What Power Looks Like
April 10th, 2008In case Newsweek’s fluff isn’t cutting it for you, here are some core materials:
The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills
Anglo-American Establishment by Carroll Quigley
Who Rules America? Power, Politics, and Social Change by G. William Domhoff
Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of the American Rich by Kevin Phillips
War is a Racket: The Antiwar Classic by America’s Most Decorated Soldier by Smedley D. Butler
America’s Secret Establishment: An Introduction to the Order of Skull & Bones by Antony C. Sutton
Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina by Peter Dale Scott
The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve by G. Edward Griffin
Anyway… That list could just keep going.
Via: Newsweek:
That such a group exists is indisputable. It includes the heads of the biggest financial institutions, the 14 families Blankfein joked about, and then some; the top 50 control almost $50 trillion in assets. The heads of the world’s biggest corporations are also members; the top 2,000 support perhaps 500 million people, generate almost $30 trillion in sales and have well over $100 trillion in assets. The list also includes top government officials with real cross-border influence: heads of state, of course, leading diplomats and military chiefs, but also central bankers like Geithner and Bernanke, and their counterparts like Chinese Central Bank Gov. Zhou Xiaochuan, reappointed this week, and the other top economic officials responsible for the world’s fastest-growing economy and its nearly $1.5 trillion in reserves.
They are joined by media barons like Rupert Murdoch, whose global network of newspapers, Web products, movie studios and TV stations reach hundreds of millions of people every day, or tech entrepreneurs like Facebook wunderkind, 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, whose company is redefining what global community means. Alongside them you’ll also find those who have different forms of power: religious leaders from the pope to Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei, perhaps the most powerful man in the Middle East today; clerics who have taken to a media pulpit and reach millions around the world daily like Latin America’s Luis Palau or the Egyptian “tele-Muslim,” former accountant turned religious TV star Amr Khaled. Cultural icons who use their celebrity platforms for activism like Bono and Angelina Jolie would certainly make the list, as would terrorist leaders and others who form a kind of shadow elite, like Osama bin Laden or the recently arrested arms dealer, Russia’s Viktor Bout. A growing number of tycoons from emerging markets make the cut: Indian industrialist Ratan Tata, Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, Saudi oil investor Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, and Chinese real-estate billionaire Yang Huiyan, among others.
One can debate who is in and who is out endlessly. Indeed, given that so much power today is institutional or job related (and thus fleeting), any ranked list is out of date almost as soon as it’s finished. Those who would have dropped off the list so far this year include the former heads of big banks who lost their jobs as a result of betting too heavily on subprime loans, including the ex-leaders of Citibank, Merrill Lynch and, as of last week, UBS. This is a very fluid ranking. But for the purposes of trying to understand the nature of today’s topmost global elite, working with the above criteria, I have ended up with a core group of somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 people—meaning that each one is “one in a million.”
I haven’t read his book yet, but recently read an interview with him, which I can’t post re copyright. Engdahl’s book looks to be the expose of the power the Rockefeller’s have had behind genetically modified seeds, plants, animals. Think that the Rockefeller’s were funding eugenics and this has now become genetics. Its really quite sickening really, to see that people of wealth and power have nothing better to do with their “moral energy” than to concentrate it on killing off the surplus population. It also discusses how the policies of Bush I and Clinton I, as well as Tony Blair have aided and abetted this “Bittenburg Group” agenda. Totally sickening.
http://www.amazon.com/Seeds-Destruction-Hidden-Genetic-Manipulation/dp/0973714727/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207867339&sr=1-1