Thursday, July 26th, 2012
Stephan: This is a report on the careful academic research showing the point I have made many time in the pages of SR and in Explore: The transition from a world geopolitically controlled by nation states to one controlled by Virtual States -- multinational corporations, and the small group of people who control them, and use them as the expression of their power without consideration for national interest. National governments are vassals to this new elite. We are entering a geopolitically different era, just as we are also entering the reality of climate change.
'147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. 'In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network,' says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions,' the report says. One hundred and forty seven companies control the economy of the world.
In this new geopolitical era there has been the rise of a new planetary aristocracy which like all aristocracies in history is already showing signs of becoming hereditary, callous, and corrupt. As you read this, keep in mind this is not a report from some partisan or polemic journal, but a research journal of great reputation reporting on the work of a rigorous and careful study.
Please click through to see the chart that accompanies this report. You can also download the entire research paper the New Scientist is reporting on at http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1107/1107.5728v2.pdf. I urge you to do so. This affects your life in a thousand ways every day.
As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
The study’s assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.
The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York’s Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world’s transnational corporations (TNCs).
‘Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it’s conspiracy theories or free-market,’ says James Glattfelder. ‘Our analysis is reality-based.’
Previous studies have found […]
