银行家统治世界。瑞士联邦理工学院一份最新研究如是说。该研究报告由史蒂芬尼娅•维塔利（Stefania Vitali）、詹姆士•格拉特菲德尔（James Glattfelder）和史蒂芬诺•巴提斯顿（Stefano Battiston）共同撰写，题目是《全球性企业控制网络》。其中写道：
“我们发现，跨国企业来自巨型的蝴蝶结型结构，大量的控制留向少量紧密相连的金融机构核心。该核心可以被看作一个超级经济体，提出对于研究和政策制定都很重要的议题。”
研究指出，147家强势企业控制着过分大量的经济活动——约占40%。在前50名中，45家是金融公司。包括巴克莱银行（号称最具影响力），摩根大通，瑞士联合银行和其他为人所熟悉或不那么为人所知的名字。
24家世美国公司，8家是英国公司，5家在法国，4家在日本，还有德国，瑞士和荷兰，各有两家。加拿大有一家。
另外，“排头的”公司“实际控制力是基于其资产所作出的估计的十倍”。
结果是，他们在政治、金融和经济活动上有巨大的影响力。
大卫•科腾（David Korten）在他的书《当企业统治世界》中说，他们能够与政府共谋，将大量的公共权力、财产和资源转成私有。金钱权力和高度集中的财富对人类伤害尤为大。
“这些力量已经让”金融机构和其他企业捕食者“变成市场暴政的工具，这种暴政正像癌症一样在全球蔓延，其前所未有的规模进行殖民，毁灭生计，驱逐人群，让民主体制失效，其对金钱的贪得无厌使之不惜吞噬生活”，而利润就是一切的目的。
只有底限的优先项和市场操纵才重要，而非人类福祉，环境洁净，和平，公平或正义。
跨国巨人是我们的时代的统治机构——尤其是能运用金钱力量控制一切的金融公司。
他们决定谁来管治以及如何管治，谁是法官，订立什么法律，以及是否为战争买单。企业操纵，尤其是金融权力，与民主价值并不相容。
私人霸权横行无道。他们是捕食者。我们是猎物。每天，我们都被生吞活剥。他们这样做，因为他们能，而在美国，则是因为天命所授。
上市的美国公司，包括金融公司，必须通过更高的利润最大化资产价值来服务持股人。他们通过无情地剥削国家、人民和资源来达到目的。
社会责任无关紧要。成为工人友好企业、成为好公民、或地球之友，都不重要。底线有限项才重要。不能完成信托责任意味着解除合约或持股人诉讼。
但美国宪法或法律并没有赋予企业他们现有的权利。他们通过跻身华盛顿、国家法院、国家资本和市政厅来夺权。
结果是，世界上最大的经济体过半是企业。控制金钱权力的金融企业是最有统治力的。
企业法人制增加了他们的力量，想象一下就知道。虽然企业不是人，他们可以永远存在，改变身份，在世界上多个地方定居，不会因为犯错而被监禁，而且可以用各种理由把自己变成新的实体。
他们享有与人一样的权利和保障，然而不需要承担义务。结果就是，他们毫无约束，尤其是以公众代价控制金钱的金融巨头。
自二十世纪六十年代末开始，金融化渐成主导。经济控制从产业转向金融。企业现在是资产集合，流动性越高越好。一种新型垄断金融资本主义发展来开发其中价值。
FIRE部门（金融、保险和地产）捕食者资本化。赌场资本主义成就卓著，在当下繁荣茁壮。主要的玩家尽得其利，从投机、狡辩和诈骗中获取暴利。
迅速生长中的金融上层建筑获得了它自己的生命。今天，它是全能的，尤其是在欧美。他们的商业模式包括抢夺任何可以赚钱的东西，无论可能引致什么伤害。
钱不是什么都能买到，但能买到足够的影响力。房间里最聪明的人占上风，收买政治家就像买牙膏一样简单。民主只是说说而已。
只有财富和权力能说话。足够的财富和权力让金融巨头变成怪兽。无论他们想要什么，他们都能得到，包括在法律以外自由运作的权利，操纵市场，欺骗投资者，对国家和人民进行露天开采，并且在走过头的时候得到公共开支的拯救。
在奥巴马和欧洲领导者的治下，不正之风中最糟糕的繁衍茂盛。狐狸守着鸡舍，疯人管理病院，监管者不监管，调查者不调查。高层刑事诈骗得到默许。毫无约制。
只要银行家们能领到薪水，公众考量无关紧要，保持低通胀和长期增长也不是目标。如今，这是美国和水深火热中的欧元区国家的头等大事。
华尔街统治对于美国至关重要。在欧洲，“三驾马车”无所不能——国际货币基金，欧盟和欧洲中央银行。被欧元约束条款束缚的国家不能贬值货币以增强竞争力，不能自由地货币化债务，也不能修订刺激增长的财政政策。
然而，他们却被银行家勒令要求进贡。换句话说，金融政变威权凌驾于主权政府之上。他们贪婪地占据，制定规则，确立条款，发布命令，并向政治领袖施压、行贿或使用强力，以获得其默许。否则，他们就会被撤换。
工薪家庭承担着失业、工资和福利裁减、高税率和其他紧缩政策所带来的压力，这些政策是为了保证银行家们能收到工资。
欧洲经济合作组织的报告讨论了过去三十年中其三十四个成员国所蒙受的损失，其中包括美国、日本、西欧和其他国家。
报告题目是“我们分开站：为何不平等持续增长”。其中讨论了自1980年代早期至2008年全球经济危机的状况。其影响是让两亿工人失业，加上更多紧缩政策的实施。
在欧洲经济合作组织成员国中，前10%比最后的10%要好九倍。美国，以色列和土耳其是最不平等的工业化国家，比率是14:1。在英国、日本、意大利和南韩，差距是10:1。
不断增长的不平等还影响了“有平等主义传统的国家”，如德国、丹麦和瑞典。他们从1980年代的5:1走到今天的6:1。墨西哥和智利最糟糕，比率是25:1。
在美国，1%的人控制20%的总收入和比率更大的资产。财富极端集中也影响到欧洲国家，状况跟美国一样。
报告称，收入不平等“在1970年代末期开始增加，在某些英语国家是自1980年代早期开始的，尤其是英国和美国，还有以色列。”
自1980年代后期开始，不平等范围愈广。与此同时，劳工权益被牺牲，以满足企业的底线利益。另外，金融资本变得更加全能。结果是，金钱权力掌控一切。
紧缩政策严重影响那些在糟糕的欧元区国家和其他面临经济困境的国家的工薪家庭。希腊的问题尤为严重，裁员、减薪减福利和高税率反复出现。
在十二月初，落选的总理卢卡斯•帕帕季莫斯（Lucas Papademos 希腊银行前任主席和欧洲央行前任主席）强行要议会通过更加多的紧缩政策。这是获得八十亿欧元的援助的条件。
最后的措施包括，开支再缩减五十亿欧元，开征三十六亿的新税，退休金减少15%，工资进一步下调。另外，更多政策还在计划中。
帕帕季莫斯说“我国的金融危机不是风暴过境……它需要许多年”的工人更大的牺牲，以保证银行家拿到他们的钱。
事实上，人们承受的薪酬、福利、退休金及其他款项的裁减越多，希腊的经济就越弱，因为工薪阶层失去购买力，他们变成一个不再适合生存的国家的农奴。
数百万希腊人正在受穷。失业率高达20%。15至24岁的年轻人中，失业率高达50%。更多年的痛苦正被计划着以保证银行家的薪酬。可以想见，希腊迟早要爆炸。
另外，希腊借的债越多，它就越不能偿还，它将更快地走向劳役偿债。而且，迈克尔•哈德逊（Michael Hudson）说，“初级数学和政治原理”说明“这些债根本还不掉，也不会被还掉。”
十二月初，落选意大利总理马里奥•蒙蒂（Mario Monti，曾是高盛安插到欧盟中的官员，有些人称他为‘三卡把戏蒙蒂’），推出了他的系列紧缩政策。
要偿还意大利借下的一万六千亿美元债务，政策包括攻击其社保退休金系统。退休之后，全家就指望这些钱了。除此以外，退休年龄到2018年从58岁提升到66岁，通胀调整后增长会停止，而且要符合条件，工人必须缴纳42年的退休保险。
另外，增值税会增长2%，开除工人比以前任何时候都要简单。就像希腊一样，更多的紧缩政策正在被计划，针对工人，便宜银行家、其他受宠企业和意大利的超级富豪。
政策还提升了除增值税以外的其他税率，将工作日延长半个小时但没有额外工资，并且取消了等于两个月工资的花红。
这些措施继承了更早的政策，包括裁减公共部门工资10%，取消四个假日，加班工资减少50%，轮班工资下调，为增加雇主控制雇员工作时间的灵活性而启用“时间银行“，让开除更简单更便宜，使用更短的定期合同，终止小休，并且降低失业保障。
结语
金融暴君统治欧美。结果将会是民众愤怒。
革命的火花还会远吗？忍受痛楚达到一定程度就无法再忍。之后什么事都可能发生，或好，或坏。
希望一个更好的没有银行家的掠夺的世界会到来。这是我们唯一的机会！
Bankers rule the world. A new Swiss Federal Institute of Technology study says so. Written by Stefania Vitali, James Glattfelder and Stefano Battiston, it’s titled “The network of global corporate control,” saying:
“We find that transnational corporations from a giant bow-tie structure and that a large portion of control flows to a small tightly-knit core of financial institutions. This core can be seen as an economic ‘super-entity’ that raises new important issues both for researches and policy makers.”
The study says 147 powerful companies control an inordinate amount of economic activity – about 40%. Among the top 50, 45 are financial firms. They include Barclays PLC (called most influential), JPMorgan Chase, UBS, and other familiar and less known names.
Twenty-four companies are US-based, followed by eight in Britain, five in France, four in Japan, and Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands with two each. Canada has one.
Moreover, “top ranked” companies “hold a control ten times bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth.”
As a result, they have enormous influence over political, financial, and economic activity.
In his book titled, “When Corporations Rule the World,” David Korten said they’re able to transfer enormous amounts of power, wealth and resources from public to private hands with government complicity. Money power and concentrated wealth in few hands especially harm humanity.
“These forces have transformed” financial institutions and other corporate predators “into instruments of a market tyranny that is extending its reach across the planet like a cancer, colonizing ever more of the planet’s living spaces, destroying livelihoods, displacing people, rendering democratic institutions impotent, and feeding on life in an insatiable quest for money” and profits as a be and end all.
Only bottom line priorities and market dominance matter, not human welfare, environmental sanity, peace, equity and justice.
Transnational giants are the dominant institution of our time – especially financial ones with money power control of everything.
They decide who governs and how, who serves on courts, what laws are enacted, and whether or not wars are waged. Corporate dominance, especially financial power, and democratic values are incompatible.
They operate ruthlessly as private tyrannies. They’re predators. We’re prey, and every day we’re eaten alive. They do it because they can, and in America by mandate.
Publicly owned US corporations, including financial ones, must serve shareholders by maximizing equity value through higher profits. They do it by exploiting nations, people and resources ruthlessly.
Social responsibility doesn’t matter. Neither does being worker-friendly, a good citizen, or friend of the earth. Bottom line priorities alone matter. Failure to pursue fiduciary responsibilities means possible dismissal or shareholder lawsuits.
Yet nothing in America’s Constitution or statute laws endow corporations with their rights. They usurped them by co-opting Washington, the nation’s courts, state capitals, and city halls.
As a result, over half the world’s largest economies are corporations. Financial ones controlling the power of money are most dominant.
Corporate personhood enhanced their power, yet imagine. Although corporations aren’t human, they can live forever, change their identity, reside in many places globally, can’t be imprisoned for wrongdoing, and can transform themselves into new entities for any reason.
They have the same rights and protections as people without the responsibilities. As a result, they operate freely unrestrained, especially financial giants controlling the power of money at the public’s expense.
Beginning in the late 1960s, financialization grew more dominant. Economic control began shifting from industry to finance. Corporations are now seen as bundles of assets, the more liquid the better. A new monopoly finance capitalism developed to exploit it.
FIRE sector (finance, insurance, and real estate) predators capitalized. Casino capitalism gained prominence. Today it thrives. Major players took advantage, profiting hugely from speculation, chicanery and fraud.
A burgeoning financial superstructure gained a life of its own. Today it’s omnipotent, especially in America and Europe. Their business model involves grabbing everything that smells money, no matter what harm is caused.
Money doesn’t buy everything, but it buys enough influence to matter. The smartest guys in the room take advantage, buying politicians like toothpaste. Democracy’s just a figure of speech.
Only wealth and power matter. Enough of them turned financial giants into monsters. Whatever they want, they get, including the right to operate freely outside the law, manipulate markets, bilk investors, strip-mine nations and people for profit, and get bailed out at public expense if overreach.
Under Obama and European leaders, the worst of bad practices flourish. Foxes guard the henhouse. Inmates run the asylum. Regulators don’t regulate. Investigations aren’t conducted. High-level criminal fraud gets wink and nod approval. Nothing is done to curb it.
Nor do public considerations matter nor is sustained low inflation long-term growth pursued as long as bankers get paid. Today, it’s issue one in America and troubled Eurozone countries.
Wall Street dominance matters most in America. In Europe, “Troika” power is omnipotent – the IMF, EU and European Central Bank (ECB). Nations trapped under euro straightjacket rules can’t devalue their currencies to be more competitive, monetize debt freely, or legislate fiscal policies to stimulate growth.
Instead, they’re entrapped by banker diktats demanding tribute. In other words, financial coup d’etat authority runs sovereign governments. They occupy them rapaciously, making rules, setting terms, issuing demands, and pressuring, bribing or otherwise forcing political leaders to acquiesce. If not, they’re replaced.
Working households bear the burden through layoffs, wage and benefit cuts, higher taxes, and other austerity measures to assure bankers are paid.
According to Michael Hudson, the system:
“shift(s) planning power into the hands of high finance on the claim that this is more efficient than public regulation. Government planning and taxation is accused of being ‘the road to serfdom,’ as if ‘free markets’ controlled by bankers given leeway to act recklessly is not planned by special interests in ways that are oligarchic, not democratic.”
“Governments are told to pay bailout debts taken on not to defend countries in military warfare as in times past, but to benefit the wealthiest layer of the population by shifting its losses onto taxpayers.”
As a result, social inequality proliferates. A new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) report discusses the damage over the last three decades among its 34 member states. They include America, Japan, Western Europe, and others.
Titled “Divided We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising,” it discusses conditions from the early 1980s until the 2008 global economic crisis. Its impact alone left 200 million workers unemployed compounded by more imposed austerity.
Among OECD countries, the top 10% is nine times better off than the bottom 10%. America, Israel and Turkey are the most unequal industrialized nations at 14 to 1. In Britain, Japan, Italy, and South Korea, the gap is 10 to 1.
Rising inequality also affected “traditionally egalitarian countries” like Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. They went from 5 to 1 in the 1980s to 6 to 1 today. Mexico and Chile are worst off with gaps of 25 to one.
In America, the top 1% controls 20% of all income plus a far greater percent of total assets. Concentrated wealth extremes also affect European countries, following America’s pattern.
The report says income inequality “first started to increase in the late 1970s and early 1980s in some English-speaking countries, notably the United Kingdom and the United States, but also in Israel.”
Since the late 1980s, it’s grown more widespread. At the same time, labor rights were sacrificed to benefit corporate bottom line priorities. In addition, finance capital grew omnipotent. As a result, money power rules everything.
Imposed austerity greatly impacted working households in troubled Eurozone countries and others facing economic hard times. Greece has been especially hammered by repeated layoffs, wage and benefit cuts, as well as higher taxes.
In early December, unelected Prime Minister Lucas Papademos (a former Bank of Greece governor and ECB vice president) force-fed through parliament more austerity cuts. Receiving an eight billion euro loan was conditional on doing so.
As a result, imposed measures include another five billion euros in spending cuts, 3.6 billion in new taxes, pensions cut 15%, and wages slashed more than already. In addition, more ahead is planned.
Papademos said “(t)he financial crisis in our country is not a passing storm….It will take many years” of greater worker sacrifices to assure bankers are paid.
In fact, the more wage, benefit, pension, and other cuts ordinary people bear, the weaker Greece’s economy becomes from lost purchasing power with a working population heading toward serfdom in a nation no longer fit to live in.
Millions of Greeks are now impoverished. Unemployment approaches 20%. For youths between 15 and 24, it’s nearly 50%. Years more imposed pain is planned to assure bankers are paid. As a result, expect Greece sooner or later to explode.
In addition, the more debt Greece assumes, the less it’s able to service it, and faster it heads toward debt peonage. According to Michael Hudson, moreover, “(a) basic mathematical as well as political principle” explains that “(d)ebts that can’t be paid, won’t be.”
In early December, unelected Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti (former EU official installed by Goldman Sachs, known to some as “three-card Monte”) introduced his own austerity package.
To service Italy’s $1.6 trillion debt, it includes attacking its social security pension system. In retirement, families depend on it. Nonetheless, retirement age eligibility will be raised to 66 from 58 by 2018, inflation-adjusted increases will end, and to qualify fully, workers must contribute from wages for 42 years.
In addition, value-added taxes will increase by 2%, and firing workers will be easier than ever. As in Greece, more cuts are planned, targeting workers to benefit bankers, other corporate favorites, and Italy’s super-rich.
Portugal’s new austerity cuts will see take-home pay down 27% since 2010. Its 2012 budget reduces spending by 4.4% of GDP by cutting healthcare and other benefits.
It also raises value added and other taxes, extends working days by 30 minutes with no added pay, and eliminates bonuses equal to two months earnings.
These measures follow earlier ones. They included cutting public sector wages 10%, eliminating four holidays, slashing overtime pay 50%, reducing pay for shift work, imposing “time banks” for greater employer flexibility over when employees must work, making firings simpler and cheaper, imposing shorter fixed-term contracts, ending rest breaks, and lowering unemployment benefits.
A Final Comment
Financial tyranny runs America and Europe. As a result, public anger grows.
Can revolutionary sparks be far behind? Expect pain levels eventually to cross thresholds of no return. Anything after that is possible, good or bad.
Hopefully a better world will emerge, free from banker occupation. It’s our only chance!
Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.
Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.
