by Michael Snyder
January 29, 2013
from
TheEconomicCollapseBlog Website
The answer might surprise you.
Most of us tend to think of money as a
convenient way to conduct transactions, but the truth is that it also
represents power and control. And today we live in a
neo-feudalist system in which the super rich pull all the strings.
When I am talking about the ultra-wealthy, I am
not just talking about people that have a few million dollars. As you will
see later in this article, the ultra-wealthy have enough money sitting in
offshore banks to buy all of the goods and services produced in the United
States during the course of an entire year and still be
able to pay off the entire U.S. national debt.
That is an amount of money so
large that it is almost incomprehensible.
Under this neo-feudalist system, all the rest of
us are debt slaves, including our own governments. Just look around -
everyone is drowning in debt, and all of that debt is making the
ultra-wealthy even wealthier.
But the ultra-wealthy don't just sit on all of
that wealth.
-
They use some of it to dominate the affairs of the nations.
-
The
ultra-wealthy own virtually every major bank and every major corporation on
the planet.
-
They use a vast network
of secret societies, think tanks and
charitable organizations to advance their agendas and to keep their members
in line.
-
They control how we view the world through their ownership of the
media and their dominance over our education system.
-
They fund the campaigns
of most of our politicians and they exert a tremendous amount of influence
over international organizations such as the United Nations, the IMF, the
World Bank and the WTO.
When you step back and take a look at the big
picture, there is little doubt about who runs the world. It is just that
most people don't want to admit the truth.
The ultra-wealthy don't run down and put their
money in the local bank like you and I do. Instead, they tend to stash their
assets in places where they won't be taxed such as the Cayman Islands.
According to a report that was released last summer, the global elite have
up to
32 TRILLION dollars stashed in offshore banks around the globe.
U.S. GDP for 2011 was about 15 trillion dollars,
and the U.S. national debt is sitting at about 16 trillion dollars, so you
could add them both together and you still wouldn't hit 32 trillion dollars.
And of course that does not even count the money
that is stashed in other locations that the study did not account for, and
it does not count all of the wealth that the global elite have in hard
assets such as real estate, precious metals, art, yachts, etc.
The global elite have really hoarded an
incredible amount of wealth in these troubled times.
The following is from an article
on the Huffington Post website...
Rich individuals and their families have as
much as $32 trillion of hidden financial assets in offshore tax havens,
representing up to $280 billion in lost income tax revenues, according
to research published on Sunday.
The study estimating the extent of global
private financial wealth held in offshore accounts - excluding
non-financial assets such as real estate, gold, yachts and racehorses -
puts the sum at between $21 and $32 trillion.
The research was carried out for pressure
group Tax Justice Network, which campaigns against tax havens, by James
Henry, former chief economist at consultants McKinsey & Co.
He used data from the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund, United Nations and central banks.
But as I mentioned previously, the global elite
just don't have a lot of money. They also basically own just about every
major bank and every major corporation on the entire planet.
According to an outstanding
NewScientist article, a study of more than 40,000 transnational
corporations conducted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Zurich discovered that a very small core group of huge banks and giant
predator corporations dominate the entire global economic system...
An analysis
(The Network of Global Corporate
Control) 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 researchers found that this core group
consists of just 147 very tightly knit companies...
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.
The following are the
top 25 banks and corporations at the heart of this "super-entity".
You
will recognize many of the names on the list...
-
Barclays plc
-
Capital Group Companies Inc
-
FMR Corporation
-
AXA
-
State Street Corporation
-
JP Morgan Chase & Co
-
Legal & General Group plc
-
Vanguard Group Inc
-
UBS AG
-
Merrill Lynch & Co Inc
-
Wellington Management Co LLP
-
Deutsche Bank AG
-
Franklin Resources Inc
-
Credit Suisse Group
-
Walton Enterprises LLC
-
Bank of New York Mellon Corp
-
Natixis
-
Goldman Sachs Group Inc
-
T Rowe Price Group Inc
-
Legg Mason Inc
-
Morgan Stanley
-
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
-
Northern Trust Corporation
-
Société Générale
-
Bank of America Corporation
The ultra-wealthy elite often hide behind layers
and layers of ownership, but the truth is that thanks to interlocking
corporate relationships, the elite basically control almost every Fortune
500 corporation.
The amount of power and control that this gives
them is hard to describe. Unfortunately, this same group of people have
been running things for a very long time.
For example, New York City Mayor
John F. Hylan said the following during a speech all the way
back in 1922...
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.
To depart from mere generalizations,
let me say that at the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller-Standard
Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally
referred to as the international bankers. The little coterie of powerful
international bankers virtually run the United States government for
their own selfish purposes.
They practically control both parties, write
political platforms, make catspaws of party leaders, use the leading men
of private organizations, and resort to every device to place in
nomination for high public office only such candidates as will be
amenable to the dictates of corrupt big business.
These international bankers and
Rockefeller-Standard Oil interests 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.
These international bankers created the central
banks of the world (including
the Federal Reserve), and they use those central banks to get the
governments of the world ensnared in
endless cycles of debt from which there is no escape.
Government debt is a way to "legitimately" take money from all of us,
transfer it to the government, and then transfer it into the pockets of the
ultra-wealthy.
Today,
Barack Obama and almost all members of Congress absolutely refuse to
criticize the Fed, but in the past there have been some brave members of
Congress that have been willing to take a stand.
For example, the following quote is from a
speech that Congressman Louis T. McFadden delivered to the U.S. House of
Representatives
on June 10, 1932...
Mr. Chairman, we have in this country one of
the most corrupt institutions the world has ever known. I refer to the
Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Reserve Banks.
The Federal Reserve
Board, a Government board, has cheated the Government of the United
States and the people of the United States out of enough money to pay
the national debt. The depredations and iniquities of the Federal
Reserve Board has cost this country enough money to pay the national
debt several times over.
This evil institution has impoverished and
ruined the people of the United States, has bankrupted itself, and has
practically bankrupted our Government.
It has done this through the
defects of the law under which it operates, through the
maladministration of that law by the Federal Reserve Board, and through
the corrupt practices of the moneyed vultures who control it.
Sadly, most Americans still believe that the
Federal Reserve is a "federal agency", but that is simply not correct.
The following comes
from factcheck.org...
The stockholders in the 12 regional Federal
Reserve Banks are the privately owned banks that fall under the Federal
Reserve System.
These include all national banks (chartered by the
federal government) and those state-chartered banks that wish to join
and meet certain requirements.
About 38 percent of the nation’s more
than 8,000 banks are members of the system, and thus own the Fed banks.
According to researchers that have looked into
the ownership of the big Wall Street banks that dominate the Fed, the same
names keep coming up over and over:
But ultra-wealthy international bankers have not
just done this kind of thing in the United States. Their goal was to create
a global financial system that they would dominate and control.
Just check out what Georgetown University
history professor Carroll Quigley
once wrote...
[T]he powers of financial capitalism had
another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of
financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system
of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.
This system was
to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the
world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent
private meetings and conferences.
The apex of the system was to be the
Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank
owned and controlled by the world’s central banks which were themselves
private corporations.
Sadly, most Americans have never even heard of
the
Bank for International Settlements, but it is at the very heart of the
global financial system.
The following is
from Wikipedia...
As an organization of central banks, the BIS
seeks to make monetary policy more predictable and transparent among its
58 member central banks.
While monetary policy is determined by each
sovereign nation, it is subject to central and private banking scrutiny
and potentially to speculation that affects foreign exchange rates and
especially the fate of export economies.
Failures to keep monetary
policy in line with reality and make monetary reforms in time,
preferably as a simultaneous policy among all 58 member banks and also
involving the International Monetary Fund, have historically led to
losses in the billions as banks try to maintain a policy using open
market methods that have proven to be based on unrealistic assumptions.
The ultra-wealthy have also played a major role
in establishing other important international institutions such as,
In fact, the land for
the United Nations headquarters in New York City was purchased and donated
by John D. Rockefeller.
The international bankers are
"internationalists" and they are very proud of that fact.
The elite also dominate the education system in
the United States. Over the years, the Rockefeller Foundation and other
elitist organizations have poured massive amounts of money
into Ivy League schools.
Today, Ivy League schools are considered to be
the standard against which all other colleges and universities in America
are measured, and the last four U.S. presidents were educated at Ivy League
schools.
The elite also exert a tremendous amount of
influence through various secret societies,
...through some very powerful think tanks and
social clubs,
...and through a vast network of charities and
non-governmental organizations,
But for a moment, I want to focus on the power
the elite have over the media.
In a
previous article, I detailed how just six
monolithic corporate giants control most of what we watch, hear and read
every single day. These giant corporations own television networks, cable
channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music
labels and even many of our favorite websites.
Considering the fact that the average American
watches
153 hours of television a month, the influence of these six giant
corporations should not be underestimated.
The following are just some of
the media
companies that these corporate giants own...
|
Time Warner
Home Box Office (HBO)
Time Inc.
Turner Broadcasting System, Inc.
Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
CW Network (partial ownership)
TMZ
New Line Cinema
Time Warner Cable
Cinemax
Cartoon Network
TBS
TNT
America Online
MapQuest
Moviefone
Castle Rock
Sports Illustrated
Fortune
Marie Claire
People Magazine |
|
|
Walt Disney
ABC Television Network
Disney Publishing
ESPN Inc.
Disney Channel
SOAPnet
A&E
Lifetime
Buena Vista Home Entertainment
Buena Vista Theatrical Productions
Buena Vista Records
Disney Records
Hollywood Records
Miramax Films
Touchstone Pictures
Walt Disney Pictures
Pixar Animation Studios
Buena Vista Games
Hyperion Books
|
|
|
Viacom
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Home Entertainment
Black Entertainment Television (BET)
Comedy Central
Country Music Television (CMT)
Logo
MTV
MTV Canada
MTV2
Nick Magazine
Nick at Nite
Nick Jr.
Nickelodeon
Noggin
Spike TV
The Movie Channel
TV Land
VH1
|
|
|
News Corporation
Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Fox Television Stations
The New York Post
Fox Searchlight Pictures
Beliefnet
Fox Business Network
Fox Kids Europe
Fox News Channel
Fox Sports Net
Fox Television Network
FX
My Network TV
MySpace
News Limited News
Phoenix InfoNews Channel
Phoenix Movies Channel
Sky PerfecTV
Speed Channel
STAR TV India
STAR TV Taiwan
STAR World
Times Higher Education Supplement Magazine
Times Literary Supplement Magazine
Times of London
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
20th Century Fox International
20th Century Fox Studios
20th Century Fox Television
BSkyB
DIRECTV
The Wall Street Journal
Fox Broadcasting Company
Fox Interactive Media
FOXTEL
HarperCollins Publishers
The National Geographic Channel
National Rugby League
News Interactive
News Outdoor
Radio Veronica
ReganBooks
Sky Italia
Sky Radio Denmark
Sky Radio Germany
Sky Radio Netherlands
STAR
Zondervan |
|
|
CBS Corporation
CBS News
CBS Sports
CBS Television Network
CNET
Showtime
TV.com
CBS Radio Inc. (130 stations)
CBS Consumer Products
CBS Outdoor
CW Network (50% ownership)
Infinity Broadcasting
Simon & Schuster (Pocket Books, Scribner)
Westwood One Radio Network
|
|
|
NBC Universal
Bravo
CNBC
NBC News
MSNBC
NBC Sports
NBC Television Network
Oxygen
SciFi Magazine
Syfy (Sci Fi Channel)
Telemundo
USA Network
Weather Channel
Focus Features
NBC Universal Television Distribution
NBC Universal Television Studio
Paxson Communications (partial ownership)
Trio
Universal Parks & Resorts
Universal Pictures
Universal Studio Home Video
|
|
And of course the elite own most of our
politicians as well.
The following is a quote from
journalist Lewis Lapham...
"The shaping of the will of Congress and the
choosing of the American president has become a privilege reserved to
the country’s equestrian classes, a.k.a. the 20% of the population that
holds 93% of the wealth, the happy few who run the corporations and the
banks, own and operate the news and entertainment media, compose the
laws and govern the universities, control the philanthropic foundations,
the policy institutes, the casinos, and the sports arenas."
Have you ever wondered why things never seem to
change
in Washington D.C. no matter who we vote for? Well, it is because both parties are owned by
the establishment.
It would be nice to think that the American
people are in control of who runs things in the U.S., but that is not how it
works in the real world.
In the real world, the politician that raises
more money wins
more than 80 percent of the time in national races.
Our politicians are not stupid - they are going
to be very good to the people that can give them the giant piles of money
that they need for their campaigns. And the people that can do that are the
ultra-wealthy and the giant corporations that the ultra-wealthy control.
Are you starting to get the picture?
There is a reason why the ultra-wealthy are
referred to as "the establishment". They have set up a system that greatly
benefits them and that allows them to pull the strings.
So who runs the world? They do. In fact, they even admit as much.
David Rockefeller wrote the following
in his 2003 book entitled "Memoirs"...
"For more than a century, ideological
extremists at either end of the political spectrum have seized upon
well-publicized incidents such as my encounter with Castro to attack the
Rockefeller family for the inordinate influence they claim we wield over
American political and economic institutions.
Some even believe we are part of a secret
cabal working against the best interests of the United States,
characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring
with others around the world to build a more integrated global political
and economic structure - one world, if you will.
If that is the charge,
I stand guilty, and I am proud of it."
There is so much more that could be said about
all of this. In fact, an entire library of books could be written about the
power and the influence of the ultra-wealthy international bankers that run
the world.
