Who Rules the World Again?

 “The Titans of Capital – How Concentrated Wealth Threatens Humanity," by Peter Phillips, 2024

This is an update of Phillips’ excellent 2018 book, “Giants – the Global Power Elite,” also reviewed on this blog.  It shows that capital and power controlled by the transnational capitalist class (TCC) has grown since then to $50 Trillion under management, especially after the CoVid epidemic. The number of billionaires and millionaires has also increased. It indicates extreme world poverty has grown since that epidemic, to 700 million.  Here Phillips concentrates on the 117 people who are on the board of directors of the top 10 world money-management firms, all located in the U.S. or Europe.  He shows how they are also involved in government, non-profits, educational institutions, charities, top political and economic bodies, the military, CIA and more.  Overall there are now 31 firms that manage at least $1 Trillion in assets.

This sample provides a look into the “Davos” set – 65% of them attended Davos – and their poisonous effect on wars, climate change, inequality, democracy and poverty. This group is fully aware of the problems of capital worldwide and has endorsed the Davos/World Economic Forum’s toothless ESG program of Environmental, Social and Governance standards.  Phillips includes their names, affiliations and wealth, almost as if the book is a spreadsheet of power. His book is essentially a plea for the TCC to stop the wheels of capital and instead work and spend to halt the damage, much like Nader once proposed.  This is another guy whose touchstone is the 1948 U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  Who thinks this kind of begging is going to work?  It’s his version of a petition to the new Czars.

The INTERNATIONAL BOURGEOISIE

The top ten firms are, in order:  Blackrock, Vanguard, UBS (Swiss), Fidelity, State Street, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Amundi (France), Allianz/PIMCO (Germany), Capital Group.  The ‘vampire squid’ Goldman Sachs is #11.  Among their holdings these firms own positions in war industries, tobacco, alcohol, firearms, gambling, private prisons, carbon firms, pipeline entities, plastics, fast food – all harmful industries in some way. Phillips lists their investments in each.   For instance Blackrock and Vanguard hold $95.5B in Exxon Mobil shares, with $165.7B held by all 10 firms in that one oil company.  Investments in the oil industry are across the board, along with coal and natural gas – giving the lie to their ‘support’ of the environment.  They instead promote the nonsense solution of ‘air capture’ of carbon, which the Biden administration just funded at $1.2B in 2023.  Even Al Gore saw through this, as it promotes continued carbon / methane production and is also an untested method.   

Of special interest is their involvement in military industries. In 2021 there was $2T in military spending world-wide, led by the U.S., China, India, the U.K. and Russia.  Phillips lists the ‘Titans’ investments in the many firms in this ‘industry,’ including firms from the Netherlands, U.K., Italy and France.   Russia has the largest arsenal of nuclear warheads, followed by the U.S., China and so on.  Russian and Chinese military production is mostly controlled by state firms, not private enterprise. 

Much of their wealth is part of financialization instead of the production of use-values.  As the search for world profits gets harder, they focus on privatization of public assets, disaster reconstruction, speculation and war investments.  So to my eyes if a major financial crisis threatens, their wealth is very fragile and fictitious.   What again stands out is the absence of any Russian and one each of Chinese and Middle-Eastern figures on these boards.   

CHINA and RUSSIA

Most of the TCC directors are from the U.S. or western Europe, with 13 individuals from countries like China, Mexico, Bulgaria, India and Kuwait.  The one from China is Fred Hu of UBS, a co-director of the Chinese National Center of Economic Research and a member of the CFR’s advisory board.  He’s a top executive in Ant Group and Yum Brands and has a PhD from Harvard in economics.  This time Phillips has a special section on China, which was really missing from his book Giants.  There is still no data on who owns private Chinese companies other than the Titans, but evidently they are not connected to these 10 firms.  Some data may be hidden, especially in tax havens or in private Chinese records.

Phillips notes that China has taken 800 million out of extreme poverty and created a sizeable ‘middle’ class, though 600 million still live on $150 a month or $5 a day.  Life expectancy in China is 2 years higher than the U.S., at 78.1 years.  Human rights is still problematic in China according to him. China is second in the world in billionaires, with 562, including Hong Kong and Macau.  Phillips quotes the 2014 China Daily as saying “China will allow all forms of capital to equally compete in the financial markets through ease of market access.”  This quote shows the CCP presides over a mixed economy of a social-democratic type, using state-directed and dominated development.  Xi Jinping spoke at Davos in 2017 and 2022, urging sustainability and advocating the avoidance of the weaponization of issues, U.S./Euro unilateralism and protectionism. The latter three are openly advocated by both capitalist Parties in the U.S. 

Due to the size of the Chinese economy and its leading role in BRICS, an up-and-coming capitalist bloc, it is possible that in the future the yuan will compete with the dollar for convertibility.  Related to China, Taiwan’s chip firm TSMC has significant investments from the Titans.  The Titans are also heavily invested in top Chinese firms, at $1.3T – Tencent, China State Engineering, Sinopec, PetroChina, State Grid, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Chinese Life Asset, Ag Bank of China, China Construction Bank, China United Network Comm. Grp, Alibaba, Baidu and China State Railway Grp.  24 Chinese corporate and government representatives attended Davos, showing its partial integration in the capitalist world order.  

Russian petro-state.

Russia is a regional extractive power based on minerals, oil and natural gas. Phillips calls it “a shell of its former self” when it was the USSR. In 2022 the Russian GDP was $2.4T, while the USSR had $2.66T in 1990. The U.S. GDP was $25.4T in 2022, 10 times larger.  The USSR endowed Russia with the most nukes in the world however. Titan investments in Russian firms were significant until the 2014 coup and the Ukraine war and invasion.  They owned stakes in VTB Bank, VEB investment firm, Gazprom, Sberbank, Rosneft, among others.  Blackrock and Vanguard stopped doing business with Russia, as did the NYSE.  However most ‘western’ capitalist entities are still in Russia – 32% left from the U.S., 10.6% from the U.K., 7.8% from Germany and less than 5% from other countries.  So the 'western' capitalists are still largely backing the Russian economy.  Philips notes that the government's goal for the ongoing Ukrainian war is to bleed and weaken Russia.  The Titans are planning to rebuild Ukraine as disaster capitalists might – of course if there is a Ukraine left, and it is not partially or totally controlled by the Russian military, or so destroyed as to be impossible to rebuild.  Some investments are pouring into western Ukraine by Nestle, the World Bank and Tattarang, an Australian investment firm.

Solutions?

Phillips’ three sociology questions are:  1. “How much do the wealthy dominate political decisions?”  2. “Who are these powerful people?” 3. “How does influence and domination work?”  These 117 enrich about 40 million millionaires and billionaires in the world, who are their real base, out of a population of 8.2 billion people.  They work in 133 companies, in interlocking directorates.  Their profit needs dominate U.S., EU and international governmental policies. Many of their investments are negative as to the health of the world population. They are heavily invested in the U.S. DOD’s “All Domain Command & Control System,” especially through Silicon Valley. I’m not sure he answers all these questions, but the answers can be inferred. 

So the world is not run by Jews, George Soros, the Vatican, Communists, aliens, child abusers, devils or 'the deep state.'  Phillips, as a supporter of Veterans for Peace, has a somewhat vague response to this shit-show.  He mentions degrowth and asks the Titans to ‘share the wealth’ and end their mismanagement of funds. He also wants to create a democratic opposition to global imperialism, which he sees as a manifestation of concentrated wealth. What that means is left unsaid. 

Prior blogspot reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “Giants” (Phillips); “The Global Police State,” “Secret History of the American Empire” (Perkins); “Ministry for the Future” (Robinson); “The New Power Elite,” “Levers of Power,” “Winners Take All” (Giridharadas); “Trade Wars are Class Wars,” “Time for Socialism” and “Capital in the 21^st Century” (Piketty); “How Will Capitalism End?” “The Great Financial Crisis” (JB Foster, Magdoff); “New Cold War on China.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / October 30, 2024