Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world ………

http://www.newscientist.com

The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red, very connected companies are yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue (Image: PLoS One)

 

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

* Lehman still existed in the 2007 dataset used

Graphic: The 1318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy

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New Video From Inside the Citibank Incident w NYPD Arrests Occupy Wallstreet 10 15 2011 ( filed under : “The Land of the Free”)

Some Cops Furious NYPD Officer Flashed Peace Sign In Photo With Occupy Wall Street Protester ……..

http://gothamist.com

via photon frequency’s facebook

The above picture, featured on the Facebook profile of someone named “Photon Frequency”, is presented as an example of how police and protesters really can get along: “Much of the NYPD are really on our side. We need to stay away from negative media influence and stay supportive and respectful of their difficult job. Many of the officers I spoke to are supportive of this movement and gratefully acknowledged the peaceful efforts of the protesters.” However, don’t tell that to any of the cops over at Thee Rant police forum—they’re pretty darn annoyed at the cop for posing with these “miscreants.”

Thee Rant is the internet forum for retired and current members of the NYPD, and they seem to heartily disapprove of officers engaging with protesters in any manner other than from an authoritarian position. User 10 08 wrote, “there are only 2 types of reactions you give these people. #1 – NOTHING #2 – ARREST.” BNDB agrees in a long message:

Exactly right! When we do anything else other than the above, we undermine the mission we have as police officers to be proffesional and maintain a STRONG AUTHORITATIVE presence…Act professional at all times!
Dont show any signs of weakness, by doing that, we raise the threat level for all other officers!
Even if we agree with these trust-fund punks, as Police Officers, it is not our job to appease and empathise with them, it is our job to make sure we, and all other officers GO HOME SAFELY!
These punks we stand with, laugh with now, ten minutes later will be throwing their piss and shyte at us, calling us pigs and climbing the barriers to try to fight us…DON’T FORGET THAT!

These trust fund bytches are NOT OUR FRIENDS! They want to see us hurt, either physically or on the job. They want to see us indicted for doing our job. They want to see us lose our jobs, our means for support to our families, they want to see our lives ruined…THEY ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS!

If you really feel that strongly about them, that you empathize with them, then maybe you should think about resigning your position as a New York City Police Officer.

Not everyone is ready to damn the office-in-question: some hope-against-hope that maybe it’s all a big misunderstanding! User bxnarcorgr asks, “Could it be he was bored and in a moment of stupidity, he flashed the peace sign more out of sarcasm than out of sympathy for the cause?” Murray Da COP said, “Maybe the cop is putting in his order for coffee or something. Yea TWO sugars please!”

If this is their reaction to a little peace sign, we can’t wait to see what they think about the protester who allegedly was caught on camera defecating on a cop car.

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“Something Has Started”: Michael Moore on the Occupy Wall Street Protests That Could Spark a Movement …….

http://www.truth-out.org

Wednesday 28 September 2011

by: Amy Goodman, Democracy NOW!

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Video and org post here

Oscar-winning filmmaker, best-selling author,and provocateur laureate Michael Moore joins us for the hour. One of the world’s most acclaimed — and notorious — independent filmmakers and rabble-rousers, his documentary films include Roger and Me; Bowling for Columbine for which he won the Academy Award, Fahrenheit 9/11, SICKO; and Capitalism: A Love Story. In the first part of our interview, Moore talks about the growing “Occupy Wall Street” protests in Lower Manhattan, which he visited on Monday night. “This is literally an uprising of people who have had it,” Moore says. “It has already started to spread across the country in other cities. It will continue to spread. … It will be tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people … Their work ahead is not as difficult as other movements in the past … The majority of Americans are really upset at Wall Street … So you have already got an army of Americans who are just waiting for somebody to do something, and something has started.”

 

AMY GOODMAN: Today we spend the hour with one of the most famous independent filmmakers in the world, Michael Moore. For more than two decades, Michael’s been one of the most politically active, provocative and successful documentary filmmakers in the business. His films include Roger and me, Bowling for Columbine, for which he won the Academy Award, Fahrenheit 9/11, Sicko, and Capitalism: A Love Story.” Today, we speak with Michael Moore about his new book that just came out, it’s called, Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life. It comprises 20 vignettes from his life that illustrate how his political and sociological view points developed. As far back as 20 years ago, when Michael Moore made his award winning debut documentary, Roger and Me, he knew he was anything but an average child.

MICHAEL MOORE: I was kind of a strange child. My parents knew early on something must be wrong with me. I crawled backwards until I was years old, but I had Kennedy’s inaugural address memorized by the time I was six. It all began when my mother didn’t show up with my first birthday party because she was having my sister. My dad tried to cheer me up by letting me eat the whole cake. I knew then there had been warned to life than this.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Michael Moore in his award winning 1989 documentary, Roger & Me. Well, today he’s one of the world’s most acclaimed and notorious independant film-makers and rabble-rousers. On Monday night, Michael visited the Occupy Wall Street protest in lower Manhattan. Police have barred the protesters from using any form of public address system at the encampment, so the crowd amplified Michael’s comments by repeating them in unison.

MICHAEL MOORE: Whatever you do, don’t despair because this is the hard part. You are in the hard part right now.

CROWD: Whatever you do, don’t despair because this is the hard part. You are in the hard part right now.

MICHAEL MOORE: But, everyone will remember,

CROWD: But, everyone will remember,

MICHAEL MOORE: three months from now,

CROWD: three months from now,

MICHAEL MOORE: six months from now,

CROWD: six months from now,

MICHAEL MOORE: 100 years from now,

CROWD: 100 years from now,

MICHAEL MOORE: that you came down to this Plaza,

CROWD: that you came down to this Plaza,

MICHAEL MOORE: and you started this movement.

CROWD: and you started this movement.

AMY GOODMAN: That was Michael Moore addressing the Occupy Wall Street protesters in Lower Manhattan. Well, for the remainder of the hour, we’re delighted to have him here in studio and we won’t be repeating everything you say, Michael, although it is ingenious when you’re not allowed to use a microphone.

MICHAEL MOORE: It’s a little weird at first because it sounds either like your reciting the Rosary and church or that seen in, Life of Brian, where the whole crowd just repeats everything that Brian says. But, the reason they do it is because the police have not allowed them to have an amplification. So, in order for the people to hear in the back, everyone around you just shouts out what you just said so everybody can hear it. I thought it was, actually, kind of an interesting and a workable idea.

AMY GOODMAN: Well we’ve put out to the world that you’re coming in today. Of course, the questions came in on Facebook. We tweeted this and people can tweet back right now. But, when we posted the question on Facebook, “What you want to ask Michael Moore?”, Tausif Khan wrote, “What do you think is the next step the protesters need to take to get Washington and Wall Street to listen and to make real change?”

MICHAEL MOORE: They don’t need to worry about a next step. It’s already happening. This is something that has, sort of, sprung up. There’s no group, organized group, no dues-paying, members only organization behind this. This is literally an uprising of people who have had it. And It has already started to spread across the country in other cities. It will continue to spread. It has to start somewhere. It started here with a few hundred. It will grow, and really already has grown here to a few thousand. And will be tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of people because, what I was in them other night, the great thing about what they are doing, and great in the sense that their work ahead is not as difficult as other movements in the past; when the Women’s Liberation Movement began, when people began protesting against the Vietnam War, civil-rights movement. At the beginning of those movements, the majority of the country was not with them, did not believe the basic principles of any of those philosophies. That’s not true right now. The majority of Americans are really upset at Wall Street. Millions of Americans have lost their homes or are facing foreclosure right now. Fifty Million do not have health insurance. Fourteen Million officially are unemployed, and it’s probably well up into the 20 million-plus people that are actually unemployed. So you’ve already got an army of Americans who are just waiting for somebody to do something, and the something has started.

AMY GOODMAN: And it is so interesting, if you had 2000 people, as the first weekend, whatever, 12 days ago, 2000 Tea Party activists down on Wall Street, you probably have double the number of reporters there. But, at the beginning of this, very little coverage. This is day 12. And, I wanted to talk about what happened this past weekend; the New York Police Department’s handling of the arrest of 80 protesters over the weekend that’s come under fire as a number of videos have emerged showing officers using heavy handed tactics to say the least. Protesters captured some of the attacks on video, including the arrest of a 21-year-old Bronx resident named, Hero Vincent. He was trying to calm the crowd and organize people to leave. This is a clip from after he was released from jail.

HERO VINCENT: That’s when the police charged at me, and just started, you know, swinging at me, and another policeman pushed me, and I’m backing up, and as I’m backing up I hit the barricade. And then I look at them and they come at me. I go over and then four policeman just started beating on me, yelling at me, “Stop resisting arrest,” while I’m just laying there, I’m not fighting back. They kick me in my stomach, knock the breath out me. Hit me with their baton. They put their knees into my face, not into my head, into my face, into the ground, and just laughing.

AMY GOODMAN: While other demonstrators were charged with blocking traffic and resisting arrest, Vincent faces the most serious charge of assaulting a police officer. The NYPD says they acted appropriately, but Vincent said he’s confident the videos of the attack will exonerate him and has vowed to continue to participating in the Occupy Wall Street protest.

HERO VINCENT: If there’s anything called the epitome of a struggle, me and my family lived it. We were foreclosed on. My father had trouble finding a job, still hasn’t found one. I had trouble finding a job, still haven’t found one. My sister is in college, the tuition is doubling. They’re trying to fight for her financial aid. We struggle with food. I even slept on a bench for a few nights before this occasion. So, I’m here for everybody in my family, not just myself, and everybody who goes through the same struggles, that I can empathize with.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael, your comments on Hero Vincent and all that are down there?

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, it’s highly ironic that now over 100 of the protesters have been arrested and not a single banker, a CEO from Wall Street, anyone from corporate America — nobody, not one arrest of any of these people who brought down the economy in 2008. Who created schemes, financial schemes that not only destroyed the economy, but took away the future of this generation, of this young man and his children in the future. They have completely ruined it for people while they have become filthy rich. Not one of them arrested, but 100 of these people who have stood up non-violently against this madness, and they’re arrested? This just boggles the mind. I want to say something, too, because, Amy, you’ve lived here, in this area, in the city for probably most of your life. I have been here for many years. By and large, the New York City cops are actually pretty good as police forces go. I can tell you from filming around the country, you know…

AMY GOODMAN: I think it depends where we live.

MICHAEL MOORE: Well, this is what I was going to say; yes, what’s rough here, is that when you have the bad apples, they are really bad here, and it’s not just one or two. I think it’s very important, also, when you look at this videotape and the other video that was shot that day of the people—-especially the one individual who was pepper spraying women in their eyes when they were standing there doing nothing—-those were the white-shirted management types. They were not just the street officers. These were the guys that were supposed to be in charge of them. They were the ones going up there. It’s one thing if you’ve got a rogue cop behaving violently, but when you have management, when have the white shirts there of the NYPD doing this, that’s not rogue, that’s policy. That’s coming from somewhere else. They’ve been told by those in charge to corral this thing, end this thing, stop this thing. Somebody should inform them that everybody is a filmmaker now. Everybody has a camera. You cannot just treat people like this and get away with it, and I hope they don’t get away with it.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Michael Moore, and when we come back, we’ve got an interesting Twitter question that has to do with comparing protests here to, well, what was happening around GM a while ago. Michael Moore is our guest for the hour. He has a new book called, Here Comes Trouble: Stories From My Life, Stay with us.

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……, Is this what you want for your children America ? (filed under : “Herd them and beat them” ) …….

http://blog.alexanderhiggins.com

This video captures NYC police acting like pit bulls, attacking and beating the hell out of non-violent protestors who were not trying to resist and were actually trying to surrender.

This is just one of several videos I have been shown on seen by people on the ground who captured live video of police brutality the Wall Street Mass arrests. Despite the lies you have read about no injuries, no macing, and no police beatings many on the ground tell difference stories and have video to prove it.

Many here do not have the know how to get these videos out to the public who needs to see how the corporate controlled security forces are treating there fellow Americans. This video captures a glimpse of what really is happening on the ground at the Occupy Wall Street Protest.

Make sure you check out NYC Police Attack, Tear Gas And Mass Arrest 2,000 Peaceful Protestors. #OccupyWallStreet and NYC Police Trap Peaceful Female Protestors Inside A Fence Then Mace Them! #OccupyWallStreet

Also, be sure to check back in I have a hard drive of NYC police brutality videos I will be posting.

So help them out and get these videos out and help #occupywallstreet.

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US protesters rally to #OccupyWallStreet …….

http://stream.aljazeera.com

Protesters gather in New York’s financial hub for demonstration against what organisers call corporate dominance.

 Building on the momentum of the Arab Spring movements, protesters in the US are gathering in New York City’s financial district in a bid to show mass resistance against the dominance of the country’s financial system.

What started as an online campaign has translated into action on the ground, with protest organisers calling for thousands of people to “occupy Wall Street” on Saturday.

“On the 17th of September, we want to see 20,000 people flood into lower Manhattan, set up beds, kitchens, peaceful barricades and occupy Wall Street for a few months,” organisers wrote on the www.occupywallst.org website.

“Like our brothers and sisters in Egypt, Greece, Spain, and Iceland, we plan to use the revolutionary Arab Spring tactic of mass occupation to restore democracy in America. We also encourage the use of nonviolence to achieve our ends and maximize the safety of all participants.”

The leaderless movement includes hacktivist group Anonymous among the protesters. The group released a video online calling on people to take to the streets on September 17.

Similar to the structure of the hacktivist group itself there is no defined central authority, but Twitter accounts like @AnonOps are hubs of information for those attending the protests in person and virtually.

The Stream is following events in New York City and around the globe via social media and will update the elements below as the story progresses.

These are some of the social media elements featured in this episode of The Stream.

[View the story "Social media elements from #OccupyWallStreet" on Storify]

Thumbnail image: NEW YORK – JANUARY 22: A tour bus passes the Wall Street bull in the financial district January 22, 2007 in New York City. In a study commissioned by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), it was determined that New York could lose its place as the financial capital of the world in as little as 10 years. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

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