Debt Slaves - As Described By A Twelve Year Old

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Wed, 16 May 2012 19:16:44 -0600

Dr Michio Kaku - Fukushima and the Future

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 14 May 2012 20:41:18 -0600

Syria - The Real Truth

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 23:33:13 -0600

All Canadian media outlets are reporting right now that Syrian troops are killing civilians in Homs. Welcome to 2012 where fiction is peddled as fact, where the tail wags the dog and make-up muppets present the news. Orwellian yes, suprising, no.

Oh Canada! Proud member of the legion of nations controlled by uber-wealthy warmongering kleptocrats.

"I Am Fishead" Are Corporate Leaders Egotistical Psychopaths ?

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 23:45:52 -0700

The Big Fix

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 21:05:01 -0700

The Economics Of Happiness

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 19:01:13 -0700

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Legalized Piracy

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 18:55:26 -0700

The Culture Of Corruption

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 22:06:56 -0700

BP Oil Disaster NOT OVER! THE BIG FIX

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:29:47 -0700

The Capitalist Network That Runs The World

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 12:11:42 -0600

One Ring To Rule Them All.

The Core Sorcery: Centralized Control of Fiat Money + Interest.

Source: The New Scientist - October 24, 2011

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning "Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power…" was misattributed.
The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA
5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co
7. Legal & General Group plc
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance
41. ING Groep NV
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan
45. Vereniging Aegon
46. BNP Paribas
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc
48. Resona Holdings Inc
49. Capital Group International Inc
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

Libya - The Real Reason

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:58:33 -0600

Occupy Wall Street Our One Demand

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 22:38:35 -0600

Robyn O'Brien - The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 01:42:26 -0600

America Gone Rogue: Lawrence Wilkerson, Former Chief Of Staff To US Secretary of State Colin Powell

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 12:34:17 -0600

The final coup was completed in 2001, what had preceded it in 1963, 1913 and various dates of import in the nineteenth century were aims at total control of the most militarized and economically powerful country in the world. That is what Bush's famous 'Mission Completed' on board an American aircraft carrier meant, it was the completion of an age long agenda. Now only a face like a mask remains, where presidents, surrounded and ruled by psycho-phant oracles inevitably fall to those most base desires any person of power and isolation must feel, the lures of global prestige and visions of personal grandeur. Under the War Powers Act presidents move with relative impunity, therefor what president would abrogate such power, and what set of handlers would ever allow that to happen? In 2001 the military stood down, there was a final and sweeping coup and the military stood down, and has never risen since, except to do the bidding of the criminally insane war hawks and their global paymasters who profit from death and destruction.

Good men leave, only to be replaced with those of compliance, this process will go on until the eventual cataclysm, which will indeed come. I can almost hear the train over the horizon right now.

Excellent Analysis Of The Situation In Libya

nospam@example.com (Harvest Dream) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 22:05:50 -0600

- Corporate Power