by Mickey Huff
Because most people do not witness news—history in the making—as it happens, we see, hear, or read about it in accounts provided by journalists. And those accounts reflect not only the world but also the social forces and professional conventions that shape journalism as a field. As sociologist Michael Schudson has famously observed, “The power of the media lies not only (and not even primarily) in its power to declare things to be true, but in its power to provide the forms in which the declarations appear.”3
One consequence of establishment journalism’s formal power—perhaps an unintended one, in some instances—is that certain types of stories consistently fall outside the scope of its attention. In such instances the result is that establishment journalism, instead of contributing to a “first rough draft of history,” promotes one version of what Noam Chomsky has called “unhistory.”4
The chapters in this section examine sources overlooked or ignored by the corporate media, to prevent some of the most important news stories of this era from joining the annals of unhistory. From the concentration of wealth in a global financial “superclass” (Peter Phillips and Brady Osborne, Chapter 9), to the voices of Chinese workers who protest against Apple and its subcontractors (Nicki Lisa Cole and Tara Krishna, Chapter 10), to Africa, where Brian Martin Murphy disambiguates US interests and the role of the indigenous Tuareg in Mali’s crisis (Chapter 11), and the catastrophic impacts of climate change on the world’s nonhuman species (Julie Andrzejew-ski and John C. Alessio, Chapter 12), these chapters challenge us to deal with the realities of global economics and our lives as consumers. These chapters also indicate how we might alter our behavior in order to create a different, better world.
It is not by chance, then, that Michael Nagler’s chapter, “The New Story: Why We Need One and How to Create It,” concludes both this section and the book as a whole. Drawing on the principled nonviolence of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., among others, Nagler makes the case that “cooperation is a more potent driver of evolution than competition” and “compassion in us leads to more long-lasting change than hatred.” Tacit in his argument is the point that all of us—not only journalists but everyday people and community members—have a central role to play in the development of this new, better story.
Notes
1. Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States (New York: Gallery Books, 2012), ix.
2. Ibid., xiii.
3. Michael Schudson, “The Politics of Narrative Form,” The Power of News (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 54.
4. Noam Chomsky, “Anniversaries from ‘Unhistory,” In These Times, February 6, 2012, http://inthesetimes.com/article/12679/anniversaries_from_unhistory. See also Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored, Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution (New York: Seven Stories, 2012), 25, 217, 333–334.
CHAPTER 9
Exposing the Financial Core
of the Transnational
Capitalist Class
Peter Phillips and Brady Osborne
INTRODUCTION
The specific names of the power elites running the financial centers of the world are rarely identified in the context of a world-class system. Corporate media and mainstream academics choose to leave undisclosed the names of the most powerful people in the world at the financial core of the transnational capitalist class.
In this study, we decided to identify the people on the boards of directors of the top ten asset management firms and the top ten most centralized corporations. Because of overlaps, there is a total of thirteen firms, which collectively have 161 directors on their boards. We think that this group of 161 individuals represents the financial core of the world’s transnational capitalist class. They collectively manage $23.91 trillion in funds and operate in nearly every country in the world. They are the center of the financial capital that powers the global economic system. Western governments and international policy bodies work in the interests of this financial core to protect the free flow of capital investment anywhere in the world.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF RESEARCH ON THE
AMERICAN POWER ELITE
A long tradition of sociological research documents the existence of a dominant ruling class in the United States, whose members set policy and determine national political priorities. The American ruling class is complex and competitive, and perpetuates itself through interacting families of high social standing with similar lifestyles, corporate affiliations, and memberships in elite social clubs and private schools.1
The American ruling class has long been determined to be mostly self-perpetuating,2 maintaining its influence through policy-making institutions such as the National Association of Manufacturers, the US Chamber of Commerce, the Business Council, Business Round-table, the Conference Board, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, Council on Foreign Relations, and other business-centered policy groups.3 These associations have long dominated policy decisions within the US government.
In his 1956 book, The Power Elite, C. Wright Mills documented how World War II solidified a trinity of power in the US that comprised corporate, military, and government elites in a centralized power structure motivated by class interests and working in unison through “higher circles” of contact and agreement. Mills described how the power elite were those “who decide whatever is decided” of major consequence.4 These higher-circle decision makers tended to be more concerned with interorganizational relationships and the functioning of the economy as a whole, rather than with advancing their particular corporate interests.5
The higher-circle policy elites (HCPE) are a segment of the American upper class and are the principal decision makers in society. Although these elites display some sense of “we-ness,” they also tend to have continuing disagreements on specific policies and necessary actions in various sociopolitical circumstances.6 These disagreements can block aggressive reactionary responses to social movements and civil unrest, as in the case of the labor movement in the 1930S and the civil rights movement in the 1960s. During these two periods, the more liberal elements of HCPE tended to dominate the decision making process and supported passing the National Labor Relations and Social Security Acts in 1935, as well as the Civil Rights and Economic Opportunities Acts in 1964. These pieces of national legislation were seen as concessions to the ongoing social movements and civil unrest, and were implemented without instituting more repressive policies.
However, during periods of threats from external enemies, as in World Wars I and II, more conservative/reactionary elements of the HCPE successfully pushed their agendas. During and after World War I, the United States instituted repressive responses to social movements, for example through the Palmer Raids and passage of the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. After World War II, the HCPE allowed and encouraged the McCarthy-era attacks on liberals and radicals and, in 1947, passage of the National Security Act and the antilabor Taft-Hartley Act. In the past twenty-five years, and especially since the events of 9/11, the HCPE in the US has been united in support of an American empire of military power that maintains a repressive war against resisting groups—typically dubbed “terrorists”—around the world. This war on terror is much more about protecting transnational globalization, the free flow of financial capital, dollar hegemony, and access to oil, than it is repressing terrorism. Increasingly, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is a partner with US global dominance interests.7
THE TRANSNATIONAL CAPITALIST CLASS
Capitalist power elites exist around the world. The globalization of trade and capital brings the world’s elites into increasingly interconnected relationships—to the point that sociologists have begun to theorize the development of a transnational capitalist class (TCC). In one of the pathbreaking works in this field, The Transnational Capitalist Class (2000), Leslie Sklair argued that globalization elevated transnational corporations (TNC) to more influential international roles, with the resu
lt that nation-states became less significant than international argreements developed through the World Trade Organization (WTO) and other international institutions.8 Emerging from these multinational corporations was a transnational capitalist class, whose loyalities and interests, while still rooted in their corporations, was increasingly international in scope. Sklair wrote:
The transnational capitalist class can be analytically divided into four main fractions: (i) owners and controllers of TNCs and their local affiliates; (ii) globalizing bureaucrats and politicians; (iii) globalizing professionals; (iv) consumerist elites (merchants and media). . . . It is also important to note, of course, that the TCC and each of its fractions are not always entirely united on every issue. Nevertheless, together, leading personnel in these groups constitute a global power elite, dominant class or inner circle in the sense that these terms have been used to characterize the dominant class structures of specific countries.9
William Robinson followed in 2004 with his book, A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World.10 Robinson claimed that 500 years of capitalism had led to a global epochal shift in which all human activity is transformed into capital. In this view, the world had become a single market, which privatized social relationships. He saw the TCC as increasingly sharing similar lifestyles, patterns of higher education, and consumption. The global circulation of capital is at the core of an international bourgeoisie, who operate in oligopolist clusters around the world. These clusters of elites form strategic transnational alliances through mergers and acquisitions with the goal of increased concentration of wealth and capital. The process creates a polyarchy of hegemonic elites. The concentration of wealth and power at this level tends to over-accumulate, leading to speculative investments and wars. The TCC makes efforts to correct and protect its interests through global organizations like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the G20, World Social Forum, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Bank for International Settlements, and other transnational associations. Robinson claimed that, within this system, nation-states become little more than population containment zones, and the real power lies with the decision makers who control global capital.11
Deeper inside the transnational capitalist class is what David Roth-kopf calls the “superclass.” In his 2008 book, Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, Rothkopf argued that the superclass constitutes 6,000 to 7,000 people, or 0.0001 percent of the world’s population.12 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. Rothkopf reported that these are the people setting the agendas at the G8, G20, NATO, the World Bank, and the WTO. 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.)13
Rothkopf’s definition of the superclass emphasized their influence and power. Although there are over 1,500 billionaires in the world, not all are necessarily part of the superclass in terms of influencing global policies. Yet these 1,500 billionaires possess two times as much wealth as the 2.5 billion least wealthy people, and they are fully aware of these vast inequalities. The billionaires inside the TCC 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 TCC works to protect its 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.14 Fears of rebellions motivated by inequality and other forms of unrest motivate NATO’s global agenda in the war on terror.15
NATO is quickly emerging as the police force for the transnational capitalist class. As the TCC more fully emerged in the 1980s, coinciding with the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO began broader operations. NATO first ventured into the Balkans, where it remains, and then into Afghanistan. NATO started a training mission in Iraq in 2005, has recently conducted operations in Libya, and, as of July 2013, is considering military action in Syria. Superclass use of NATO for its global security is part of an expanding strategy for US military domination around the world, whereby the US/NATO military–industrial–media empire operates in service to the TCC for the protection of international capital anywhere in the world.16
The most recent work on the TCC is William K. Carroll’s The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class (2010).17 Carroll’s work focused on the consolidation of the transnational corporate-policy networks between 1996 and 2006. He used a database of the boards of directors of the global 500 largest corporations, showing the concentrated interconnectedness of key corporations and a decreasing number of people involved. According to this analysis, the average size of corporate boards has dropped from 20.2 to 14.0 in the ten years of his study. Furthermore, financial organizations are increasingly the center of these networks. Carroll argued that the TCC at the centers of these networks benefit from extensive ties to each other, thus providing both the structural capacity and class consciousness necessary for effective political solidarity.
A 2011 University of Zurich study completed by Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, reported that a small group of companies—mainly banks—wields huge power over the global economy.18 Applying mathematical models—usually used to model natural systems—to the transnational corporations in the world economy, the study found that 147 companies controlled some 40 percent of the world’s wealth.19
PROJECT CENSORED RESEARCH ON THE 2013
TRANSNATIONAL CAPITALIST CLASS
Although sociological theorists conduct studies of the world’s power elite, these researchers rarely identify specific members of the transnational capitalist class, preferring instead to build theory for other academics to read and discuss, while avoiding the particulars of who is actually involved.
The world’s corporate media pay absolutely no attention to academic concepts like “transnational capitalist class.” Thus, a LexisNexis search of news coverage, completed on June 3, 2013, using the term “transnational capitalist class,” returned only three news stories in the past decade—two from foreign media, and the third a letter to the editor by Leslie Sklair. The concept of a transnational capitalist class is absent from corporate news coverage, which also does not address who constitutes this most elite, powerful group.
We think that the world needs to know who comprises the TCC and thus who makes the financial decisions regarding global capital.
This is actually a fairly straightforward—if labor-intensive—research effort: most of the information is not only public but also online. We started with the top ten most centralized companies from the previously cited 2011 Swiss study.20 This identified the world’s most centralized and interconnected financial organizations. We also wanted to consider those groups managing the largest volumes of financial capital, so we added the top asset management firms from 2012 to our data set.21 The following chart shows the rankings in trillions of dollars of assets managed for the top thirty-five asset management firms in the world.
TABLE 1: THE WORLD’S TOP 35 ASSET MANAGEMENT FIRMS, IN TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS (2012)
1 BlackRock US $3,560
2 UBS Switzerland $2,280
3 Allianz Germany $2,213
4 Vanguard Group US $2,080
5 State Street Global Advi
sors (SSgA) US $1,908
6 Pimco (Pacific Investment Management Company) US $1,820
7 Fidelity Investments US $1,576
8 AXA Group France $1,393
9 JPMorgan Asset Management US $1,347
10 Credit Suisse Switzerland $1,279
11 BNY Mellon Asset Management US $1,299
12 HSBC UK $1,230
13 Deutsche Bank Germany $1,227
14 BNP Paribas France $1,106
15 Capital Research and Management Company US $1,071
16 Prudential Financial US $961.00
17 Amundi France $880.00
18 Goldman Sachs Group US $836.00
19 Wellington Management Company US $719.80
20 Natixis Global Asset Management France $710.90
21 Franklin Resources (Franklin Templeton Investments) US $707.10
22 Northern Trust US $704.30
23 Bank of America US $682.20
24 Invesco US $646.60
25 Legg Mason US $631.80
26 Nippon Life Insurance Company Japan $600.00
27 Legal & General Investment Management UK $598.50
28 Generali Group Italy $581.50
29 Prudential UK $570.20
30 Ameriprise Financial US $543.60
31 T. Rowe Price US $541.70
32 Wells Fargo US $534.90
33 Manulife Financial Canada $513.80
34 Sun Life Financial Canada $496.30
35 TIAA-CREF US $481.00
Seven of the top ten asset management firms were in the top ten of the most centralized firms from the Swiss study. We decided to identify the people on the boards of directors of the top ten asset management firms and the top ten most centralized corporations. With overlaps there is a total of thirteen firms in our study: Barclays PLC, BlackRock Inc., Capital Group Companies Inc., FMR Corporation: Fidelity Worldwide Investment, AXA Group, State Street Corporation, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Legal & General Group PLC (LGIMA), Vanguard Group Inc., UBS AG, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse Group AG, and Allianz SE (Owners of PIMCO) PIMCO-Pacific Investment Management Co. The boards of directors of these firms, totaling 161 individuals, represent the financial core of the world’s transnational capitalist class (for more details see Appendix). Collectively, they manage $23.91 trillion in funds and operate in nearly every country in the world. The $23.91 trillion does not include the equity balances—which number in the billions of dollars—that each of these firms holds in company assets. Nor does it include the $18.8 trillion controlled by the next twenty-five most valuable asset management firms.
