{"id":30598,"date":"2013-06-24T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2013-06-24T11:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=30598"},"modified":"2015-05-06T09:00:14","modified_gmt":"2015-05-06T08:00:14","slug":"exposing-the-transnational-capitalist-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2013\/06\/exposing-the-transnational-capitalist-class\/","title":{"rendered":"Global Power Project, Part 1: Exposing the Transnational Capitalist Class"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"capitalism\"<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n

The Global Power Project<\/a>, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today’s global power oligarchy. By studying the relationships and varying levels of leadership that govern our planet’s most influential institutions \u2014 from banks, corporations and financial institutions to think tanks, foundations and universities \u2014 this project seeks to expose the complex, highly integrated network of influence wielded by relatively few individuals on a national and transnational basis. This is not a study of wealth, but a study of power.<\/i><\/p>\n

Many now know the rhetoric of the 1% very well: the imagery of a small elite owning most of the wealth while the 99% take the table scraps. This rhetoric and imagery was made popular by the growth of the Occupy movement, so it seems appropriate that a project of\u00a0Occupy.com<\/a>\u00a0should expand on this understanding and bring the activities of the global elite further to light.<\/p>\n

In 2006,\u00a0a UN report<\/a>\u00a0revealed that the world\u2019s richest 1% own 40% of the world\u2019s wealth, with those in the financial and internet sectors comprising the \u201csuper rich.\u201d More than a third of the world\u2019s super-rich live in the U.S., with roughly 27% in Japan, 6% in the U.K., and 5% in France. The world\u2019s richest 10% accounted for roughly 85% of the planet’s total assets, while the bottom half of the population \u2013 more than 3 billion people \u2013 owned less than 1% of the world\u2019s wealth.<\/p>\n

Looking specifically at the United States, the top 1% own more than 36% of the national wealth and more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%. Almost all of the wealth gains over the previous decade went to the top 1%. In the mid-1970s, the top 1% earned 8% of all national income; this number rose to 21% by 2010. At the highest sliver at the top, the 400 wealthiest individuals in America have more wealth than the bottom 150 million.<\/p>\n

\"graph\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A 2005 report from Citigroup<\/a>\u00a0coined the term \u201cplutonomy\u201d to describe countries \u201cwhere economic growth is powered by and largely consumed by the wealthy few.\u201d The report specifically identified the U.K., Canada, Australia and the United States as four plutonomies. Published three years before the onset of the financial crisis in 2008, the Citigroup report stated: \u201cAsset booms, a rising profit share and favorable treatment by market-friendly governments have allowed the rich to prosper and become a greater share of the economy in the plutonomy countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

“The rich,” said the report, “are in great shape, financially.\u201d<\/p>\n

In early 2013, Oxfam reported that the fortunes made by the world\u2019s 100 richest people over the course of 2012 \u2013 roughly $240 billion \u2013 would be enough to lift the world\u2019s poorest people out of poverty four times over. In\u00a0the Oxfam report<\/a>, “The Cost of Inequality: How Wealth and Income Extremes Hurt Us All,” the international charity noted that in the past 20 years, the richest 1% had increased their incomes by 60%. Barbara Stocking, an Oxfam executive, noted that this type of extreme wealth is \u201ceconomically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive and environmentally destructive…We can no longer pretend that the creation of wealth for a few will inevitably benefit the many \u2013 too often the reverse is true.\u201d<\/p>\n

The report added: \u201cIn the UK, inequality is rapidly returning to levels not seen since the time of Charles Dickens. In China the top 10% now take home nearly 60% of the income. Chinese inequality levels are now similar to those in South Africa, which is now the most unequal country on Earth and significantly more unequal than at the end of apartheid.\u201d In the United States, the share of national income going to the top 1% has doubled from 10 to 20% since 1980, and for the top 0.01% in the United States, \u201cthe share of national income is above levels last seen in the 1920s.\u201d<\/p>\n

Previously, in July of 2012, James Henry, a former chief economist at McKinsey, a major global consultancy, published a major report on tax havens for the Tax Justice Network which compiled data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the IMF and other private sector entities to reveal that the world\u2019s super-rich have hidden between $21 and $32 trillion offshore to avoid taxation.<\/p>\n

Henry stated: \u201cThis offshore economy is large enough to have a major impact on estimates of inequality of wealth and income; on estimates of national income and debt ratios; and \u2013 most importantly \u2013 to have very significant negative impacts on the domestic tax bases of \u2018source\u2019 countries.\u201d John Christensen of the Tax Justice Network\u00a0further commented<\/a>\u00a0that \u201cInequality is much, much worse than official statistics show, but politicians are still relying on trickle-down to transfer wealth to poorer people… This new data shows the exact opposite has happened: for three decades extraordinary wealth has been cascading into the offshore accounts of a tiny number of super-rich.\u201d<\/p>\n

With roughly half of the world\u2019s offshore wealth, or some $10 trillion, belonging to 92,000 of the planet’s richest individuals \u2014representing not the top 1% but the top 0.001% \u2014 we see a far more extreme global disparity taking shape than the one invoked by the Occupy movement. Henry commented: \u201cThe very existence of the global offshore industry, and the tax-free status of the enormous sums invested by their wealthy clients, is predicated on secrecy.\u201d<\/p>\n

In\u00a0his 2008 book<\/a>, “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making,” David Rothkopf, a man firmly entrenched within the institutions of global power and the elites which run them, compiled a census of roughly 6,000 individuals whom he referred to as the \u201csuperclass.\u201d They were defined not simply by their wealth, he said, but by the influence they exercised within the realms of business, finance, politics, military, culture, the arts and beyond.<\/p>\n

Rothkopf noted: \u201cEach member is set apart by his ability to regularly influence the lives of millions of people in multiple countries worldwide. Each actively exercises this power and often amplifies it through the development of relationships with other superclass members.\u201d<\/p>\n

The global elite are of course not defined by their wealth alone, but through the institutional, ideological and individual connections and networks in which they wield their influence. The most obvious example of these types of institutions are the multinational banks and corporations which dominate the global economy. In the first scientific study of its kind, Swiss researchers analyzed the relationship between 43,000 transnational corporations and \u201cidentified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

In\u00a0their report<\/a>, “The Network of Global Corporate Control, researchers noted that this network \u2013 which they defined as “ownership” by a person or firm over another firm, whether partially or entirely \u2013 \u201cis much more unequally distributed than wealth\u201d and that \u201cthe top ranked actors hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth.\u201d The \u201ccore\u201d of this network \u2013 which consists of the world’s top 737 corporations \u2013 control 80% of all transnational corporations (TNCs).<\/p>\n

Even more extreme, the top 147 transnational corporations control roughly 40% of the entire economic value of the world\u2019s TNCs, forming their own network known as the \u201csuper-entity.\u201d The super-entity conglomerates all control each other, and thus control a significant portion of the rest of the world\u2019s corporations with the \u201ccore\u201d of the global corporate network consisting primarily of financial corporations and intermediaries.<\/p>\n

In December of 2011, the former deputy secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, Roger Altman, wrote an article for the Financial Times in which\u00a0he described<\/a>\u00a0financial markets as \u201ca global supra-government\u201d which can \u201coust entrenched regimes… force austerity, banking bail-outs and other major policy changes.\u201d Altman said bluntly that the influence of this entity \u201cdwarfs multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund\u201d as \u201cthey have become the most powerful force on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

With the formation of this \u201csuper-entity\u201d \u2013 a veritable global supra-government \u2013 made up of the world\u2019s largest banks and corporations exerting immense influence over all other corporations, a new global class structure has evolved. It is this rarefied group of individuals and firms, and the relations they hold with one another, that we wish to further understand.<\/p>\n

According to\u00a0the 2012 report<\/a>, “Corporate Clout Distributed: The Influence of the World\u2019s Largest 100 Economic Entities,” of the world\u2019s 100 largest economic entities in 2010, 42% were corporations while the rest were governments. Among the largest 150 economic entities, 58% were corporations. Wal-Mart was the largest corporation in 2010 and the 25th largest economic entity on earth, with greater revenue than the GDPs of no less than 171 countries.<\/p>\n

According to the\u00a0Fortune Global 500 list of corporations<\/a>\u00a0for 2011, Royal Dutch Shell next became the largest conglomerate on earth, followed by Exxon, Wal-Mart, and BP. The Global 500 made record revenue in 2011 totaling some $29.5 trillion \u2014 more than a 13% increase from 2010.<\/p>\n

With such massive wealth and power held by these institutions and “networks” of corporations, those individuals who sit on the boards, executive committees and advisory groups to the largest corporations and banks wield significant influence on their own. But their influence does not stand in isolation from other elites, nor do the institutions of banks and corporations function in isolation from other entities such as state, educational, cultural or media institutions.<\/p>\n

Largely facilitated by the cross-membership that exists between boards of corporations, think tanks, foundations, educational institutions and advisory groups \u2014 not to mention the continual “revolving door” between the state and corporate sectors \u2014 these elites become a highly integrated, organized and evolved social group. This is as true for the formation of national elites as it is for transnational, or global, elites.<\/p>\n

The rise of corporations and banks to a truly global scale \u2013 what is popularly referred to as the process of \u201cglobalization\u201d \u2013 was facilitated by the growth of other transnational networks and institutions such as think tanks and foundations, which sought to facilitate these ideological and institutional structures of globalization. A wealth of research and analysis has been undertaken in academic literature over the past couple of decades to understand the development of this phenomenon, examining the emergence of what is often referred to as the “Transnational Capitalist Class” (TCC). In various political science and sociology journals, researchers and academics reject a conspiratorial thesis and instead advance a social analysis of what is viewed as a powerful social system and group.<\/p>\n

As Val Burris and Clifford L. Staples argued in an article for the International Journal of Comparative Sociology (Vol. 53, No. 4, 2012), \u201cas transnational corporations become increasingly global in their operations, the elites who own and control those corporations will also cease to be organized or divided along national lines.\u201d They added: \u201cWe are witnessing the formation of a \u2018transnational capitalist class\u2019 (TCC) whose social networks, affiliations, and identities will no longer be embedded primarily in the roles they occupy as citizens of specific nations.\u201d To properly understand this TCC, it is necessary to study what the authors call \u201cinterlocking directorates,\u201d defined as \u201cthe structure of interpersonal or interorganizational relations that is created whenever a director of one corporation sits on the governing board of another corporation.\u201d<\/p>\n

The growth of \u201cinterlocking directorates\u201d is primarily confined to European and North American conglomerates, whereas those in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East largely remain \u201cisolated from the global interlock network.\u201d Thus, the \u201ctransnationalization\u201d of corporate directorates and, ultimately, of global class structures \u201cis more a manifestation of the process of European integration \u2013 or, perhaps, of the emergence of a North Atlantic ruling class.\u201d<\/p>\n

The conclusion of these researchers was that the ruling class is not \u201cglobal\u201d as such, but rather \u201ca supra-national capitalist class that has gone a considerable way toward transcending national divisions,\u201d notably in the industrialized countries of Western Europe and North America; in their words, “the regional locus of transnational class formation is more accurately described as the North Atlantic region.\u201d However, with the rise of the “East” \u2013 notably the economic might of Japan, China, India, and other East Asian nations \u2013 the interlocks and interconnections among elites are likely to expand as various other networks of institutions seek to integrate these regions.<\/p>\n

The influence wielded by banks and corporations is not simply through their direct wealth or operations, but through the affiliations, interactions and integration by those who run the institutions with political and social elites, both nationally and globally. While we can identify a global elite as a wealth percentage (the top 1% or, more accurately, the top 0.001%), this does not account for the more indirect and institutionalized influence that corporate and financial leaders exert over politics and society as a whole.<\/p>\n

To further understand this, we must identify and explore the dominant institutions which facilitate the integration of these elites from an array of corporations, banks, academia, the media, military, intelligence, political and cultural spheres. This will be the subject of the second installment in the series, appearing next week.<\/p>\n

________________________<\/p>\n

Andrew Gavin Marshall is an independent researcher and writer based in Montreal, Canada.<\/i><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 occupy.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Global Power Project, an investigative series produced by Occupy.com, aims to identify and connect the worldwide institutions and individuals who comprise today’s global power oligarchy. By studying the relationships and varying levels of leadership that govern our planet’s most influential institutions \u2014 from banks, corporations and financial institutions to think tanks, foundations and universities \u2014 this project seeks to expose the complex, highly integrated network of influence wielded by relatively few individuals on a national and transnational basis. This is not a study of wealth, but a study of power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,139,55,146,169,203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30598","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analysis","category-justice","category-capitalism","category-economics","category-trade","category-development"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30598","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30598"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30598\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30598"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30598"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30598"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}