1. New Scientist article, "Revealed - the capitalist network that runs the world," provides a synopsis of Vitali, Glattfelder and Battiston's forthcoming article, "The network of global corporate control," (to be published in PLoS ONE) presenting their rigorous economics-and-systems'-theory analysis of the structure of the ownership and control network existing among 43,060 incestuously-related trasnsnational corporations.
I'm reading the paper itself, but it is dense and filled with befuddling algorithms, abbreviations, tables and footnotes optimized for bound print publication but difficult to cross-reference in the hand-held .pdf app through which I'm reading, so I am not finished and unready, Dear Reader, and anyway probably wouldn't dare try, to summarize it or pick out pithy passages: Struggle with the algorithms yourself -- goggle at the figures; slog through the prose -- like I am, and make up your own mind. From New Scientist:
From . . . a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled . . . 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them[,] [t]hen . . . constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.
The work . . . revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships. Each . . . had ties to two or more other companies, and on average . . . were connected to 20. [A]lthough they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own . . . the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing . . . 60 per cent of global revenues.
When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions.
From the study itself:
This is the first time a ranking of economic actors by global control is presented. Notice that many actors belong to the financial sector . . . and many . . . are well-known global players. [T]his ranking . . . shows that many of the top actors belong to the core. This means that they do not carry out their business in isolation but . . . are tied together in an extremely entangled web of control. This finding is extremely important since there was no prior economic theory or empirical evidence regarding whether and how top players are connected. Finally, it should be noted that governments and natural persons are only featured further down in the list.
[T]he Paid Detail Unit . . . allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye . . . pay[ing] an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest. The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.
New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police. The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit. The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.
The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master.