These 10 Companies Run Our ‘Democracy’
By Sheerpost-November 1, 2024
Amidst the hype, excitement and nervousness of the election, the bigger picture of what the United States is and how it operates often gets lost on people. Many think that choosing one or another candidate will significantly alter their future to better represent their values, but in reality there is only one group of people that matter the most: those who Dr. Peter Phillips, professor emeritus at Sonoma State University, calls the “titans of capital.”
In his new book by the same name, Phillips studies the economic trends following the COVID-19 pandemic and how the wealth concentration in the world took a dramatic turn towards the already ultra-wealthy. He joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to further analyze these trends and how dire inequality is becoming.
The main problem is simple to understand: the ultra-wealthy “doubled their wealth concentration.” That means, according to Phillips, that “the upper one half of 1% of the people got richer and basically, the rest of the world got poorer.”
Phillips names the top 10 capital investment companies, such as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Morgan Stanley and others as the main culprits. Over $50 trillion are controlled by 117 people across these 10 companies, according to Phillips.
This immense concentration of wealth inevitably renders any semblance of democracy almost useless, as the main decision makers are those who hold the biggest bag. “Whoever we elect as President is not going to make any difference because they’re managed by capital,” Phillips tells Scheer.
“They’re there to protect global capital. That’s what the American political system is about. That’s what the political systems in the West are about. They see capital as a vital interest of the West, and that’s why we have military bases all over the world to protect capital and to ensure that debts get repaid and that this capital continues to grow and expand.”
Robert Scheer
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, Professor Peter Phillips from Sonoma State College emeritus of political sociology at Sonoma State here in California. First of all, he wrote a very highly regarded book called “Giants: The Global Power Elite.” And now his new book is “Titans of Capital,” it’s published by Seven Stories Press, and the subtitle is “How Concentrated Wealth Threatens Humanity,” and it is really a sobering and very important book, because he’s talking about, basically, 10 huge capital management companies that have collectively, I guess, a boards of directors of 117 people he calls “titans,” and they basically run the world economy.
And now, if that sounds fanciful or so forth, we live in a very odd world. We still pay homage to Adam Smith and the free market, but there’s nothing free about the current economic market in the world and the political direction and profit motives have gone wild, but in the main it’s concentrated. That’s the key word. Adam Smith talked about an invisible hand in which no one would be able to game the market. These are people who do nothing but game the market. Is that a fair summary, Peter and I’ll let you take over?
Peter Phillips
Well, that’s pretty accurate. The top capital investment companies today, the top 10, control $50 trillion worth of investment capital.
Robert Scheer
Remind people what a trillion is, you do it in your book.
Peter Phillips
Well a trillion is a thousand billions. So they control 50,000 billions of dollars of money, and they decide where to invest it. And one of their biggest problems is they’ve got more money than they’ve got safe places to invest. So they max their investments in General Motors and all the big companies, Google and that, but then they still have excess capital. So they’re constantly looking around the world for places to invest, and they want to be able to invest anywhere in the world with free flow of capital. So when we talk about the important interests of the United States and the West, it’s capital. It’s these companies and their ability to freely invest anywhere in the world, whether they get a return.
So they’re looking for an 8% plus return and sometimes they don’t have enough places to do that, so they’ll invest in the subprime mortgage loans, which ended up as a debascal. So they take risks and they’re trying to politically manipulate places like Russia to open back up their investment policies there. China challenges them, but only partially. China has about $5 trillion of extra investment capital, whereas the West has well over $100 trillion. So China, in terms of capital for investment worldwide, is relatively minor in today’s market. So these 10 companies that control $50 trillion are managed by only 117 people.
Robert Scheer
Now where do they get this money? Explain the whole thing.
Peter Phillips
The money comes from the richest one half of 1% of the people in the world. So the billionaires and the multi-millionaires. There’s about 40 million of them. They put their excess capital in these capital investment companies. So BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley, in France it’s Amundi, in Germany it’s Allianz, it’s UBS in Switzerland. Those companies manage trillions of dollars of investment capital, and their goal, they have a fiduciary responsibility to get a return on that money for the people that give them the money.
So it’s free flowing capital, money that’s in excess, that is invested all over the world, and it’s not necessarily beneficial for most people. So there’s dangers of these in some of their investments, as well as increasingly concentrating wealth. So this is doubled… the book I wrote five years ago called “Giants,” at that time, there were 17 companies that were giants. I called them giants. They were trillion dollar capital investment companies. BlackRock was the biggest with four almost five trillion. Now they’ve all doubled. BlackRock is $10 trillion.
Vanguard is $9 trillion. I mean, so they doubled their wealth concentration and that means that the upper one half of 1% of the people got richer, and basically the rest of the world got poorer. So, I mean, you can’t continue to concentrate wealth in the upper 1% and not have a negatively impact other people, especially the bottom. The bottom half of the world lives on $6 a day or less. That’s incredible to think about it. 80% of the world lives on $10 a day or less. So the wealth is incredibly concentrated in the top 20% and actually more of the top 1% of the people in the world control the wealth. They continue to increase it, concentrate it, and that gives them greater power over what’s happening in the world today.
Robert Scheer
Every time you talk about economics, most people say, Wow, I don’t understand it, or I’m bored, or so forth, and these numbers are difficult to comprehend. But actually, what is so important about your book, and I highly recommend it, it challenges the basic narrative of what’s going on about everything from climate change to our confrontation with other countries and of course, the growing income gap, which is… we’re right at the end of an election season here and the real question is, why are so many people unhappy?
Half the country thinks the other half of the country is crazy. When you vote for the other person, we’re going to have fascism or madness or communism or whatever, depending on whether you’re a Trumper or you’re supporting the Biden-Harris administration’s running of the country, and people correctly feel alienated from the process, so they have conspiracy theories and they think… but they’re not conspiracy theories. The fact is, decision making is not made at this election. And basically the companies you’re talking about are the same companies that were involved in the housing meltdown, that are involved in a lot of the dangerous mischief that has played havoc with the world economy.
But I want to return to my opening statement and this is something you won’t get from any business school or most departments of economics, there are occasional economists who write about it. You’re in something called political sociology, I assume that also relates to somebody like C. Wright Mills, who told us about a power elite six decades ago, whatever it was, you’re in that tradition. And what’s so refreshing about your book is this has nothing to do with any original thinking about capitalism, which was, after all, a rebellion against certain cartels and control of trade.
This has nothing to do with a free market and so people can’t I want to unpack that, what is a company’s, BlackRock, for instance, or any of these companies, they get money from these super wealthy people, and they get to keep managing it and pay themselves a lot of money because they can deliver a minimum rate much bigger than the rest of us suckers when we put money in a bank savings account, right? So why don’t you give us that broad picture?
Peter Phillips
Well, the broad picture is that the global 1% or actually the one half of 1% is controlling increasingly amounts of capital, and they farm that capital after these capital management investment companies, which have doubled in size in the past five years and the top 10 today, control $50 trillion—that’s 50,000 billions worth of money—and they they’re invested everywhere in the world, including China and Russia.
Robert Scheer
What percentage of world wealth would that be? How does that compare what the lower 98% have, or the lower 50% or what have you?
Peter Phillips
Oh, it’s far in excess. And it depends on you could define wealth as property, or you could define wealth as stocks. Yes, but when it comes to capital, when it comes to money, it’s highly concentrated. And that’s what we’re seeing, is that this wealth is continuing to be concentrated, doubling in size in the past five years, so that the richest one half of 1% of the people got incredibly richer in the last five years and the rest of us have been in decline.
Robert Scheer
And that includes the pandemic right?
Peter Phillips
The pandemic allowed them to maximize their profit concentrations. So they grabbed two thirds of the net worth of $42 trillion worth of money since 2020, they grabbed two thirds of that, just concentrated. And the rest of us, it got spread around minor in the top 20% or so, but most people in the world are in decline. So when we talk about the political parties in this country and people having a harder time, they do! Half the country at some point, the families can’t afford food for everybody.
It’s quite diabolical, in a sense, that this concentrated wealth manages everything, controls everything, and that we have very little say, and whoever we elect as President is not going to make any difference, because they’re managed by capital. They’re there to protect global capital. That’s what the American political system is about. That’s what the political systems in the West are about. They see capital as a vital interest of the West, and that’s why we have military bases all over the world to protect capital and to ensure that debts get repaid and that this capital continues to grow and expand.
Robert Scheer
We just had this BRIC[S] meeting, which does include countries of different political system, but with the emphasis being on the ones that have been left out of the big capital feast of the West. So India and China that haven’t agreed on very much, including their border, although at the end of this last BRICS meeting, they agreed to try to not have any fights over their border. But actually, here you have two countries, India and China, that are responsible. I don’t know the exact figure, what is it, what percentage of the world’s population? It’s very large.
Peter Phillips
A quarter at least.
Robert Scheer
A quarter at least, okay. And then you throw in Brazil, you throw in other countries that are also part of this BRICS thing. And what they’re saying is, hey, we’ve been left out of this, even though, like in the case of China, these same capital companies, they go in there, invest and so forth, but they’re playing with those economies. They’re able to manipulate economies because they take money out of one investment, put it in another, they reward one and not another. And like you mentioned, even subprime mortgages that hurt a lot of people, but if they can make money off it, they’re going to do it.
So you have this incredible center of power, much more significant than C. Wright Mills, who I think, wrote most compellingly about a power elite. That was the title of his book. And I don’t know how often it’s referred to in American colleges or universities, but the fact that matter is… and if I say it’s alarming, then some people say, well, then it can’t be true. It’s alarming, and it is true, and it is documented, and this is a scholarly work, and we waste so much time arguing about, where is the menace to freedom? Is it Trump, or is it Harris? Is it this, or is that? No, it’s this control of power that mocks individual decision.
We think that the West is for individual freedom has nothing to do with individual freedom, because you don’t have the freedom if you can’t keep your job, or you’re not making decent money, or you’re drowning in debt, what kind of freedom do you have? And these people have in all the freedom, it’s not just about money. Power ensures that they can control things. So why don’t you give us… Because you can go through the chapters of your book or what have you, because you make a compelling case. And by the way, the book came out last month. It’s up to date. It’s available.
So I highly recommend, again, the title is “Titans of Capital,” it’s by Peter Phillips, and it’s Seven Story Press. Full disclosure, I had a book once published by Seven Story Press, but I would say they’re a great press. But take us through the argument of the book because it’s backed up, it’s researched, it’s documented. And so it’s not just yes, it’s a provocative idea. It certainly is, because most people in these think tanks and everything have been bought off by precisely the money that’s made by these capital groups. So you can’t rely on them, and the main universities have certainly been co opted by them. So give us the broad picture that your book outlines.
Peter Phillips
The broad picture is that global capital, the 1% that control global capital in the world, are rapidly concentrating their wealth, reaping the profits from major corporations around the world and increasingly have more capital to invest in control. The top 1%, actually the top one half of 1%, 40 multi-millionaires and billionaires control these huge amounts of global capital that they own personally, and then they hand it over to these capital investment companies like BlackRock and Vanguard and State Street that have doubled in size in the past five years alone.
So my book is an alarming statement that capital is being concentrated by the top 1%, it’s accelerating, and it has many negative consequences that impact all. But the worst, I think, is with half the people in the world living on poverty, wages and for the UN defines extreme poverty as $2.15 a day, there’s 700 million people living at that level now.
Robert Scheer
I want that figure again. I just want to shove that before people, because you can have all the wonderful discussions about freedom, democracy. We’re protecting people, religion. After all, every single religion, major religion, condemns usury, condemns excessive… it was Jesus who threw the money changes out of the temple. So give us that statistic again. Remind us what has happened
Peter Phillips
Extreme poverty for the United Nations is defined as $2.15 a day. That’s extreme. You’re barely living. And many of those people, 20,000 a day, die from malnutrition or easily curable diseases, so that there’s an ongoing slaughter of people because of inequality, that’s daily. So it’s 140,000 a week. I mean, it’s millions a year are dying at this poverty level of extreme poverty. And that’s that poverty level is increased. Now capital investments, as they were saying, extreme poverty before the pandemic, had been declining a bit.
It had gone down a little bit, and they were saying, Oh, look, it’s trickling down. It’s going to get better. All we have to do is keep growing. And that’s simply not true. Extreme poverty has increased. The only place it didn’t increase has been in China, the Chinese have a philosophy as part of their government called [inaudible], which simply means that all people can be neither rich nor poor, but should be free from want and toil. So the Chinese government has eliminated extreme poverty in China, there were several hundred million people in extreme poverty in China.
Now there’s several hundred million people living at $5 a day, which is still pretty poor, but they’re not in extreme poverty. Whereas in the West, extreme poverty has increased. So, there’s still this great gap between the 1% and the rest of the world that is accelerating, that is getting larger as they control more of the wealth of the world.
Robert Scheer
So let’s cut to this, people should understand we’re talking about Jeff Bezos. He owns the Washington Post, and now there are people critical, oh, he wouldn’t support a candidate, because he has to have influence with whoever wins. You have billionaires right here, where I am in LA, own the LA Times. But really we’re talking about… some people don’t like Bezos, a lot of people don’t like Elon Musk, who’s certainly in this group. But we’re talking about Bill Gates, who gets to set the agenda for what is charity and what are we doing to solve big problems? And everybody takes these people serious.
And so when they can control our elections, which they clearly do, I mean, clearly Kamala Harris was picked because she appealed to what they called the donor class, she was acceptable and certainly Trump would not have won, he may get defeated now, because the donor class, with the exception of Elon Musk or a few other people may not like him as much. But the fact of the matter is this political drama. And you’re, you know, in political sociology, so you’re the right person to put this question to. We’re expected to really get very agitated about the political drama, but these folks act totally indifferent to this.
I mean, sometimes they weigh in because they’re a little bit worried that they might not fare as well with the other but we’re going through basically a charade of an election, and people are doing it in every country. Basically they’re not addressing the key question of, how are most people going to be helped or hurt by what’s going on and what’s going on makes a travesty, by the way, of the claim of every government, despite their ideology, China should be doing better if it’s still run by a communist party than you describe.
But here, when we talk about the free market and freedom in the west and so forth, basically, we’re creating this worldwide problem. And one of the reasons we’re hanging with China is they’re trying to get a little bit better deal for their own people, right? So they’re a threat now, right? That’s what really the BRICS challenge is.
A number of these countries, which includes, you know, I think 14 more just wanted to sign up, so quite a few countries now have a connection with it, includes South Africa, which people were very concerned for years about freedom in South Africa, obviously legitimately when it was apartheid, but now South Africa’s having trouble meeting the needs of its own people in post apartheid.
You have Brazil, a very important economy, and so just take us through this. These people basically have decision making power over what happens that indeed the president of the United States and the leader of China are curtailed by them. That’s the reality here. We could talk about different political systems in the world, but these folks operate everywhere in the multinational community, don’t they?
Peter Phillips
Absolutely and and I mean, they invest in the top 10 capital investment companies. They have over $100 billion invested in tobacco in the world. Now, tobacco kills 8 million people a year and and that’s ongoing annually, and it’s just a poison that’s out there in the world. They pay for the manufacturer of tobacco. So people, you know, who are addicted by it. So in a way, it’s a drug. Well, it is a drug that people are addicted to, and they continue to buy it, and it kills them. The same thing with alcohol.
The Titans have 60 billion dollars invested in the top alcohol producing companies in the world now alcohol. Half the profits in alcohol are made from 10% of the people who are alcoholics. So an alcoholic is someone who drinks 75 drinks a week, and there’s 20 million of them and 24 million of them in the United States. They’re the ones that make that give the profit to the alcohol industry, and that goes to Titan coffers.
They get returns on that. So they have, when we talk about global warming, the Titans have over $400 billion invested in the top nine oil companies. They finance oil production, which has doubled in the last few years, that it declined [inaudible] global warming, is continuing.
Robert Scheer
Okay, but just, let’s go through that statistic, because we’re this is going to be broadcast just before this, people feel this is a world shattering election in significance, half the people in the country think the other half will destroy their way of life. And there’s a real danger of that. There’s a great deal of instability. I’m not mocking that, but the fact of the matter is, these people are going to profit and control things no matter who wins the selection.
I want you to go through that example with oil, because you can talk all you want about climate change and your intention. And oh, Trump was insensitive and now Harris will be sensitive, but neither of them are going to make the key decisions right their donor class, their donor class is going to make it through these companies, 10 companies. That’s where the donor class, the big donor class, is putting their money. Isn’t that the message here?
Peter Phillips
that’s absolutely true. So when you talk about only 10 companies controlling 50 trillion then there’s only 31 companies that control $83 trillion worth of capital. So there’s now, there are 17 giants five years ago now there’s 31 giants. These are capital investment companies that manage wealth.
Robert Scheer
But the donor class, that’s the donor class, puts their money. People have to understand it, because when you read the New York Times, you think, Oh, the donor class. What are they? Oh, they’re nice people to help the blind. The donor class. How nice of them. Bill Gates, he helps people read or something.
But this donor class has put capitalism or socialism or anything else in the world right to the side, pushed it to the side, and they say we want ours, and we want it in extreme amounts, and we don’t care that any income inequality in the world is widening to alarming, again, the word alarming degree because of what we do, and we are unaccountable. And we want a president.
Whoever we back, we will. We back both of them. We want a president in the most powerful economy, with the biggest military and all of its 750 bases. We want that President not to touch us, not to interfere with what we do. Right? That’s what they all agree on.
Peter Phillips
Absolutely and I mean this upper, this upper 1% this is what you call you’re calling the donor class a capitalist…
Robert Scheer
I don’t call them that. New York Times calls them the donor class, because they’re the people obviously, who picked Harris. That’s why there wasn’t a new primary. They kept Biden in there as long as they could. And they’re the people that picked Trump. They tried an experiment with him for four years.
Now, some of them are scared about that, but this donor class is going to end up with a president that certainly will not trouble their system of private investment, of their private billionaire funds. That is the story. It’s not taught, it’s not described, it’s not dealt with by the media, if you want.
I know you did work with Project Censored, an admirable group, but this is not censorship by fiat. It’s just by consensus of the super rich who control the media, control governments and almost irrespective of what kind of political system you have.
Peter Phillips
That’s pretty accurate. I would say the 1% have the wealth. The rest of us get by, some of us get by. Most of the world doesn’t get by very well at all, and at the bottom, thousands of people are dying every day because of malnutrition and inequality.
Robert Scheer
So to go back to oil, I cut you off, and it’s an important example. We could talk about climate.
Peter Phillips
Global warming is happening. It continues to happen. The Paris Accords that said we weren’t going to get above you know, the certain percentages are in the past. We’re producing more carbon dioxide than ever, and that, you know, they’re hoping for a technological fix, that they’ll be able to build these giant air sucking machines that will take the carbon dioxide out and keep, you know, keep it the air breathable.
Al Gore thinks that’s absolutely ridiculous, but that, you know, there’s no turning back from this capital investment, which includes oil, and there’s no cutting back on that. There’s no cutting back on building nuclear weapons and weapons of war. That’s very profitable. $260 billion of capital investment from the 1% are invested in the war companies. All of them make money off the war in Israel. All of them are making money, you know, by the bombs that are being dropped on Gaza.
I did a research on the 26 companies that the Friends Committee on Legislation had identified as profit making from the for the war and on Israel, and that there, there have, they’re, they’re making millions of dollars off of selling weapons of war. A big part of that is weapons that Israel is buying, which are primarily financed by the US. So US tax dollars finance weapons production for Israel to acquire or use.
We give that away and it’s designed to continue to protect investment capital worldwide. There’s no other way to say it. The investor class, 1% has control of the financial resources of the world. They do this now through investment management companies who are identifiable, and the people who manage those companies, I list all 117 of them in the book so you can take people like…
Robert Scheer
Go through the people that’s important. Yeah, these are familiar names,
Peter Phillips
All right. Well, the number one Titan is Larry Fink.
Robert Scheer
Do you have a copy of the book you can hold up for the people who watched us on YouTube? There’s the book. Yeah, “Titans of Capital: How Concentrated Wealth Threatens Humanity,” and this is not kidding around. You will not solve the problems of climate change. You will not solve the problems of incredible income differences. I mean, I think of the obscenities. I mean, sorry, I got upset about it last night because I was reading about the tariffs against EVs coming from China and Europe.
Europe is complicit with the United States and trying to control the world economy, and they’ve made a done a good job from their own pocketbook. And here’s China trying to feed, when I was in the center for Chinese studies at UC Berkeley, we said China could never develop because they had so many people, they got a billion more. They’re trying to feed them, and they’re finally making some progress in doing that. And say, oh, no, no, you can’t sell your cars in Europe, you know, but we can sell our Mercedes and BMWs in China.
And now, you know, we’re threatening war. We’re actually thinking about, you know, our military is actually thinking about what would surely be World War III and destroy the planet with China. And why? Because they’re threatening to build chips and get into high end. So they’re not just making all the iPhones. They can actually make some of the profitable items for themselves instead of Cupertino. And that’s worth going to war.
There’s a moral obscenity here and that your book lays out that really, it mocks any notion of democracy or agency on the part of ordinary people. It’s a bizarre course on the history of human experience. Bizarre. And your book does about as good a job as I know of laying it out well.
Peter Phillips
Thank you very much for that. Very nice of you to say, I mean, China has a burgeoning middle class. They have 350 million households now, 1 billion people that over make over $20,000, $23,000, $24,000 a year, which gives them more. You know, they can buy a house. They can have a car.
They can go on a vacation. China, their life expectancies higher than the US. So the betterment for the people there has massively increased. There’s still a large number of poor people, several hundred million at $5 a day, but there’s problems with how their political system works, and repression and a variety of other issues, but nonetheless, their population overall is doing better than the rest of the world.
Robert Scheer
So think about Nancy Pelosi when she insisted on bringing up the Taiwan issue. Let’s provoke China on Taiwan and here Nancy Pelosi, you know, has serviced this, this predatory economy of ours has given these greed mongers and the people that that you are describing everything they have wanted when she’s been to degrees, she’s been in power and one of the most powerful people United States.
So instead of saying, you know, which would be constructive, pointing out, yes, it would be better if China also recognized the human right to be in a labor union and recognize other human rights of people to organize and get better pay and maybe strike against Apple so those people driven to suicide working long hours assembling our iPhones, maybe they should get better pay.
There are human rights issues in China and elsewhere, including the United States, that but they also relate to the economic rewards and so forth. And instead of that, she’s going to pick up this old fight about between Taiwan and China. And I’m bringing her up because she represents, for a lot of people I know, enlightened Democratic Party leadership. And then, of course, Trump is particularly evil on this stuff, because he blamed China for everything, including the pandemic, you know, everything else.
So we live in a world where we don’t have adults watching the store, but they are watching their own private wealth. And that’s really the power of your book, that so much of what we do engages in a charade about power, the real power. And you bring it up, it’s a number. There are 117 Titans. But that’s not a gimmick. It’s a reality check and and those are the people. Let’s remind people what we’re talking about. They have to deliver a certain return. So the billionaire and the upper millionaire, I wouldn’t insult it by throwing in every millionaire.
A million is nothing. Now it’s chump change to these people, but the billionaire class and these super wealthy people, this is private investor. They go to these companies. They’re demanding an incredible return. Mocks any kind of saving account any normal person could have or do with their money and they set the whole agenda. That is really what we’re talking about. It’s not just Elon Musk. He’s just one of them, maybe one of the more offensive or visible people, or a Peter Thiel. But you know, Bill Gates, even like I was here today,
The Atlantic magazine, which celebrates this whole global economy. And if you go to Apple news, which is our main source of news now, Google News, or Apple news, the these other organizations, like New York Times and so forth. They circulate, really, through them. And then, you know, I’m not going to put down Steve Jobs widow, but she pays for the Atlantic Council. Is she experiencing this pain? I’m sure her money is being managed in this same way.
Peter Phillips
Absolutely.
Robert Scheer
What are we talking about?
Peter Phillips
Among managers, they’re concerned that China’s economy ought is now on par with the US that they can, that they will be limited in their ability to continue to grow and expand by China. And they’ve got $30 billion invested in China, but it’s against a lot of invest in companies in China that support their military. So they can’t invest there, but there’s still, you know, widespread Titan investments in China.
But the wealth that they’re seeing, if they want to continue to see it grow, China is conceived as a threat, plus China is controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, which is a political party that is not controlled by rich people. The Chinese Communist Party, they have five, 600 billionaires in China. The difference with their billionaires is that they have little to say about the Chinese government.
Robert Scheer
But it’s not just China, because now they don’t like Modi in India, because he says, Look, we got a lot of mouths to feed here in India, and you guys are giving us a raw deal, and they don’t like Lulu. They didn’t like it his predecessor. He’s on the left, his predecessor on the right, in Brazil, because, say, Brazil, they say, look, that matter. Yeah, exactly. So not even their political system, their religion.
Even Saudi Arabia, they don’t like Saudi Arabia says, Wait a minute, we may run out of oil, and we got people here, and we got to do some green energy, and we got to do something. And besides, you’re going to screw us. So we’re going to sell, we’re not going to undermine Russia right now. That was the big betrayal here. If Saudi Arabia wanted to, they could have undermined Putin, you know, and just let the oil flow out and make less money and wipe them out.
But they didn’t go along, you know. And so you have this emerging alliance in the world. This is why I bring up BRICS and where you make a very important point, they are willing to restrain this investor gang. I’m going to call them a gang. You call them, what’d you call them? What’s your title? Titans? Titans dignifies this. They’re the people who did the banking swindle in the United States. Titans is too dignified, you know, these people are hustlers. They’re scam artists. If they were the mafia, you’d throw them in jail, but not one of them went to jail.
And these people are quite willing to rip off the whole world, you know? And that’s really the issue. And we didn’t like Russia, but when it was communist, we don’t like Russia when it’s anti communist. After all, Putin defeated the communists. So that is all part of an old play theater. We don’t like we didn’t like India when they were neutral and, you know, Nehru and that, and we don’t like them with Modi, because anybody who stands up for their own nation and their own people, because otherwise they’re going to get, you know, troubled people are going to revolt against them. They’re the enemy because they’re going to get in the way of you getting, what did you say the minimal profit they have to come up with?
Peter Phillips
Oh, eight plus percent.
Robert Scheer
So they’re going to get in the way if they allow you to do that, which when China was fine with that, then nobody’s going to move against them. And probably Elon Musk is whispering in Donald Trump’s ear. Hey, wait a minute. I got my biggest plant there in Shanghai. So don’t go too far with your rhetoric. So there is a counter veiling power, if these people can make their money plundering China or India or Brazil, they’re going to do it right? It’s just when those people get uppity and say, Hey, we got to get a bigger piece of this pie that the Titan group says, Wait a minute. Maybe you got to be reined in. And we do have our military. We do have these Western governments that will do our bidding. That’s really the big message.
Peter Phillips
That and then there’s policy groups. The largest now is the World Economic Forum, which is the top 2,000 to 3,000 corporations in the world send their CEOs there, to Davos every year. And there’s a global leaders attend, and they’re talking about a better capitalism, a state, what they call stakeholders capitalism, in other words, capitalism with a conscience and that they’re going to try to do this, environmental, social and governmental protections, ESG protections in terms of how investment capital is decided, where it’s invested, it’s not working.
They’re not doing anything different, other than allowing the continued concentration of capital globally. And they’re trying to protect that. And it’s ESG is a sort of propaganda, you know, newspaper release media concept that we’re trying to have betterment in the world and that it’s going to trickle down. And that’s not happening. It’s clear that the global warming is worse, the dangers of war are higher, and wealth is even more concentrated.
Robert Scheer
Let me [inaudible] with it that sentence, because that is, to my money, the real message of your book is that we’re in the charade of arguing about everything in the sun, except where is power and the things that concern us all the issues, the quality of life, our individual freedom, we’re not going to have individual freedom if people are not surviving economically, if they’re not getting what they think is a decent share. So we got only a few minutes, if you could just, you know, I want people to understand this is not just another book.
And you know, you can disagree with things in it. You can argue and so forth. But if the message of this book is correct, then we are wasting a hell of a lot of time, whether we’re in the Trump is our part, or where the super Harris is great and anew. And it’s important to have it is to have a woman and a woman of color be president. Yes, let’s break the glass ceiling. It has to be broken. But if you read this book, you will understand, if we don’t hold anybody we’re going to vote for and hold their feet to the fire and say, are you dealing with titans of capital?
Peter Phillips, if you’re not dealing with this issue, this is all a con game. It’s all a Ponzi scheme. And this guy, you know, and I never even thought of it before, political sociology. But that is C. Wright Mills, you are doing what the great soci and not only C Wright Mills but all the great sociologists did is call our attention to what the economists want, with the exception of a few great ones want to ignore, which is the social, political implication of this game of economics. It’s not econometrics, it’s not mathematical formula, it’s not algorithms.
It’s not that. It’s who has power, how is it used, and who does the screwing? Who gets screwed? What happens to the great mass of people. And you make it front and center, and you’re not the only one. There have been some very good books that have come out on this issue of concentration. But this one really pushes it very far in connecting to what ails us. I’ve taken longer than I promised, but why don’t you summarize it and take this time now I’ll manage to shut up and tell me what we left out.
Peter Phillips
Well, C. Wright Mills’ “The Power Elite,” was one of my first reads in college. And right at the same time, Bill Domhoff was writing the books, “Who Rules America,” which he’s done a lot of, and he really says there was an upper class system in the US university, private club based that was making the policy decisions for the government, that was all accurate.
Now what’s happened in the last 20, 30 years is globalization, that the financialization of the world and capital investment everywhere has opened up a new avenues for concentration of capital that’s global. And so William I Robinson at UC Santa Barbara has a number of books on global capital and transnational capitalist class. So it’s the same thing, only now it’s global. So I’m writing how wealth is concentrated. This is a global issue.
That’s why there’s a picture of the globe on the cover. And that’s, that’s the difference between C. Wright Mills 60 years ago, and today, it’s the same powerful entities and people now it’s just on a global scale.
Robert Scheer
Well, that summarizes it, and I want to thank you for doing this because, and I forget I’m blocking on the name, but it was a much celebrated book that talked about class and the concentration of power. I should give it a shout out, but I’m blocking on it, but you’ve mentioned a few good ones to start with. But again, hold up to cover, you know, “Titans of Capital.” And I was in graduate school in economics, and I really spent a lot of my life studying this question.
I think you hit, well, I hope it’s not the third rail, but you expose the raw nerve of our system. And if people don’t, they can disagree or argue, but if they don’t start or include in their conversation the ideas, whether they come from you and they come from you, I think better at this point than just about anywhere else. But if people don’t factor this in, they’re really wasting their time. They’re not discussing what’s going on. And yeah, and we’re not going to we’re not going to prevent the nuclear war unless global warming steps up, and that comes first.
But we’re in a whole lot of trouble. Most people, even in the United States, know that, and I say even, because we have the delusion that we have good people running things and they’re going to come around to their senses, but most of us don’t believe that anymore. The reason we’re in so much pain and so much trouble is that our schools have trained these Titans. They’ve justified our media, our media, our academic world, our political establishment in the West, in the democratic world, in the free world, has actually propagandized for this ruling elite of serving the rich.
That’s all that they’re expected to do is serve the super wealthy, and that this extreme class difference. Remember why they crushed Occupy because it called attention in the face of Wall Street right there, in the face of the major cities, it was primarily Democratic mayors who ended up calling out the cops and arresting people in cities like Los Angeles and Boston and elsewhere, I think that had an independent candidate that maybe was Giuliani or somebody in New York, but it was still a Democratic establishment that ran most of New York City, and they crushed this movement because it called attention from ordinary people, saying, we’re hurting here in the center of finance, in the center of world capitalism, people were on Wall Street saying, we’re hurting you’re ignoring us.
You’re hurting us. Okay, not ignoring you’re hurting us. You know, stop it. And they were crushed. They were arrested. The movement was broken. And then people are surprised. We get a right wing rebellion in Donald Trump and this election, because other people were not living in Manhattan, and they can see the pain.
And so they went for a right wing populist instead of for a progressive populist like Bernie Sanders, who did respond to the Occupy movement. And what do we have? We have a situation. This is the most startling statistic I didn’t get from your book. I just got it from you. Now, maybe it’s in your book. You said it’s doubled in the last five years?
Peter Phillips
Yes, absolutely.
Robert Scheer
These gone offs have taken double what they got.
Peter Phillips
Their wealth is increasing very rapidly. And these, these wealth management companies, have doubled the amount of capital that they’re managing.
Robert Scheer
So, okay, maybe that’s alarming, but it’s not alarmist, okay, it’s truth and you gotta face it, all right, I’ll end on that. I want to thank you for doing that. And could you hold up the book one more time? I always forget to do that.
Peter Phillips
Yes, thanks for having me on Bob. I greatly appreciate it.
Robert Scheer
If you can’t read an old fashioned book. Get it on Kindle. Get it but somewhere, get it from a small surviving bookstore, but get it. I’m sorry, tell them again. I’ve had other people on from that. It’s great. Okay, I want to thank Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian at KCRW, a fairly independent NPR, I shouldn’t say fairly a good independent NPR station and part of the NPR network. So it’s good to know that in NPR, there’s still some desire to serve the underserved. Much of the media has forgotten that slogan.
I want to thank Christopher Ho and Laura Kondourajian. I want to thank Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, who once again insisted on doing your book and not that I was resistant, but he kept pushing it. I want to thank Diego Ramos, who writes as the managing editor of ScheerPost and writes the intro for these and Max Jones, who is the producer of the video that very much extends the reach of these shows.
I want to thank the JKW Foundation in memory of Jean Stein, a public intellectual, a woman who came from a family that might have invested in these things, but nonetheless she took her talent and her interest to be a pioneering writer and for supporting these shows, and I want to thank Integrity Media, a foundation that supplies some money to people challenging the system and trying to do honest journalism. That’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. See you next week.
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Robert Scheer
Robert Scheer, publisher of ScheerPost and award-winning journalist and author of a dozen books, has a reputation for strong social and political writing over his nearly 60 years as a journalist. His award-winning journalism has appeared in publications nationwide—he was Vietnam correspondent and editor of Ramparts magazine, national correspondent and columnist for the Los Angeles Times—and his in-depth interviews with Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev and others made headlines. He co-hosted KCRW’s political program Left, Right and Center and now hosts Scheer Intelligence, a KCRW podcast with people who discuss the day’s most important issues.
