The Superclass

ashurbanipal · 04-08-08, 09:06 AM

This article seems to speak for itself, and indeed it speaks volumes, especially if you're familiar with the territory:

What Power Looks Like | Newsweek International Edition | Newsweek.com

A few selected quotes:

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They ride on Gulfstreams, set the global agenda, and manage the credit crunch in their spare time. They have more in common with each other than their countrymen. Meet the Superclass.

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There was nothing in writing, no rules, no formal process, and while no one asked the Fed to act, the Fed let everyone in the markets know it was acting. The beauty of the process was its absolute efficiency, seeing what a tight circle of large firms with "some global reach" could get done, fast—with an executive committee of only four running the weekly conference call until the crisis was past. "There is no formal mechanism we could have used to force this on anybody, so we had to invent it. I think the premise going forward is that you have to have a borderless, collaborative process.

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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.

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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.

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Thanks to this kind of social interaction, large portions of the global superclass are well acquainted with each other. Says Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of Wall Street's Blackstone Group, "The world is pretty small. In almost every one of the areas in which I am dealing or in which we at Blackstone are looking at deals, you find it is just 20, 30 or 50 people worldwide who drive the industry or the sector." Numbers tell the same tale. If you take just the people who serve in top management positions or on the boards of the five biggest companies in the world, you'll find they also serve on the boards of an additional 140 other major companies and 22 universities.

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With the salaries of major multinational CEOs now averaging more than 350 times that of the average employee— a tenfold increase over the disparities of the 1970s—there is a growing anger that those with the power are using it to unfairly feather their own nests.

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...even though many of those supporting the bailout/buyout were the same who have long clamored for "self-regulation," even though many were the ones who had cited the moral hazard of helping to bail out homeowners and encouraging their bad borrowing behavior. And so you have a financial leadership structure that bails out investment bankers worldwide, but not homeowners.

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And the more members of the superclass adopt a business-as-usual attitude toward countries that ignore political or social conditions, the less likely the superclass will be to reform itself. In short, while we may have a somewhat different superclass in the future, until the people of the world are more comfortable with creating the kind of strong global governance mechanisms that can contain and regulate many of their activities, the 6,000 will continue to play the greatest role of any group on the planet in defining our times.

As I believe I have maintained before, the wealthy and powerful collude in their own interests, often at the expense of everyone else on the planet. They do not compete in any sense that is usually understood.

128shot · 04-08-08, 10:01 PM

..is this really a conspiracy tho?

its obviously out in the open. for something to really be a conspiracy, doesn't it usually have to be hush hush?

ashurbanipal · 04-09-08, 10:39 AM

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Originally Posted by 128shot

..is this really a conspiracy tho?

its obviously out in the open. for something to really be a conspiracy, doesn't it usually have to be hush hush?

I don't think so. "Conspire" just means (literally) "to breathe together," which just implies a group of people all sharing the same plans. The global elite (quite separate from the illuminati) have been doing this for a couple of centuries. We acknowledge that they were doing it in any time prior to our own, but in our own, no, no, it just can't be happening. The next generation will believe the same thing.

Most conspiracies are out in the open and people are just too apathetic or dumb to care about them. Why should they? A new episode of "American Idol" is coming on and the "value" of their home just shot up another $10,000.

If you care to look, you will find plenty of evidence that there have been multiple conspiracies going on, right out in the open, for several decades. For instance, the process of drug money being laundered on Wall Street, the CIA trafficking drugs for the purpose of keeping the Dow aloft. The "President's Working Group on the Economy," affectionately known as the "Plunge Protection Team," whose job it is to purchase large blocks of stock with fake money whenever the market looks set to crash. Government collusion on everything from embezzelment to fraud to murder. It's all out there in the public eye, all being reported on every day. And none of it should be in the least surprising, because it's all merely a reflection, writ large, of our own day-to-day dealings.

The fantasy, so often dramatized in hollywood, of someone "blowing the whistle" and going public with some kind of damaging evidence is just that--fantasy. No one will pay any attention unless Wolf Blitzer, Katie Couric, or Dan Rather tells them they should.

All of that is slowly winding to a close, though, and people will begin to care. However, by now it is too late to do anything about it. The conspirators are quite safe and in control of what concerns them most. We are all now ruled, once again, by a bunch of sociopaths.