An estimated 6,000 "SUPERCLASS" world figures, not politicians
necessarily, are really in charge of every significant aspect of your
life.
Oh, the "privilege" of voting for Obama or Hillary or McCain might
satisfy your sense of "making a difference" this year. But in
reality, you might just as well not vote, for all the good it might
not do you.
You see, the powers that REALLY be are intentionally positioned well
outside your vote's ability to influence the elite people that install
the strings, cock the triggers, set the arrows, and open bombay doors
that
make things happen worldwide.
But go ahead. Visit the polls. Pull the lever. Feel happy.
Empowered. But don't attach too much importance to your actions or
the results. Not worth the ... stress.
-----------------------------------------
"They're Global Citizens. They're Hugely Rich. And They Pull the
Strings."
By David Rothkopf
Sunday, May 4, 2008; B01
We didn't elect them. We can't throw them out. And they're getting
more powerful every day.
Call them the superclass.
At the moment, Americans are fixated on the political campaign. In the
meantime, many are missing a reality of the global era that may matter
much more than their presidential choice: On an ever-growing list of
issues, the big decisions are being made or profoundly influenced by a
little-understood international network of business, financial,
government, cultural and military leaders who are beyond the reach of
American voters.
In addition to top officials, these people include corporate
executives, leading investors, top bankers, media moguls, heads of
state, generals, religious leaders, heads of terrorist and criminal
organizations and a handful of important cultural and scientific
figures. Each of these roughly 6,000 individuals is set apart by their
power and ability to regularly influence millions of lives across
international borders. The group is not monolithic, but none is more
globalized or has more influence over the direction in which the
global era is heading.
Doubt it? Just look at the current financial crisis. As government
regulators have sought to head off further market losses, they've
found that perhaps the most effective tool at their disposal is what
the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank described to me as
their "convening power" -- their ability to get the big boys of Wall
Street and world financial capitals into a room or on a conference
call to collaborate on solving a problem. This has, in fact, become a
central part of crisis management, both because national governments
have limited regulatory authority over global markets and because
financial flows have become so large that the real power lies with the
biggest players -- such as the top 50 financial institutions that
control almost $50 trillion in assets, by one measure nearly a third
of all assets worldwide.
Most major companies are both bigger and more global today, which
effectively makes them able to pick and choose among various
governments' regulatory regimes or investment incentive programs. They
play officials in country X against those in country Y, gaining
leverage that makes the old rules of trade obsolete. The world's
biggest corporations, such as Exxon or Wal-Mart, have annual sales
(and thus financial resources) that rival the gross domestic product
of all but the 20 or so wealthiest nations. The top 250 companies in
the world have sales equal to about a third of global GDP (these are
very different measures, but they give a rough sense of relative
size).
Major media organizations such as Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., which
is effectively controlled by a single individual, touch far more
people each day than any national government can. Just a few weeks
ago, Italian media billionaire Silvio Berlusconi once again used his
extraordinary resources to win election as prime minister, which will
give him a seat at G-8 summits and other global conclaves. Even global
terrorist organizations such as al-Qaeda or Hezbollah have both the
ability, through their international networks, and the will to project
force more effectively on an international level than all but a
handful of governments.
The people who run these big international organizations can have much
more power over key aspects of your daily life and over global trends
than most officials in Washington are likely to have, except in the
most extreme circumstances. They can affect investments and job
creation, shape culture and influence lawmakers. The Federal Reserve
Bank has played a critical role in the financial crisis, but it
couldn't have intervened successfully without a financial leader like
Jamie Dimon, chief executive of J.P. Morgan Chase, which stepped in to
purchase the failing investment bank Bear Stearns.
The rise of the global superclass signals the latest evolution in the
age-old tale of the few who corner the market on power. There have
always been elites. But this contemporary group is very different from
those that preceded it. Study these 6,000 or so individuals, and
you'll find that unlike past aristocrats who inherited their wealth,
many -- Bill Gates, for instance, or Warren Buffett -- have built
their fortunes over their lifetimes. Many more come from the worlds of
business, finance and media than in the past.
What's more, many acknowledge that they increasingly have more in
common with fellow members of the global elite than they do with the
people of their own nations. Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, for
instance, may be governor of a Siberian province, but he also manages
to live large in London, where he owns a famous English soccer club.
Even though he has donated millions to help his province, he spends
considerably more time with global business partners or his posh
neighbors in Britain than he does with his constituents back home.
At the same time, political and military elites are fading in relative
influence -- the former bound by geography, the latter by the
extraordinarily high cost of modern warfare. The regional composition
of the group is changing as well, as transatlantic elites who today
make up about 60 percent of the class gradually give way to a rising
cadre of Asian leaders, such as the 100 Chinese billionaires estimated
to have emerged in the last couple of years.
In a world with only two kinds of international institutions -- weak
and dysfunctional -- the members of this superclass are filling a
power vacuum when it comes to influencing decisions about
transnational issues such as financial-market regulation or climate
change. (Many countries voted for the Kyoto accords on global warming,
but it took just Exxon and a handful of other oil companies to
successfully lobby the White House to opt out and undercut the entire
initiative.) In so doing, they raise real questions about the future
of global governance. Will the global era be more democratic or less
so? Will inequality continue to grow, as it has for the past three
decades of this group's rise, or recede? Will the few dominate because
the government mechanisms that traditionally represent the views of
the many are so underdeveloped on a global scale?
Once again, the meltdown in global financial markets brings this
aspect of the story into focus. For years, financial elites have
argued that markets should self-regulate even as instruments grew more
complex and risks more opaque. Then, when a crisis came, they used
their influence to get top government officials to come in and help
cauterize their self-inflicted wounds, warning of a "systemic
failure." But critics are already correctly charging that new
regulations to rein in global markets are largely protecting the
interests of the richest.
One distinguishing characteristic of the superclass is the
concentration of extreme wealth in the hands of so few. Inequality has
always existed in the world, but the international trend toward leave-
it-to-the-market policies of the past 25 years has resulted both in
great growth worldwide (what superclass member Martha Stewart might
call "a good thing") and in growing inequality (not so much, as
superclass member Jon Stewart might say). Today, the world's more than
1,100 billionaires have a net worth that's roughly double that of the
bottom 2.5 billion people on the planet. The richest 10 percent of
adults worldwide own 85 percent of global wealth, while the poorest
half only barely one percent. The world's almost 10 million
millionaires have seen their wealth double to nearly $37 trillion over
the past 10 years.
Growth is taking place, but it is disproportionately benefiting the
few. And there's a sense that the issue of class conflict, confined
not too long ago to the ash heap by our (premature) celebration of the
"end of history" after communism's fall, remains with us.
A backlash is inevitable. Are these elites especially talented? Hard-
working? Lucky? Some are all of these things. But conspiracy theories
don't hold water in a group whose members are so diverse and self-
interested. Still, when their self-interests align to cause them to
act together, they can be hard to resist. They often get their way --
and thus often get much more than the rest of us. And that leads to
angry reaction. "When a CEO is making more in 10 minutes than an
ordinary worker's making in an entire year . . . something is wrong,
something has to change," Sen. Barack Obama declares on the stump.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton chimes in that "it is wrong that somebody
who makes $50 million a year on Wall Street pays a lower tax rate than
somebody who makes $50,000 a year."
The next U.S. president will still be the most powerful person in the
world because of his or her control of the nation's unparalleled
military might and influence over our economic and political
resources. But that influence is on the wane, for a number of reasons:
the relative decline in the power of national governments; the
relative rise in the power of others in the world's fastest-growing
places; U.S. trade and fiscal deficits; and a third, geopolitical
deficit arising from both damaged national prestige and what might be
characterized either as Iraq fatigue or as having learned from the
mistakes of the past several years.
None of this makes the decision that U.S. voters will make in November
less important. Government still offers the average citizen the best
means of counterbalancing the superclass or redressing growing
inequality. And governments will have to play a key role in shaping
the new regulatory frameworks and governance mechanisms that will be
essential to a more balanced distribution of power in the global era.
But what it does mean is that "change" isn't just a slogan in this
year's campaign. It's a reality that will redefine the landscape of
power worldwide for U.S. presidents of the future.
drothkopf@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, is the author of "Superclass: The Global Power
Elite and the World They Are Making."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/contenbt/article/2008/05/02/AR2008050203311.html
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