the social control (police) state replete with the dramatic expansion of public and private security forces, the mass incarceration of the excluded populations (disproportionately minorities), new forms of social apartheid . . . and anti-immigrant legislation." [xxxviii] Robinson and Harris's theory accurately predicts the agenda of today's global superclass, including -- President Obama's continuation of the police state agendas of his executive predecessors, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George H. W. Bush; -- the long-range global dominance agenda of the superclass, which uses US/NATO military forces to discourage resisting states and maintain internal police repression, in service of the capitalist system's orderly maintenance; -- and the continued consolidation of capital around the world without interference from governments or egalitarian social movements. [xxxix] Furthermore, this agenda leads to the further pauperization of the poorest half of the world's population, and an unrelenting downward spiral of wages for everyone in the second tier, and even some within the first tier. [xl] It is a world facing economic crisis, where the neoliberal solution is to spend less on human needs and more on security. [xli] It is a world of financial institutions run amok, where the answer to bankruptcy is to print more money through quantitative easing with trillions of new inflation-producing dollars. It is a world of permanent war, whereby spending for destruction requires even more spending to rebuild, a cycle that profits the TCC and its global networks of economic power. It is a world of drone killings, extrajudicial assassinations, and death and destruction, at home and abroad. Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11
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#1. To: tom007 (#0)
Naomi Wolf did an interview on this topic on Russia Today: 'US instigating violent crackdown on whistleblowers, dissent' — RT It shut down my computer a little while ago when I tried to link to it. I even had a hard time finding it this time, using the very same search words. After all, "Capital must protect itself in every way, through combination and through legislation. Debts must be collected and loans and mortgages foreclosed as soon as possible. When through a process of law the common people have lost their homes, they will be more tractable and more easily governed by the strong arm of the law, applied by the central power of wealth, under control of leading financiers. People without homes will not quarrel with their leaders. This is well known among our principal men now engaged in forming an imperialism of capital to govern the world. By dividing the people we can get them to expand their energies in fighting over questions of no importance to us except as teachers of the common herd. Thus by discreet action we can secure for ourselves what has been generally planned and successfully accomplished." ((((((The above was printed from the "Banker's Manifest", for the private circulation among leading bankers only, taken from the "Civil Servants' Year Book, "The Organizer" of January, 1934.)))))) The Banker's Manifesto ties in with U.S. Senate Document No. 43, 73rd Congress, 1st Session (1934), to wit: "The ultimate ownership of all property is in the State; individual so-called "ownership" is only by virtue of Government, i.e., law, amounting to mere "user" and use must be in acceptance with law and subordinate to the necessities of the State." ..... Banker's Manifesto "...as long as there..remain active enemies of the Christian church, we may hope to become Master of the World...the future Jewish King will never reign in the world before Christianity is overthrown - B'nai B'rith speech http://www.biblebelievers.org.au/luther.htm / http://bible.cc/psalms/83-4.htm
Thanks, I am a fan of Naiomi Wolf.
The billionaires and the global 1 percent are similar to colonial plantation owners. They know they are a small minority with vast resources and power, yet they must continually worry about the unruly exploited masses rising in rebellion. As a result of these class insecurities, the superclass works hard to protect this structure of concentrated wealth. Protection of capital is the prime reason that NATO countries now account for 85 percent of the world's defense spending, with the US spending more on military than the rest of the world combined.
http://rt.com/usa/news/wolf-interview-039/
1 day ago... American author Naomi Wolf to discuss why journalists are finding it increasingly ... after the world-famous whistleblower came to the country's embassy in .... right now, this huge fraud being uncovered in the banking sector.
#2. To: AllTheKings'HorsesWontDoIt (#1)
"Satan / Cheney in "08" 
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