by Peter
Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro
Abstract: This study asks Who are the the world's 1
percent power elite? And to what extent do they operate in unison for their own
private gains over benefits for the 99 percent? We examine a sample of the 1
percent: the extractor sector, whose companies are on the ground extracting
material from the global commons, and using low-cost labor to amass wealth.
These companies include oil, gas, and various mineral extraction organizations,
whereby the value of the material removed far exceeds the actual cost of
removal.We also examine the investment sector of the global 1 percent: companies
whose primary activity is the amassing and reinvesting of capital. This sector
includes global central banks, major investment money management firms, and
other companies whose primary efforts are the concentration and expansion of
money, such as insurance companies. Finally, we analyze how global networks of
centralized power--the elite 1 percent, their companies, and various governments
in their service--plan, manipulate, and enforce policies that benefit their
continued concentration of wealth and power. We demonstrate how the US/NATO
military-industrial-media empire operates in service to the transnational
corporate class for the protection of international capital in the world.
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The
Occupy Movement has developed a mantra that addresses the great inequality of
wealth and power between the world's wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of us,
the other 99 percent. While the 99 percent mantra undoubtedly serves as a
motivational tool for open involvement, there is little understanding as to who
comprises the 1 percent and how they maintain power in the world. Though a good
deal of academic research has dealt with the power elite in the United States,
only in the past decade and half has research on the transnational corporate
class begun to emerge. [i]
Foremost
among the early works on the idea of an interconnected 1 percent within global
capitalism was Leslie Sklair's 2001 book, The
Transnational Capitalist Class. [ii]
Sklair believed that globalization was moving transnational corporations (TNC)
into broader international roles, whereby corporations' states of orgin became
less important than international argreements developed through the World Trade
Organization and other international institutions. 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 writes:
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 [transnational corporate class] 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. [iii]
Estimates are that the total world's wealth is close to $200
trillion, with the US and Europe holding approximately 63 percent. To be among
the wealthiest half of the world, an adult needs only $4,000 in assets once
debts have been subtracted. An adult requires more than $72,000 to belong to
the top 10 percent of global wealth holders, and more than $588,000 to be a member
of the top 1 percent. As of 2010,
the top 1 percent of the wealthist people in the world had hidden away between
$21 trillion to $32 trillion in secret tax exempt bank accounts spread all over
the world. [iv]
Meanwhile, the poorest half of the global population together possesses less
than 2 percent of global wealth. [v]
The World Bank reports that, in 2008, 1.29 billion people were living in
extreme poverty, on less than $1.25 a day, and 1.2 billion more were living on
less than $2.00 a day. [vi]
Starvation.net reports that 35,000 people, mostly young children, die every day
from starvation in the world. [vii]
The numbers of unnecessary deaths have exceeded 300 million people over the
past forty years. Farmers around the world grow more than enough food to feed
the entire world adequately. Global grain production yielded a record 2.3
billion tons in 2007, up 4 percent from the year before--yet, billions of people
go hungry every day. Grain.org describes the core reasons for ongoing hunger in
a recent article, "Corporations Are Still Making a Killing from Hunger": while
farmers grow enough food to feed the world, commodity speculators and huge
grain traders like Cargill control global food prices and distribution. [viii]
Addressing the power of the global 1 percent--identifying who they are and what
their goals are--are clearly life and death questions.
It is
also important to examine the questions of how wealth is created, and how it
becomes concentrated. Historically, wealth has been captured and concentrated
through conquest by various powerful enities. One need only look at Spain's
appropriation of the wealth of the Aztec and Inca empires in the early
sixteenth century for an historical example of this process. The histories of
the Roman and British empires are also filled with examples of wealth captured.
Once
acquired, wealth can then be used to establish means of production, such as the
early British cotton mills, which exploit workers' labor power to produce goods
whose exchange value is greater than the cost of the labor, a process analyzed
by Karl Marx in Capital. [ix]
A human being is able to produce a product that has a certain value. Organized
business hires workers who are paid below the value of their labor power. The
result is the creation of what Marx called surplus value, over and above the
cost of labor. The creation of surplus value allows those who own the means of
production to concentrate capital even more. In addition, concentrated capital
accelerates the exploition of natural resources by private entrepreneurs--even
though these natural resources are actually the common heritage of all living
beings. [x]
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