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Thursday, June 13, 2013

The “Transnational Capitalist Class”

In 2006, a UN report revealed that the world’s richest 1% own 40% of the world’s wealth.

The world’s richest 10% accounted for roughly 85% of the planet’s total assets, while the bottom half of the population – more than 3 billion people – owned less than 1% of the world’s wealth.

Roughly half of the world’s offshore wealth, or some $10 trillion, belonging to 92,000 of the planet’s richest individuals —representing not the top 1% but the top 0.001%.

In the United States, the top 1% own more than 36% of the national wealth and more than the combined wealth of the bottom 95%.  400 wealthiest individuals in America have more wealth than the bottom 150 million.

Of the world’s 100 largest economic entities in 2010, 42% were corporations while the rest were countries. 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.

According to the Fortune Global 500 list of corporations for 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.

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.

Swiss researchers analyzed the relationship between 43,000 transnational corporations and “identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.” The core of this network – which consists of the world’s top 737 corporations – control 80% of all transnational corporations (TNCs). Even more extreme, the top 147 transnational corporations control roughly 40% of the entire economic value of the world’s TNCs, forming their own network known as the “super-entity.” The super-entity conglomerates all control each other, and thus control a significant portion of the rest of the world’s corporations with the core of the global corporate network consisting primarily of financial corporations and intermediaries.

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.

Former deputy secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, Roger Altman described financial markets as “a global supra-government” which can “oust entrenched regimes… force austerity, banking bail-outs and other major policy changes.” Altman said bluntly that the influence of this entity “dwarfs multilateral institutions such as the International Monetary Fund” as “they have become the most powerful force on earth.”

Val Burris and Clifford L. Staples argued in the International Journal of Comparative Sociology “as 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.” They added: “We are witnessing the formation of a ‘transnational capitalist class’ (TCC) whose social networks, affiliations, and identities will no longer be embedded primarily in the roles they occupy as citizens of specific nations.”

Taken from here

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