Giants

The Global Power Elite

Ebook
On sale Aug 28, 2018 | 352 Pages | 9781609808723
A look at the top 300 most powerful players in world capitalism, who are at the controls of our economic future.

Who holds the purse strings to the majority of the world's wealth? There is a new global elite at the controls of our economic future, and here former Project Censored director and media monitoring sociologist Peter Phillips unveils for the general reader just who these players are. The book includes such power players as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, and Warren Buffett.
     As the number of men with as much wealth as half the world fell from sixty-two to just eight between January 2016 and January 2017, according to Oxfam International, fewer than 200 super-connected asset managers at only 17 asset management firms—each with well over a trillion dollars in assets under management—now represent the financial core of the world's transnational capitalist class. Members of the global power elite are the management—the facilitators—of world capitalism, the firewall protecting the capital investment, growth, and debt collection that keeps the status quo from changing. Each chapter in Giants identifies by name the members of this international club of multi-millionaires, their 17 global financial companies—and including NGOs such as the Group of Thirty and the Trilateral Commission—and their transnational military protectors, so the reader, for the first time anywhere, can identify who constitutes this network of influence, where the wealth is concentrated, how it suppresses social movements, and how it can be redistributed for maximum systemic change.
PETER PHILLIPS has been a professor of political sociology at Sonoma State University since 1994, was the director of Project Censored from 1996 to 2010, and the president of Media Freedom Foundation from 2003 to 2017.  He has been editor or co-editor of fourteen editions of Censored, co-editor with Dennis Loo of Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney (Seven Stories Press, 2006), and editor of two editions of Progressive Guide to Alternative Media and Activism (Seven Stories Press, 1999 and 2004). He was a co-host of the weekly Project Censored show on Pacifica Radio with Mickey Huff from 2010 to 2017, originating from KPFA in Berkeley and airing on forty stations nationwide. He teaches courses in Political Sociology, Sociology of Power, Sociology of Media, Sociology of Conspiracies, and Investigative Sociology. He was winner of the Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Best Political Book in 1997, the PEN Censorship Award in 2008, the Dallas Smythe Award from the Union for Democratic Communications in 2009, and the Pillar Human Rights Award from the National Association of Whistleblowers in 2014. He lives in a redwood forest near Bodega, California, with his wife, Mary Lia.

About

A look at the top 300 most powerful players in world capitalism, who are at the controls of our economic future.

Who holds the purse strings to the majority of the world's wealth? There is a new global elite at the controls of our economic future, and here former Project Censored director and media monitoring sociologist Peter Phillips unveils for the general reader just who these players are. The book includes such power players as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Jamie Dimon, and Warren Buffett.
     As the number of men with as much wealth as half the world fell from sixty-two to just eight between January 2016 and January 2017, according to Oxfam International, fewer than 200 super-connected asset managers at only 17 asset management firms—each with well over a trillion dollars in assets under management—now represent the financial core of the world's transnational capitalist class. Members of the global power elite are the management—the facilitators—of world capitalism, the firewall protecting the capital investment, growth, and debt collection that keeps the status quo from changing. Each chapter in Giants identifies by name the members of this international club of multi-millionaires, their 17 global financial companies—and including NGOs such as the Group of Thirty and the Trilateral Commission—and their transnational military protectors, so the reader, for the first time anywhere, can identify who constitutes this network of influence, where the wealth is concentrated, how it suppresses social movements, and how it can be redistributed for maximum systemic change.

Author

PETER PHILLIPS has been a professor of political sociology at Sonoma State University since 1994, was the director of Project Censored from 1996 to 2010, and the president of Media Freedom Foundation from 2003 to 2017.  He has been editor or co-editor of fourteen editions of Censored, co-editor with Dennis Loo of Impeach the President: The Case Against Bush and Cheney (Seven Stories Press, 2006), and editor of two editions of Progressive Guide to Alternative Media and Activism (Seven Stories Press, 1999 and 2004). He was a co-host of the weekly Project Censored show on Pacifica Radio with Mickey Huff from 2010 to 2017, originating from KPFA in Berkeley and airing on forty stations nationwide. He teaches courses in Political Sociology, Sociology of Power, Sociology of Media, Sociology of Conspiracies, and Investigative Sociology. He was winner of the Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Best Political Book in 1997, the PEN Censorship Award in 2008, the Dallas Smythe Award from the Union for Democratic Communications in 2009, and the Pillar Human Rights Award from the National Association of Whistleblowers in 2014. He lives in a redwood forest near Bodega, California, with his wife, Mary Lia.