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Peter Phillips discussing the subject of his new book Giants: The Global Power Elite
September 19, 2018 @ 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm UTC+0
Giants: The Global Power Elite
By Peter Phillips
Introduction by William I. Robinson
published by Seven Stories Press
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 facilitors–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 consitutes 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, director emeritus of Project Censored and president of the Media Freedom Foundation, is an associate professor of sociology at Sonoma State University. Known for his op-ed pieces in the alternative press and independent newspapers nationwide, such as Z magazine and Social Policy, Phillips is also the winner of the 2009 Dallas Smythe Award, presented by the Union for Democratic Communication. He lives in Southern California.