Are you part of the 1%?
To be among the wealthiest half of the world, you need only $4,000 in assets.
You need more than $72,000 to belong to the top 10%.
You need more than $588,000 to be a member of the top 1 percent.
(Global Research article by Prof. Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro)
The total world’s wealth is approximately $200 trillion, with the US and Europe holding approximately 63 percent.
The total world’s wealth is approximately $200 trillion, with the US and Europe holding approximately 63 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.
The poorest half of the global population together has less than 2 percent of global wealth.
The poorest half of the global population together has less than 2 percent of global wealth.
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.
Starvation.net reports that 35,000 people, mostly young children, die every day from starvation in the world.
(Global Research article by Prof. Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro)
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.
Commodity speculators and huge grain traders control global food prices and distribution.
(Global Research article by Prof. Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro)
The Case of Freeport-McMoRan
Freeport-McMoRan is the world’s largest extractor of copper and gold.
The Case of Freeport-McMoRan
Freeport-McMoRan is the world’s largest extractor of copper and gold.
The company controls huge deposits in Indonesia and elsewhere.
The Grasberg mine in Papua, Indonesia, employs 23,000 workers at wages below three dollars an hour.
In September 2011, workers went on strike for higher wages and better working conditions.
Security forces financed by Freeport killed or wounded several strikers.
Website for this image
Indonesian National Police Chief Timur Pradopo admitted that officers received close to ten million dollars annually from Freeport.
Website for this image
Indonesian National Police Chief Timur Pradopo admitted that officers received close to ten million dollars annually from Freeport.
These payments recall even larger ones made by Freeport to Indonesian military forces.
Website for this imageSome speculate that the US has a hidden agenda in deploying marines to Australia.
The Thai newspaper The Nation has suggested that one of the reasons why US Marines might be stationed in Darwin could be that they would provide remote security assurance to US-owned Freeport-McMoRan’s gold and copper mine in West Papua, less than a two-hour flight away.
The board of directors of Freeport-McMoRan represents a portion of the global 1 percent who not only control the largest gold and copper mining company in the world, but who are also interconnected by board membership with over two dozen major multinational corporations, banks, foundations, military, and policy groups.
The Case of BlackRock, Inc.
BlackRock, based in Manhattan, is the largest assets management firm in the world.
As of March 2012, BlackRock manages assets worth $3.68 trillion.
In addition to Freeport-McMoRan, BlackRock has major holdings in Chevron (49 million shares, 2.5 percent), Goldman Sachs Group (13 million shares, 2.7 percent), Exxon Mobil (121 million shares, 2.5 percent), Bank of America (251 million shares, 2.4 percent), Monsanto Company (12 million shares, 2.4 percent), Microsoft Corp. (185 million shares, 2.2 percent), and many more.
BlackRock manages investments of both public and private funds, including California Public Employee’s Retirement System, California State Teacher’s Retirement System, Freddie Mac, Boy Scouts of America, Boeing, Sears, Verizon, Raytheon, PG&E, NY City Retirement Systems, LA County Employees Retirement Association, GE, Cisco, and numerous others.
Some of the top financial giants of the capitalist world are connected by interlocking boards of directors at BlackRock, including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, PNC Bank, Barclays, Swiss Reinsurance Company, American International Group (AIG), UBS A.G., Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, J. P. Morgan Chase & Co., and Morgan Stanley.
BlackRock’s eighteen board members control and influence tens of trillions of dollars of wealth in the world and represent a core of the super-connected financial sector corporations.
(Global Research article by Prof. Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro)
The wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s population represents approximately forty million adults.
BlackRock manages investments of both public and private funds, including California Public Employee’s Retirement System, California State Teacher’s Retirement System, Freddie Mac, Boy Scouts of America, Boeing, Sears, Verizon, Raytheon, PG&E, NY City Retirement Systems, LA County Employees Retirement Association, GE, Cisco, and numerous others.
Some of the top financial giants of the capitalist world are connected by interlocking boards of directors at BlackRock, including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, PNC Bank, Barclays, Swiss Reinsurance Company, American International Group (AIG), UBS A.G., Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development, J. P. Morgan Chase & Co., and Morgan Stanley.
BlackRock’s eighteen board members control and influence tens of trillions of dollars of wealth in the world and represent a core of the super-connected financial sector corporations.
(Global Research article by Prof. Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro)
The wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s population represents approximately forty million adults.
Approximately ten million of these individuals have assets in excess of one million dollars, and approximately 100,000 have financials assets worth over thirty million dollars.
There are the 2.5 billion people who live on less than two dollars a day, die by the tens of thousands every day from malnutrition and easily curible illnesses, and who have probably never even heard a dial tone.
(Global Research article by Prof. Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro)
The 1 percent global elite dominates and controls public relations firms and the corporate media.
Global corporate media protect the interests of the 1 percent by serving as a propaganda machine for the superclass.
The corporate media provide entertainment for the masses and distorts the realities of inequality.
Corporate news is managed by the 1 percent to maintain illusions of hope and to divert blame from the powerful for hard times.
(Global Research article by Prof. Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro)
(Global Research article by Prof. Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro)
David Rothkopf, former managing director of Kissinger Associates and deputy undersecretary of commerce for international trade policies, published his book Superclass: the Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making, in 2008.
According to Rothkopf, the superclass constitutes approximately 0.0001 percent of the world’s population, comprised of 6,000 to 7,000 people - some say 6,660.
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.
These are the people setting the agendas at the Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, G-8, G-20, NATO, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.
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.
(Global Research article by Prof. Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro)
Although there are over 1,000 billionaires in the world, not all are necessarily part of the superclass in terms of influencing global policies.
Although there are over 1,000 billionaires in the world, not all are necessarily part of the superclass in terms of influencing global policies.
Yet these 1,000 billionaires have twice as much wealth as the 2.5 billion least wealthy people, and they are fully aware of the vast inequalities in the world.
The billionaires and the global 1 percent 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 superclass works hard to protect this 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.
Fears of inequality rebellions and other forms of unrest motivate NATO’s global agenda in the war on terror.
It has become clear that the superclass uses NATO for its global security.
This is part of an expanding strategy of US military domination around the world, wherby the US/NATO military-industrial-media empire operates in service to the transnational corporate class for the protection of international capital anywhere in the world.
(Global Research article by Prof. Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro)
Sociologists William Robinson and Jerry Harris anticipated this situation in 2000, when they described “a shift from the social welfare state to the social control (police) state replete with the dramatic expansion of public and private security forces, the mass incarceration of the excluded populations (disproportionately minorities), new forms of social apartheid . . . and anti-immigrant legislation.”
(Global Research article by Prof. Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro)
Sociologists William Robinson and Jerry Harris anticipated this situation in 2000, when they described “a shift from the social welfare state to the social control (police) state replete with the dramatic expansion of public and private security forces, the mass incarceration of the excluded populations (disproportionately minorities), new forms of social apartheid . . . and anti-immigrant legislation.”
(Global Research article by Prof. Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro)
It is a world facing economic crisis, where the neoliberal solution is to spend less on human needs and more on security.
It is a world facing economic crisis, where the neoliberal solution is to spend less on human needs and more on security.
It is a world of financial institutions run amok, where the answer to bankruptcy is to print more money through quantitative easing with trillions of new inflation-producing dollars.
It is a world of permanent war, whereby spending for destruction requires even more spending to rebuild.
It is a world of drone killings, extrajudicial assassinations, and death and destruction, at home and abroad.
(Full article at Global Research.)
(Full article at Global Research.)