Censored 2014 (47 page)

Members of the financial core take active parts in global policy groups and government. Five of the thirteen corporations have directors as advisors or former employees of the IMF. Six of the thirteen firms have directors who have worked at or served as advisors to the World Bank. Five of the thirteen firms hold corporate membership in the Council on Foreign Relations in the US. Seven of the firms sent nineteen directors to attend the World Economic Forum in February 2013. Seven of the directors have served or currently serve on a Federal Reserve board, both regionally and nationally in the US. Six of the financial core serve on the Business Roundtable in the US. Several directors have had direct experience with the financial ministries of European Union countries, the G8, and the G20. Almost all of the 161 individuals serve in some advisory capacity for various regulatory organizations, finance ministries, universities, and national or international policy-planning bodies.

These 161 directors are part of Rothkopf's superclass. Given their control over $23.91 trillion, Western governments and international policy bodies serve the interests of this financial core of the TCC. Wars are initiated to protect their interests, and to promote the free flow of global capital for investment anywhere that returns are possible. Identifying the people with such power and influence is an important part of any democratic movement seeking to protect our commons so that all humans might share and prosper.
³⁷

APPENDIX

FINANCIAL CORE OF THE TRANSNATIONAL CAPITALIST CLASS (2013)

BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Barclays PLC (assets $2.4 trillion)

Antony Peter Jenkins, Sir David Alan Walker, Frits van Paasschen, Michael Ashley, Hugh E. “Skip” McGee III JD, Tim Breedon, Fulvio Conti, Ashok Vaswani Brysam, Diane de Saint Victor, Shaygan Kheradpir, David George Booth, Simon John Fraser, Reuben Jeffery III, JD, Dambisa Moyo, Sir Michael Rake, Sir John Sunderland, Maria Ramos

BlackRock Inc. (corp. assets $22.3 billion; assets in management: $3.7 trillion)

Laurence Fink, Robert S. Kapito, James Rohr, Hsueh-Ming Wang, Murry S. Gerber, Thomas H. O'Brien, Jr, Sir Deryck Charles Maughan, David Komansky, James Grosfeld, William S. Demchak, Susan Lynn Wagner, Dennis D. Dammerman, Mathis Cabiallavetta, Abdlatif Al-Hamad, John Silvester Varley, Ivan Seidenberg, Thomas Montag, Marco

Antonio Slim Domit, Fabrizio Freda, Jessica P. Einhorn,

Capital Group Companies Inc. Assets Management: $1.07 Trillion

David Isador Fisher, Martin E. Diaz Plata, Ashley Dunster, Koenraad Foulon, Shaw B. Wagener, Leonard L. Kim, Guilherme Lins, Lam Nguyen-Phuong,

FMR Corporation: Fidelity Worldwide Investment (Family Controlled) Assets Management: $1.7 Trillion

Edward Crosby Johnson III, Abigail Pierrepont Johnson, Ned C. Lautenbach,

AXA (Assets Management: $1.4 Trillion)

Claude Bébéar, Henri de Castries, Norbert Dentressangle, Jean-Pierre Clamadieu, Denis Duverne, Jean-Martin Folz, Anthony Hamilton, Isabelle Kocher, Suet Fern Lee, Stefan Lippe, François Martineau, Deanna Oppenheimer, Ramon de Oliveira, Michel Pébereau, Dominique Reiniche, Marcus Schenck

State Street Corporation (Assets management: $1.9 trillion)

Joseph (Jay) L. Hooley, Kennett F. Burnes, Peter Coym, Patrick de Saint-Aignan, Dame Amelia C. Fawcett, David P. Gruber, Linda A. Hill, Robert S. Kaplan, Richard P. Sergel. Ronald L. Skates, Gregory L. Summe, Robert E. Weissman,

J. P. Morgan Chase & Co. (Assets management: $1.34 Trillion)

James A. Bell, Crandall C. Bowles, Stephen B. Burke, David M. Cote, James S. Crown, James Dimon, Timothy P. Flynn, Ellen V. Futter, Laban P. Jackson, Jr., Lee R. Raymond William C. Weldon,

Legal & General Group PLC (LGIMA) (Assets management: $598 Billion)

John Morrison Stewart, Nigel Wilson, Mark Zinkula, Mark Gregory, John Pollock, Henry Staunton, Mike Fairey, Rudy Markham, Stuart Popham, Nick Prettejohn, Julia S. Wilson, Lindsay Tomlinson

Vanguard Group Inc. (Assets management: $2.1 Trillion)

F. William McNabb III, Emerson U. Fullwood, Rajiv L. Gupta, Amy Gutmann, JoAnn Heffernan-Heisen, F. Joseph Loughrey, Mark Loughridge, Scott C. Malpass, André F. Perold, Alfred M. Rankin, Jr., Peter F. Volanakis,

UBS AG (Assets management: $2.3 Trillion)

Axel A. Weber, Michel Demaré, David Sidwell, Rainer-Marc Frey, Ann F. Godbehere, Axel P. Lehmann, Wolfgang Mayrhuber, Helmut, William G. Parrett, Isabelle Romy Beatrice Weder de Mauro, Joseph Yam Chi-kwong, Luzius Cameron, Sergio P. Ermotti,

Bank of America/Merrill Lynch (Assets management: $2.3 trillion)

Charles O. Holliday, Jr., Susan S. Bies, Frank P. Bramble, Sr, Arnold W. Donald, Charles K. Gifford, Monica C. Lozano, Thomas J. May, Brian T. Moynihan, Lionel L. Nowell, Sharon Allen, Jack Bovender, Linda Parker Hudson, David Yost,

Credit Suisse Group AG (Assets management: $1.8 Trillion)

Urs Rohner, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Jassim Bin Hamad, J.J. Al Thani, Iris Bohnet, Noreen Doyle, Jean-Daniel Gerber, Walter B. Kielholz, Andreas N. Koopmann, Jean Lanier,

Kai S. Nargolwala, Anton van Rossum, Richard E. Thornburgh, John Tiner,

Allianz SE (Owners of PIMCO) (Assets Management; $ 2.3 Trillion) and PIMCO-Pacific Investment Management Co. (Assets Management; $1.8 Trillion)

Michael Diekmann, Oliver Bäte, Manuel Bauer, Gary C. Bhojwani, Clement B. Booth, Dr. Helga Jung, Christof Mascher, Jay Ralph, Dieter Wemmer, Werner Zedelius, Maximilian Zimmerer

PETER PHILLIPS
is professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and president of Media Freedom Foundation/Project Censored.

BRADY OSBORNE
is a senior level research associate at Sonoma State University.

Sonoma State University's KIMBERLY SOEIRO, KATELYN CLATTY, and GARRETT LYONS provided research assistance with this study. Portions of the literature review in this chapter were previously published in earlier Censored yearbooks.

Notes

^1.
See G. William Domhoff, Who
Rules America?,
5th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2006), and Peter Phillips, “A Relative Advantage: Sociology of the San Francisco Bohemian Club,” 1994,
http://library.sonoma.edu/regional/faculty/phillips/bohemianindex.php
.

^2.
Early studies by Charles Beard, published as
An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States
(1913), established that economic elites formulated the US Constitution to serve their own special interests. Henry Klein, in a 1921 book entitled
Dynastic America and Those Who Own It,
argued that wealth in America had power never before known in the world and was centered in the top 2 percent of the population, which owned some 60 percent of the country. In 1937, Ferdinand Lundberg published
America's Sixty Families,
which documented intermarrying, self-perpetuating families, for whom wealth was the “indispensable handmaiden of government.” In 1945, C. Wright Mills determined that nine out of ten business elites from 1750 to 1879 came from well-to-do families (“American Business Elites,”
Journal of Economic History,
December 1945).

^3.
See Robert A. Brady,
Business as a System of Power
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1943); and Val Burris, “Elite Policy Planning Networks in the United States,”
Research in Politics and Society,
4th ed. Gwen Moore and J. Allen Whitt (Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1992), 111–134,
http://pages.uoregon.edu/vburris/policy.pdf
.

^4.
C. Wright Mills,
The Power Elite
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1956).

^5.
See Michael Soref, “Social Class and Division of Labor within the Corporate Elite,”
Sociological Quarterly
17 (1976); and two works by Michael Useem: “The Social Organization of the American Business Elite and Participation of Corporation Directors in the Governance of American Institutions,”
American Sociological Review
44 (1979), and
The Inner Circle
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).

^6.
Thomas Koenig and Robert Gogel, “Interlocking Corporate Directorships as a Social Network,”
American Journal of Economics and Sociology
40, no. 1 (1981); and Peter Phillips, “The 1934–35 Red Threat and the Passage of the National Labor Relations Act,”
Critical Sociology
20, no. 2 (1994).

^7.
For a discussion of principals inside the HCPE who pursue US military domination of the world as their key agenda, see Peter Phillips, Bridget Thornton, and Celeste Vogler, “The Global Dominance Group: 9/11 Pre-Warnings & Election Irregularities in Context,”
http://www.projectcensored.org/top-stories/articles/the-global-dominance-group
.

^8.
Leslie Sklair,
The Transnational Capitalist Class
(Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2001).

^9.
Leslie Sklair, “The Transnational Capitalist Class and the Discourse of Globalization,”
Cambridge Review of International Affairs
14, no. 1, (2000), 67–85,
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/globalDimensions/globalisation/theTransnationalCapitalistClassAndTheDiscourseOfGlobalization
.

^10.
William I. Robinson,
A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World
(Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004).

^11.
Ibid., 155–156.

^12.
David Rothkopf,
SuperClass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008).

^13.
Peter Dale Scott,
American War Machine, Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010). See also
Censored
story #22, “Wachovia Bank Laundered Money for Latin American Drug Cartels,”
Censored 2013: Dispatches from the Media Revolution,
Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth with Project Censored (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 66–68.

^14.
David Rothkopf, Superclass, Public Address:
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
April 9, 2008.

^15.
“Defense Against Terrorism Programme of Work (DATPOW),” North Atlantic Treaty Organization, September 24, 2012,
http://www.nato.int/cps/en/SID-EBFFE857-66071109D/natilive/topics_50313.htm?selectedLocale-en
.

^16.
Nazemroaya, Mahdi Darius,
The Globalization of NATO
(Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2012).

^17.
William K. Carroll,
The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the 21st Century
(London and New York: Zed Books, 2010).

^18.
Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, “The Network of Global Corporate Control,”
PLoS ONE,
October 26, 2011,
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.113711%2Fjournal.phone.0025995
. See also
Censored
story #6, “Small Network of Corporations Run the Global Economy,”
Censored 2012,
69–70.

^19.
More details on this University of Zurich study, and the list of the top twenty-five of the 147 super-connected companies, is printed in full in Mickey Huff and Andy Roth with Project Censored,
Censored 2013,
247–248.

^20.
Vitali, et al., “Network of Global Corporate Control.”

^21.
“The Top Asset Management Firms 2012, Banks around the World,” June 30, 2012,
http://www.relbanks.com/rankings/largest-asset-managers
.

^22.
“Barclays Total Assets: 2.426T for Dec. 31, 2012,”
http://ycharts.com/companies/BCS/assets
.

^23.
See the Censored News Cluster, “Iceland, the Power of Peaceful Revolution, and the Commons,” in this volume, for coverage of Iceland as a notable exception to the international trend of banks not being held accountable for systemic misconduct.

^24.
Dylan Murphy, “Money Laundering and The Drug Trade: The Role of the Banks,” Global Research, May 7, 2013,
http://www.globalresearch.ca/money-laundering-and-the-drug-trade-the-role-of-the-banks/5334205
. See also Scott,
American War Machine.

^25.
Ibid.

^26.
Kylie MacLellan and Matthew Tostevin, “Factbox: Banks drawn into Libor rate-fixing scandal,” Reuters, July 11, 2012,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/111/us-banking-libor-panel-idUSBRE86A0P020120711
.

^27.
“Barclays Fined for Attempts to Manipulate Libor Rates,” BBC News, June 27, 2012,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/buisness-18612779
.

^28.
Matthew Leising, Lindsay Fortado and Jim Brunsden, “Meet ISDAfix, the Libor Scandal's Sequel,” April 18, 2013,
Bloomberg Businessweek,
http://businessweek.com/articles/2013-04-118/meet-isdafix-the-libor-scandes-sequel
.

^29.
Dan Margolies and Ross Kerber, “Vanguard Sued again for ‘Illegal Gambling' Investments,” Reuters, April 8, 2010,
http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/04/08/vanguard-lawsuit-idUSN0818833420100048
.

^30.
Matt Taibbi, “Everything is Rigged: The Biggest Price-Fixing Scandal Ever,”
Rolling Stone,
April 25, 2013,
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/everything-is-rigged-the-biggest-financial-scandal-yet-20130425
.

^31.
John Rudolf and Chris Kirkham, “Gunmaker Investments Under Review By California Teachers' Fund After Newton Massacre,”
Huffington Post Business,
December 18, 2012,
http://huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/118/gunmaker-investments-newton_n_2325323.html
.