Exposing and Confronting the 'Global Corporate Empire' (CartaMaior, Brazil)
"The political and economic influence corporations exercise over governments interferes with commodity prices, and leads to reductions in social investment, health, education, transportation and security. ... A simplified articulation is as follows: there is a small central business core that has two parts: those that compose the nucleus and those that are controlled by it. ... This core is mainly comprised of large banks, who hold most of the shares in other corporations. The leading banks control 80 percent of the entire corporate network. ... How much inhumanity can people stomach? ... A society cannot long survive based on extreme exploitation, lies and opposition to life."
Good
wishes for a happy year are rituals, but they don’t go beyond simple wishes. They
are unable to change the course of a world in which the super-powerful follow
their strategy for global domination. On this topic we all need to think and
even pray, because the economic, social, cultural, and spiritual consequences,
as well as those for the future of the species and nature, could be
catastrophic.
Many
like [Nobel Prize winning economists] Joseph Stiglitz
and Paul Krugman hoped that the legacy of the 2008
crisis would be a great debate about what type of society we want. They were greatly
mistaken. Such a discussion hasn't taken place. On the contrary, the logic that
provoked the crisis has been taken up again with even greater enthusiasm.
Richard Wilkinson, a leading expert on the topic of inequality, was more
attentive, saying some time ago in an interview with Germany's Die Zeit: “The
fundamental question is this: do we or do we not want to truly live according
to the principle that the strongest get almost everything, and the weakest are
left behind?”
The
super-rich and super-powerful decided they wanted to live according to the
Darwinian principle of the strongest - and
damn the weak. But Wilkinson commented: “I believe that we all have a need for
greater cooperation and reciprocity, because people want more social equality.”
This desire is intentionally denied by those rich men.
As
a rule, capitalist logic is ferocious: one company swallows another
(euphemistically called a "merger"). When it gets to the point where
there are just a few large firms, their logic changes: rather than making war,
they create a wolf's alliance among themselves and mutually behave like sheep.
In this way they retain more power, make profit for themselves and their
shareholders with greater certainty, and completely disregard the good of
society.
The
political and economic influence corporations exercise over governments, the
majority of which are much weaker than they, is extremely awkward, interfering with
commodity prices, and leads to a reduction in social investment, health, education,
transportation, and security. The thousands occupying streets around the world and
in Brazil intuited this domination as that of a new form of empire, constructed
under the motto: “greed is good” and “devour whatever we can consume.”
There
are excellent studies on the domination of the world by large multinational
corporations. One such well-known person is by David Korten,
who wrote When
Corporations Rule the World. But a study pulling together the loose
strands was missing. That was done in 2011 by the Swiss Institute of Technology
(ETH) in Zurich, one of the world's most respected centers of research and a
competitor of MIT. The document includes some big names and is short - no more
than ten pages, with 26dedicated to methodology to show the complete
transparency of the results. It was summarized by Pontifical Catholic
University of São Paulo Professor of EconomicsLadislauDowbor. On this we will
rely.
Of
the 30 million existing corporations, the Institute selected 43,000 to better
study the logic of how they function. A simplified articulation is as
follows: there is a small central business core that has two parts: those that compose the nucleus and those that are controlled by it. This linkage creates a network of global corporate control.
This tiny core constitutes a super-entity. It is this core that controls the network, which focuses on cost cutting, protection from risk, boosting confidence, and
most importantly, defining the outlines of the global economy and where they
lines should be strengthened.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
This
tiny core is mainly comprised of large banks, who hold most of the shares in other corporations.
The leading banks control 80 percent of the entire corporate network. There are
only 737 players from 147 large corporations. There is Deutsche Bank,
J.P. Morgan Chase, UBS, Santander, Goldman Sachs, BNP
Paribas, among several others. In the end, less than 1 percent of all companies
control 40 percent of the entire network.
This
fact now allows us to understand the indignation of the Occupiers and others, who
accuse the 1 percent of companies of doing what they want with the hard-earned
resources of 99 percent of the population. These firms contribute nothing - and
produce nothing. They just make more money by way of market speculation.
It
was this absurd and unlimited voracious accumulation that created the systemic
crisis of 2008. This logic continually worsens inequality, and makes it more
difficult to emerge from the crisis. How much inhumanity can people stomach? Everything
has its limits, and the economy isn't everything. Now, however, we see the guts
of the monster. As Dowbor says: “The truth is that we
have ignored the elephant in the room.” It's breaking everything in sight:
crystal, crockery - and trampling people. But for how much longer? Global
ethical common sense assures us that a society cannot long survive based on extreme
exploitation, lies and opposition to life.
