On May 4, 2:20=A0pm, Fellatia <lilhor...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 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. =A0But 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. =A0Visit the polls. =A0Pull the lever. =A0Feel happy.
> Empowered. =A0But don't attach too much importance to your actions or
> the results. =A0Not 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.
But, the only problem with that theory is the only world the idiots
are
making is a cloistered world for Rupert Murdoch. Since the only
people who
even the idiot US media system anymore is Fox News and Dan Rather.
>
> 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.
>
> drothk...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
> David 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/AR20...
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