Censored 2014 (46 page)

We think that the world needs to know who comprises the TCC and thus who makes the financial decisions regarding global capital.

This is actually a fairly straightforward—if labor-intensive—research effort: most of the information is not only public but also online. We started with the top ten most centralized companies from the previously cited 2011 Swiss study.
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This identified the world's most centralized and interconnected financial organizations. We also wanted to consider those groups managing the largest volumes of financial capital, so we added the top asset management firms from 2012 to our data set.
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The following chart shows the rankings in trillions of dollars of assets managed for the top thirty-five asset management firms in the world.

TABLE 1: THE WORLD'S TOP 35 ASSET MANAGEMENT FIRMS, IN TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS (2012)

Seven of the top ten asset management firms were in the top ten of the most centralized firms from the Swiss study. We decided to identify the people on the boards of directors of the top ten asset management firms and the top ten most centralized corporations. With overlaps there is a total of thirteen firms in our study: Barclays PLC, BlackRock Inc., Capital Group Companies Inc., FMR Corporation: Fidelity Worldwide Investment, AXA Group, State Street Corporation, JPMorgan Chase & Co., Legal & General Group PLC (LGIMA), Vanguard Group Inc., UBS AG, Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Credit Suisse Group AG, and Allianz SE (Owners of PIMCO) PIMCO-Pacific Investment Management Co. The boards of directors of these firms, totaling 161 individuals, represent the financial core of the world's transnational capitalist class (for more details see Appendix). Collectively, they manage $23.91 trillion in funds and operate in nearly every country in the world. The $23.91 trillion does not include the equity balances—which number in the billions of dollars—that each of these firms holds in company assets. Nor does it include the $18.8 trillion controlled by the next twenty-five most valuable asset management firms.

The bank Barclays, the most wealth-centralized corporation in the world, sold its global asset management division to BlackRock in 2009. The result is that Blackrock is now the single largest asset management firm, though Barclays remains one of the most wealth-centralized firms with company assets of $2.42 trillion.
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UNDERSTANDING THE FINANCIAL CORE OF THE
TRANSNATIONAL CAPITALIST CLASS

The 161 directors of the thirteen mostly centralized/largest asset management firms represent the central core of international capital. As such, these 161 people share a common goal of maximum return on investments for their clients and will seek to achieve returns sometimes by any means necessary—legal or not.

Authorities have deemed the largest banks “too big to fail,” and have responded to the banks' criminal activities with weak reforms and no prosecutions.
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The American government has refused to prosecute any officials from the multitude of banks who have laundered billions of dollars for illegal drug cartels. Powerful banking corporations, such as JPMorgan Chase, have continually refused to comply with American anti-money laundering (AML) laws.
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This refusal to prosecute is often hailed as an honorable move that serves to protect all individuals from devastation. Thus, Assistant Attorney General Lanny A. Breuer explained the refusal to prosecute the bank HSBC:

Not only are these powerful corporations considered “too big to fail,” they appear to have become too big to tell apart. Traditionally, banks have been understood as separate entities, competing against one another in order to entice consumers to deposit funds and invest. Such competition theoretically forces banks to compete to offer the best rates. However, in reality, these banks found that competing against one another was less profitable than working together. Real
izing that their interests lie side by side, the financial core of the TCC have been highly motivated to join forces—legally or not—to manipulate laws, policies, and governments to their advantage.

The ramifications of the lack of competition in the banking industry are devastating. Consider, for example, price-fixing scandals such as Libor or ISDAfix. JPMorgan Chase, UBS, and Barclays (among thirteen others) were implicated in the Libor scandal, falsifying the data that was used to create benchmark rates.
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Based on faked data, those rates affected the prices of everything from auto, home, and student loans to credit cards to mortgage and commercial loans, and even the price of currencies themselves. The Financial Services Authority in the United Kingdom fined Barclays $450 million, and several other banks are still under investigation.
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The ISDAfix scandal looks a lot like the Libor case. The same superpower banks are currently under investigation to determine whether or not they manipulated ISDAfix, a benchmark number used to calculate the prices of global interest rate swaps.
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Because cities and sovereign governments use interest rate swaps to help manage their debts, manipulation of those rates has far-reaching impacts, particularly for the poor and working classes, as economic safety nets are subject to “austerity” measures—i.e., budget cuts—that favor protection of financial capital.

Not only were rates illegally fixed and data falsified, but the offending banks also used individual consumers' investments to engage in criminal activity. The Vanguard Group was accused of investing its clients' money into illegal offshore gambling sites, prompting a class-action lawsuit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Vanguard did not deny such wrongdoing, but a judge determined that when the plaintiffs (Vanguard's clients) were harmed, they lost their money due to the government's crackdown on such illegal gambling, rather than due to Vanguard's investing in such sites.
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However, it is clear that if Vanguard had not invested client money in illegal ventures, there would have been no negative re-percussions from such a government crackdown. As journalist Matt Taibbi declared, “Everything is rigged.”
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Indeed it seems that the superpower corporate elite will never be made to pay for their crimes against consumers—we have yet to see such a prosecution.

Vanguard Group and BlackRock are major investors in Sturm, Ruger & Co., a leading firearms manufacturer.
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Though there is nothing illegal about such investments, we can wonder about the consequences of such a pairing. With the expansion of private police and military companies, the power elite are investing in the violent means with which to maintain and further their power.

With money comes power, influence, and propaganda. BlackRock and numerous other banks and Wall Street institutions are financially backing groups like Parent Revolution and StudentsFirst, whose agendas are to privatize and subsequently corporatize the public school system.
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The transnational capitalist class is laying the foundation for the privatization of the world. If public, democratic institutions—including schools, post offices, universities, the military, and even churches—become privately owned entities, then corporate interests will truly dominate. Then, we become neo-feudal societies where the reign of kings is replaced by private corporate ownership and the people serve as peasants.

We do not claim that any single person identified in this study, as one of the 161 individuals at the financial core of the TCC, has done anything illegal. We only point out that the institutional, structural arrangements within the money management systems of global capital relentlessly seek ways to achieve maximum return on investment, and that the conditions for manipulations—legal or not—always hold. As these institutions become “too big to fail,” their scope and interconnections pressure government regulators to shy away from criminal investigations, much less prosecutions. The result is a semi-protected class of people with increasingly vast amounts of money, seeking unlimited growth and returns, with little concern for consequences of their economic pursuits on other people, societies, cultures, and environments.

Estimates are that the total world's wealth is close to $200 trillion, with the US and Europe holding approximately 63 percent of that total; meanwhile, the poorest half of the global population together possesses less than 2 percent of global wealth.
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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.
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Thirty-five thousand people, mostly young children, die
every day from starvation.
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So while millions suffer, the TCC financial elites seek returns that speculate on the rising cost of food, and they do this in cooperation with each other in a global system of TCC power and control.

Who are the financial core of the transnational corporate class? As indicated above, the financial core of the TCC are directors of banks and asset management firms. The 161 directors who manage the top thirteen firms have very similar backgrounds and training. (See Appendix for names and affiliations. The full, detailed list is online at:
http://projectcensored.org/financial-core-of-the-transnational-corporate-class/
).

FINANCIAL CORE OF THE TRANSNATIONAL
CORPORATE CLASS

One hundred thirty-six of the 161 core members (84 percent) are male. Eighty-eight percent are whites of European descent (just nineteen are people of color). Fifty-two percent hold graduate degrees—including thirty-seven MBAs, fourteen JDs, twenty-one PhDs, and twelve MA/MS degrees.

Almost all have attended private colleges, with close to half attending the same ten universities: Harvard University (25), Oxford University (11), Stanford University (8), Cambridge University (8), University of Chicago (8), University of Cologne (6), Columbia University (5), Cornell University (4), the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania (3), and University of California–Berkeley (3), which is a public institution. Forty-nine are or were CEOs, eight are or were CFOs; six had prior experience at Morgan Stanley, six at Goldman Sachs, four at Lehman Brothers, four at Swiss Re, seven at Barclays, four at Salomon Brothers, and four at Merrill Lynch.

People from twenty-two nations make up the central financial core of the TCC. Seventy-three (45 percent) are from the US; twenty-seven (16 percent) Britain; fourteen France; twelve Germany; eleven Switzerland; four Singapore; three each from Austria, Belgium, and India; two each from Australia and South Africa; and one each from Brazil, Vietnam, Hong Kong/China, Qatar, the Netherlands, Zambia, Taiwan, Kuwait, Mexico, and Colombia. They live in or near a number of the world's great cities: New York, Chicago, London, Paris, and Munich.
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