Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich by Chrystia Freeland – review

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/01/plutocrats-super-rich-freeland-review

ho is the richest person to have lived? Given the impossibility of comparing chariots with private jets, this is an absurd question. But it is still one economists have sought to answer, with perhaps the best measure – as defined by Adam Smith – based on annual income as a multiple of the average wage of fellow citizens.

Their answer is not Marcus Crassus, whose fortune was the same size as the entire government treasury of the Roman Empire. His annual return was paltry for a plutocrat, equating to the average yearly income of 32,000 Romans. Nor was it those robber barons of the Gilded Age – Andrew Carnegie, whose wealth peaked in 1901, took home the same as 48,000 typical Americans while John D Rockefeller's vast riches yielded an annual income equal to 116,000 of his countrymen.

The wealth of these figures from history pales in comparison with the strutting financiers of Wall Street, the geeky billionaires of Silicon Valley and the grisly oligarchs who plundered Russia. Trumping them all is Carlos Slim, the telecoms tycoon whose £53bn fortune is equal to that of an incredible 400,000 of his fellow Mexicans.

There has always been a gap between rich and poor but this is just one sign of how the gulf has widened into a chasm over the past few decades. Creaming off more and more wealth is a new elite, a transglobal class of mainly self-made men carving out unimaginable fortunes. They are the subject of this timely and absorbing analysis by former Financial Times deputy editor Chrystia Freeland.

Forget the 1% targeted by the Occupy mob. Freeland is talking about the 0.1 per centers who look down with disdain at the paupers scrabbling around on a few million a year. She quotes another shocking sign of our times: three decades ago the average American chief executive made 42 times as much as the average worker; today this ratio is an obscene 380. And bear in mind the richer you are, the smaller proportion of your income you tend to pay in tax, levels diminishing even at the very top of the tree.

the author is currently the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada

>>9621091

Would You Recognize a Plutocracy If You Saw One?

A handy guide for understanding when a democracy ceases to be particularly democratic.

https://inequality.org/great-divide/would-you-recognize-a-plutocracy-if-you-saw-one/

How can we tell when a democracy, or rule by the people, evolves into a plutocracy, the reign of the rich? Easy. We have a democracy when a political system can and does make a good-faith effort to address the problems average people face.

In a plutocracy, on the other hand, the political system pays no more than lip-service to average people’s problems and works diligently instead at protecting — and growing — the wealth of the already wealthy.

By this simple standard, we Americans today unquestionably live in a plutocracy. Our freshest slam-dunk evidence: the record of the decade since the Wall Street financial crash ushered in the Great Recession.

Almost exactly ten years ago, in late summer 2008, the tremors that had been roiling the U.S. economy ever since the housing bubble popped the year before turned into an economic earthquake. The giant Lehman Brothers investment bank fell into one yawning fissure. The giant insurer AIG stumbled toward another.

“Citigroup appeared poised to go down next, with General Motors and Chrysler to follow,” remembers the New Yorker’s George Packer. “Everything solid in the American economy turned out to be built on sand.”

No American born after the 1929 crash had ever since anything like this. In quick order, about 9 million workers lost their jobs. About the same number of families lost their homes.

What happened next? Plutocracy happened next. The American political system came rushing to the rescue of the same elites whose frauds and financial manipulations had greased the skids for the crisis.

Earlier this week, a triumphant Wall Street celebrated that rescue, on the day the stock market reached a historic milestone: 3,453 days of bull market, arguably, the New York Times noted, the longest bull market in American financial history.

>>9621108

THE PLUTOCRACY CARTEL

AN ENTRENCHED GLOBAL ELITE OF VAST WEALTH HAS SPREAD ITS TENTACLES OVER THE EARTH WIELDING EXTRAORDINARY POWER OVER WORLD AFFAIRS

http://www.plutocracycartel.net/

A wealthy and powerful oligarchy of banks, corporations, and dynastic families and institutions, runs the world. This elite group exercises control through interlocking boards of directors and stock ownership, acting through private clubs, societies and institutions, dominating national governments, both democratic and authoritarian.

Behind a facade of wealth and privilege, the octopus arms of the Plutocracy Cartel embrace every region of the globe, generating obscene profits from its activities, including weapons trafficking, funding wars and controlling the global trade in drugs. And, as they accumulate more and more wealth and power, they undermine democracy, exploit the weak and vulnerable, ruin lives, and kill hope for millions.

The endgame of this plutocracy is global financial domination and world government.

This website seeks to expose this hegemonic global shadow government that dictates to presidents and prime ministers, directs economic and foreign policies, controls the value of money, oversees drug trafficking, and funds wars.

THE PLUTOCRACY CARTEL'S GLOBAL NETWORK

DYNASTIC FAMILIES AND INSTITUTIONS

"There is a shadowy group of Plutocrats running multinational corporations, controlling the media narrative, manipulating the money supply, influencing governments, generating chaos, and provoking wars in order to further their agendas.

These people are very real and extremely dangerous. They operate in the shadows, safely out of the light of public scrutiny. They manage by proxy, using cut-outs to do their bidding, never allowing themselves to get their hands dirty?

Politicians are used and discarded, giving the illusion that they are the ones in control. The controllers' identities are hidden through a corporate shell game of holding companies and secret banking tax havens, in places like the Cayman Islands and Luxemburg.

A thirst for publicity and a lust for the spotlight are liabilities if you want to excel in this endeavor. Better to rule from the shadows where your identity and intentions are unknown.

… The people running the show are mostly driven, professional, sociopaths with no discernible traces of compassion.

… Some of our best-known leaders and public figures are actually psychopaths, and what makes a psychopath most effective is their overall lack of empathy. They simply do not have the ability to imagine or feel someone else's pain, and this frees them up to cross boundaries that the rest of us would never dream of crossing. They can operate without limits, giving them an advantage over everyone else. They are professional liars and damn proud of it.

… You do not make it to the top of the food chain by being nice, honest and fair; you get there by force, deception, and influence. You get there through violence, if necessary. You get there through blackmail and extortion. It takes planning and funding, patience and practice, and a mastery of how to use fear to control other people. Those running the world are playing a much different game than the rest of us, and the way they see it, there are no rules. Or at least the rules do not apply to them.

… Their plan is to change society in every country in a way that provides them a reason to impose a world government. The creation of a world central bank and an electronic world currency, in conjunction with the elimination of cash, would allow them complete control to dictate financial policy around the globe. Their policies would be enforced by their world army, and a micro-chipped population would live in fear of having their electronic currency deleted if they ever crossed the world government."

Charlie Robinson, in his book "The Octopus of Global Control", 2017

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35713715-the-octopus-of-global-control

The Octopus of Global Control: How Banks Enslave the World

Author Charlie Robinson discusses the housing market’s rigged carnival game that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

From Watching The Hawks, Episode 712, with Sean Stone

https://www.rt.com/shows/watching-the…

“The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy legs over our cities, states and nation… The little coterie of powerful international bankers virtually run the United States government for their own selfish purposes. They practically control both parties… and control the majority of the newspapers and magazines in this country. They use the columns of these papers to club into submission or drive out of office public officials who refuse to do the bidding of the powerful corrupt cliques which compose the invisible government. It operates under cover of a self-created screen [and] seizes our executive officers, legislative bodies, schools, courts, newspapers and every agency created for the public protection.”

• New York City Mayor John Francis Hylan, March 1922

https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/time…

In hock to Uncle Sam

https://www.theguardian.com/books/200…

An Economic Hit Man Confesses and Calls to Action | John Perkins | TEDxTraverseCity

https://youtu.be/btF6nKHo2i0

"At the center of the international financial system are the banks, asset management firms, oligarchs and financial dynasties that together control the network - or cartel - of the Global Financial Mafia. A network of roughly 150 of the world's largest financial institutions collectively control each other and a significant percentage of the network of the world's largest 47,000 transnational corporations. This unprecedented global financial power concentrated in a relatively small list of banks, insurance companies and asset management firms is itself controlled by rich and powerful individuals and families: the core constituency of the world of Global Financial Governance."

Andrew Gavin Marshall

Organized crime has entered a new era. The presence of large criminal organizations in many parts of the world is a historical reality which has been developing over more than a century. But it is only during recent years that we have been observing the growth of a ‘world mafia market’ whose two basic characteristics are: the extension on a world scale of the trafficking of various goods (not only confined to drugs and weapons), and the gradual transformation of this traffic into a mass commodities market. This is where the new mafia exercises a hegemony over vast segments of the ‘Black Economy’ . These mass-market characteristics imply that although criminal organizations persist in having their own specific cultural aspects connected with various traditions, they are becoming more and more alike in structure and international connections, taking on characteristics of multinational corporations, with cooperation-competition-rivalry within an international division of criminal-legal work.

During recent years, at the same time as the Sicilian-American mafia has expanded in scope and financial significance, other kinds of organized crime have also grown, such as the Columbian and Bolivian mafias, the Chinese ‘Triads’, and the Japanese Yakuza. The same type of development can also be seen among Puerto Rican mobsters as well as among Australian racketeers (2). All this is part of the development of an international financial network consisting of systems for the recycling of illegal capital and providing investment outlets. This therefore allows for the merging of ‘legitimate’ and ‘illegitimate’ capital within international financial markets, and thus also for the development of an identification process between criminal syndicates and the military-political power in many parts of the world. Such basic common features point to the conclusion that various criminal organizations are becoming increasingly ‘mafia-like’, that is, vertically integrated in national and political systems.

The world-wide economico-political context has been particularly encouraging for the development of this process. Call it what you will – ‘latecapitalistic’, ‘post-industrial’, ‘mass-society’, etc. – there are some essential features of the social order, developed throughout recent decades, which have called for the modernization of the mafia. Such a modernization includes: technological development which restructures the industrial sector by means of mechanization, the exclusion of certain expensive forms of manual labor, and the growing importance of service sector jobs in finance, insurance, nursing, education, and scientific research. Though these latter do produce new work-places, they can not counterbalance the vacancies caused by industrial restructuring, and the result is an increasing surplus population. Clearly, the world economic scene is ruled by multinational corporations supported by large financial institutions which encourage the decentralization of production and the employment of labor forces from peripheral areas of the world, and at the lowest possible cost as well.

https://www.centroimpastato.com/the-financial-mafia-the-illegal-accumulation-of-wealth-and-the-financial-industrial-complex/

>>9621144

That's because the really rich are not really rich!!!

They are a FAMILY.

The money and assets are mostly owned by a FAMILY TRUST, a fund that is considered to be a 3rd party, a private foundation, a web of holding companies.

The wealth that the individual has access to is partly property (mansions/yachts/estates) that he does not actually own. But the FAMILY allows him to use this property.

The end result is that when people analyze the personal wealth of individuals, the people who come up at the top of the lists, are people that the FAMILIES have decided to put there. Part of their role is as scapegoats. The big tech companies are a variation of that. Companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter are given big piles of cash so they can dominate a market and sweep up or destroy the hard work of others. But the company and its leaders are not the ones running the show. The FAMILY has its people inside the management infrastructure at all levels and they are the ones really in control.

BANK CRIMES PAY: UNDER THE THUMB OF THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL MAFIOCRACY

https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/bank-crimes-pay-under-the-thumb-of-the-global-financial-mafiocracy

On Nov. 13 2015, the United Kingdom's Serious Fraud Office (SFO) announced it was charging 10 individual bankers, working for two separate banks, Deutsche Bank and Barclays, with fraud over their rigging of the Euribor rates. The latest announcement shines the spotlight once again on the scandals and criminal behavior that have come to define the world of global banking.

To date, only a handful of the world's largest banks have been repeatedly investigated, charged, fined or settled in relation to a succession of large financial scams, starting with mortgage fraud and the Libor scandal in 2012, the Euribor scandal and the Forex (foreign exchange) rate rigging. At the heart of these scandals, which involve the manipulation of interest rates on trillions of dollars in transactions, lie a handful of banks that collectively form a cartel in control of global financial markets - and the source of worldwide economic and financial crises.

Banks such as HSBC, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Bank of America, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland and UBS anchor the global financial power we have come to recognize as fraud. The two, after all, are not mutually exclusive. In more explicit terms, this cartel of banks functions as a type of global financial Mafia, manipulating markets and defrauding investors, consumers and countries while demanding their pound of flesh in the form of interest payments. The banks force nations to impose austerity measures and structural reforms under the threat of cutting off funding; meanwhile they launder drug money for other cartels and organized crime syndicates.

Call them the global Mafiocracy.

In May, six major global banks were fined nearly $6 billion for manipulation of the foreign exchange market, which handles over $5 trillion in daily transactions. Four of the six banks pleaded guilty to charges of "conspiring to manipulate the price of U.S. dollars and euros exchanged." Those banks were Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays and Royal Bank of Scotland, while two additional banks, UBS and Bank of America, were fined but did not plead guilty to the specific charges. Forex traders at Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and other banks conspired to manipulate currency prices through chat room groups they established, where they arrogantly used names like "The Mafia" and "The Cartel."

The FBI said the investigations and charges against the big banks revealed criminal behavior "on a massive scale." The British bank Barclays paid the largest individual fine at around $2.3 billion. But as one trader at the bank wrote in a chat room conversation back in 2010, "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying." The total fines, while numerically large, were but a small fraction of the overall market capitalization of each bank - though the fine on Barclays amounted to some 3.4% of the bank's market capitalization, the highest percentage by far among the group.

The Matrix Of The System

a 500 page book attached as PDF