Article in one Swedishstan's biggest newspaper about "Giants: The Global Power Elite" written Peter Phillips
Translated by sweanon for everyone to share
In his farewell speech 1961 President Eisenhower warned about the powerful "Military Industrial Complex", a sort of cartel within the defense industry and the military establishment. The same shady cartel had been described in Sociologist; C Wright Mills study "The Power Elite" a few years earlier.
The book "Giants: The global power elite", written by sociology professor and media critic Peter Phillips, can be said to be the sequel on the same theme. Reading on it says the warning's of the past have not been taken seriously enough. The military industrial complex has been allowed to grow into a global power elite with an almost absolute influence over our lives.
In the centre of Phillips Analysis is the worlds biggest companies and fund managers, among them is Black rock, Vanguard group, JP Morgan Chase. These "Giants" together administrate assets equivalent to five hundred thousand billion crowns(I believe it might be 50.000billion converted to dollars but who knows at this point how much money they control).
Handling these astronomical amounts of money makes it hard to find secure investments. That's why these "giants" commit their time to financial speculation of the sorts that led to the crash of 2008. Another relief-valve for the surplus capital is war and states/countries increasing defense budgets. A third secure card is the privatization of water rights to official businesses. These "giants" are rapidly buying up the world.
"The democratic structures will be undermined bit by bit and replaced with militarised policestates"
They are also massively invested in the companies who are responsible for the most Co2 and other greenhouse gases being emitted into our air. Therefore there is no random chance, says Phillips, that we are standing in front of a never before seen global crisis of inequality, violence, instability, pollution of the environment and mass extinctions.
The systems defense attorneys usually say that the middle class has never been bigger then it is today. Against that Phillips responds that 80% of humanity is below middle class and every day 30.000 people die of starvation and malnourishment. The wealth will never trickle down to the rest of humanity says Phillips.
The book lists large amounts of encyclopedia data which bit by bit makes the reading heavy. But therein lies the strength. For the first time, we get to know exactly who the Global Power Elite really are name by name(together 389 names in all) and how they operate and who they network with. We get to know who it is with backgrounds in the CIA, Pentagon, house of lords, USA's central bank, who has been the minister of France and who was awarded the British Imperial order.
How does the global elite actually succeed to rule the world? Peter Phillips puts them into four functions/groups:
- The Leaders(The managers) alludes to the barely 200 top directors who run the top "Giants" and handles thousands of billions of dollars and how they are invested. Most of them formed in private schools and elite universities. More than half of them come from the USA and the rest mostly from Great Britain and France.
They can work with democracies as well as dictatorships as long as the elite of that country allows the flow of capital to penetrate and hinder the local population to get in their way.
- Bureaucrat's (The facilitators) are the global policymakers. The book especially focuses on the two non-governmental elite organization's "Group of Thirty" and Trilateral Commission.
There the power elite meets without outside insight and make up the policy of the global capital.
Their recommendations are then implemented by intergovernmental organizations like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization, World Economic Forum and G20.
- The protectors(the protectors) is the USA's Military Imperium with over 800 military bases in over 70 countries and Nato which member states stands for 85% of the worlds military spending.
Nato is, according to the book transforming into a complementary police force who defends the interests of the elite around the world.
Think-tank Atlantic Council makes up the policy and alternative course of action for USA/NATO-Empire.
On its board is no less than the 146 global elite. Here are the financial "giants" represented by the biggest weapon industries, oil, and media companies. Here the representants of the global capital top names from Nato, Pentagon, and leading intelligence bureaus meet up - The Military Industrial Complex in a nutshell.
Atlantic Council has now gotten the mandate to supervise/surveil Facebook and Twitter to prevent disinformation.
Even though several members of its board were involved in disinformation campaigns that were the ground for the Invasion of Iraq.
- Ideological's. Last but not least is the global power elite's idealogical's. In the USA it has gone from 50 different media companies in the 80's down to only six giants that today control more than 90% of all newspapers, tv and radio stations and dominate the news in USA and big parts of the world.
These six giants get more than two-thirds of its information from what Phillips calls PRP (Public-Relations-Propaganda). PRP is in turn controlled by the three Giants Omnicom, WPP and Interpublic group.
Owner concentration have according to Phillips made it so the news is ideologically driven. The commercial media and PRP-firms are described as the Military Industrial Complex's propaganda tool.
They help demonize regimes who don't cooperate with the global elite.
WPP's Hill & Knowlton strategies delivered for example the fake story of babies in incubators in Kuwait when USA needed to turn the war tired population at home before the first gulf war.
Phillips thinks its wrong to call the big media houses mainstream. That term he wants to assign to the alternative media's instead which he would call the "mainstream of humanity".
"Giants: the power elite" describes a world where democracy's roads through the state, capital, media and pr, business and military is erased. The book makes me think about Mussolini's vision of a perfect society where "you can't put a cigarette paper between the state and big businesses". Phillips predicts that the democratic structures will be undermined bit by bit and get replaced by a police state.
And as a finish, the sociology professor and his research team at Sonoma State University write an open letter to the global elite and beg's them to do the changes that are needed for humanity's survival. The letter finishes with "Worry is spreading around the world. The environment can't handle more pollution and destruction. The trickle down must become a flood of resources to every child, family and all humans."
Very naive it seems. But maybe an open hand is a constructive way to finish a book that wants to understand the mechanisms behind the worlds increasing polarization.
But free from scrutiny it is not. Broad in parts and exaggeratedly black (hopefully) in its description of the mainstream-journalism. but and obligatory reading for the one that wants to study the power elite of the world. And unique research material for all who wants to dig more.