"Often hiding behind the platitudes of ‘doing good’ at meetings like the World Economic Forum, private capital investors are laying waste to the environment and facilitating the growing inequality that leaves ever greater numbers of people living in poverty. When we focus on these ‘Titans of Capital’ and understand how they use financial power to mold our lives, we may be able to find sustainable alternatives for the long-term economic and environmental health and human well-being most of us crave. Titans is an essential book for addressing humanity’s current crisis and for re-evaluating our acquiescence to the financiers who currently run the world."

—robin andersen, Professor Emerita of Communication and Media Studies, Fordham University

"With Titans of Capital, Professor Peter Phillips has produced a masterful follow-up to Giants: The Global Power Elite. This is a very necessary sequel because all of the alarming trends that Phillips identified in 2018 have only accelerated. As Titans points out, there were nearly twice as many trillion-dollar capital management firms in 2022 compared to 2017. At the same time, Titans has a narrower focus. . . . Phillips focuses on an even tighter core of 117 persons who sit on the executive boards of the top ten capital management firms. If you want to know about who is running the world on behalf of the global oligarchy of wealth, read Titans of Capital!"

—aaron good, author of American Exception: Empire and the Deep State

"Some years ago, I wrote a short endorsement of Peter Phillips’s excellent book Giants: The Global Power Elite. His new book, Titans of Capital, is even better, making connections between corporate capital and almost all the institutions of social life globally—a textbook of capitalism’s deficiencies."

—leslie sklair, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, London School of Economics

in praise of peter phillips’s giants: the global power elite

Adam Smith warned that the ‘masters of mankind’ will pursue their ‘vile maxim: All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.’ . . . Who exactly are the masters? [Phillips] lifts the veil, providing detailed and often shocking revelations about the astonishing concentration of private wealth and corporate power, its institutions and integrated structure—and not least, its threat to civilized and humane existence.

—noam chomsky

[A] timely reminder that, as the transnational capitalist class/global power elite changes, it is vital that critical researchers keep up with these changes. The reader will find impressive documentation of the institutions and personnel driving capitalist globalization in its destructive and relentless search for growth and profits.

—leslie sklair, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science

"Giants answers, in great detail, the commonly-asked but little-known question: Who really pulls the strings? . . . [A]n essential tool to understand those at the reins of empire and capitalist hegemony, so we can be empowered to fight for our survival."

—abby martin, The Empire Files

A copy should be in everyone’s bookcase, like a good dictionary or atlas.

—david rosen, New York Journal of Books

Copyright © 2024 Peter Phillips

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

The Censored Press

PO Box 1177

Fair Oaks, CA 95628

censoredpress.org

Seven Stories Press

140 Watts Street

New York, NY 10013

sevenstories.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file.

isbn 978-1-64421-433-6 (paperback)

isbn 978-1-64421-434-3 (ebook)

College professors and high school and middle school teachers may order free examination copies of Seven Stories Press titles. Visit https://www.sevenstories.com/pg/resources-academics or email academic@sevenstories.com.

Printed in the United States of America

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

DEDICATION

to veterans for peace, an organization of military veterans and allies whose collective efforts build a culture of peace worldwide. VFP has 140 chapters in the US and six other countries.

Veterans For Peace Chapter 63 in Albuquerque, New Mexico has been dedicated to opposing the construction of nuclear weapons in our state and ending all wars.

Chapter 63’s members include: Bill Tiwald, Barbara Tiwald, Robert Anderson, Charles Powell, Sally-Alice Thompson, Mandy Pino, Willard Hunter, John E. Wilks III, Bear Albrecht, Kathy Albrecht, Art Ratcliffe, Tom Delehanty, Arla Ertz, Don Kimball, Jack Turner, Ravi Wadhwani, Mike Gallagher, Penelope Mainz, Laura Martin, Paul Pino, Dan Shelton, and Peter Phillips.

CONTENTS

Foreword

by Dan Kovalik

Introduction

Chapter 1

Titans of Capital

Concentrated Global Elites Manage World Wealth

Chapter 2

Who Controls World Capital?

Chapter 3

The World Economic Forum

Saviors of Capitalism—and Climate-Crisis Profiteers

Chapter 4

Titans in Socially Harmful Investments

Tobacco, Alcohol, Plastics, Firearms, Gambling, and Private Prisons

Chapter 5

Titans’ Investments in War and the International Weapons Trade

Chapter 6

China

Building a Multipolar World

Chapter 7

Russia

An Ideological Challenge to Global Capitalism

Chapter 8

Crash of the Titans

Building a Better World

Acknowledgments

Appendix

2018 Letter to the Global Power Elite

Index

FOREWORD

by Dan Kovalik

In Titans of Capital, Peter Phillips names the world’s top ten investment management firms controlling a huge portion of humanity’s wealth—close to $50 trillion—and the 117 individuals who serve on these firms’ executive boards. These businesses and individuals constitute the international ruling class, to use Marxist terms, whose decisions impact nearly every facet of our lives. And they make these judgments in their own interest while claiming that they operate in the interest of all humanity.

Although seven of the top ten investment firms are based in the United States—and the other three in Europe—these entities owe no allegiance to any nation, only to themselves and their shareholders.

Political thinker and writer Michael Parenti once asked rhetorically, What do the capitalists want? His answer, quite simply: Everything! They want all the world’s wealth and riches for themselves, and every choice they make comes back to that. And while the capitalist ruling class at least used to create something of value in the process of making their wealth—for example, by managing the workers who made steel, cars, appliances, railroads, and so forth—now the primary means of making profit is through finance. That is, through the process of making money from money rather than through industry, which requires investing profits back into productive pursuits. This financialization of the economy focuses on short-term gain while sacrificing long-term stability and growth. Indeed, the new economic system controlled by these superrich companies and their managers thrives on chaos and instability.

The ruling class will never let a good crisis go to waste, seizing upon every disaster to make profit. A good example of this is the recent COVID-19 pandemic. In the midst of it, the superrich got even richer, and the poor got proportionally poorer. As US senator Elizabeth Warren explained:

Pre-pandemic, the wealth gap between the wealthiest and the poorest Americans was already wider than ever. But the coronavirus and the economic crisis that followed have made that gap even worse. While millions of Americans remain unemployed and families are struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table, billionaire wealth has grown to $4.2 trillion, 40% higher than before the COVID crisis began.¹

Here, Peter Phillips explains that the Titans of Capital, the leaders of the world’s largest investment firms, were among those that made a killing during the pandemic, while the poor were simply killed. As he relates:

[Extreme poverty] was slowly declining during the three decades preceding the pandemic, but this trend was reversed in 2020, after COVID-19 spread. At that point, inequality was amplified as wealth concentration accelerated for the 1 percent and declined for the 99 percent, forcing 180 million more people into extreme poverty. Developing countries, women, and ethnic minorities were hardest hit by the pandemic. The number of people in extreme poverty rose to more than 700 million. According to the World Bank, the rate of global extreme poverty reached 9.3 percent in 2020, up from 8.4 percent in 2019.

This is an extraordinary reallocation of wealth upward—quite possibly the greatest in all human history. And, of course, this was not by accident. Instead, the policies that were implemented, without any public debate, allegedly to deal with the pandemic, guaranteed that this would be the result. Those policies included, for example, lockdowns that shuttered mom-and-pop and other informal small businesses, while keeping Walmarts, Targets, and Amazon going as essential businesses.

To celebrate their newfound wealth, and to parade it in front of the people they stole it from, billionaires including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson took much-publicized victory laps in space while the proles were confined to quarters and barred from even going out to dinner. And we were told by the media that the superrich are in control and that we must simply grin and bear this for our own good and shun anyone who dares complain about the obvious injustice. The worst of the pharaohs would blush at such brazenness, but alas, this is the brave new world that the international capitalists have created for us.

Another example is the August 2023 destruction by fire of the town of Lahaina, in Maui, Hawaii, which claimed the lives of at least ninety-seven people. Within days, outside real estate investors were swooping in to make cash offers to desperate Lahaina homeowners. Even the establishment press and government authorities characterized these maneuvers as predatory.² Reuters highlighted one typical homeowner who was inundated with purchase offers after the horrible tragedy:

Deborah Loeffler felt she could not lose much more after a wildfire destroyed the home in Maui where five generations of her family have lived, and a son died the same day on the U.S. mainland. Grieving and overwhelmed, Loeffler was soon beset by emails with unsolicited proposals to sell the Lahaina beachfront plot in Maui where her grandfather built their teal-green wooden home in the 1940s.

It felt like we had vultures preying on us, said Loeffler, 69, a retired flight attendant.³

The land-grabbing attempts were so fast and furious that many began to suspect investors might have set the fire purposefully to create the very opportunity they were seizing upon.⁴ These suspicions were fueled by the fact that the homeowners on the island had for years resisted attempts by speculators to buy their properties.

While there appears to be no good evidence as yet of such a conspiracy in the case of the Maui fire, there is no doubt that the finance capitalists who dominate our world are quite willing to create crises to achieve their wealth-grabbing goals. The best example of this is war—a quite lucrative type of crisis for the Titans of Capital. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, The war is not meant to be won; it is meant to be continuous. In the modern age, arms dealers and the firms that invest in them turn profits on sales of guns and ammunition in perpetuity.

Probably the best example of war profiteering was the US war in Afghanistan, which lasted twenty years, from September 2001 to August 30, 2021. After trillions of dollars spent and tens of thousands of lives lost, the US military mission accomplished the impressive feat of ousting the Taliban and replacing it with the Taliban. However, this Rube Goldberg machine of a conflict was great for the industry, which worked tirelessly to the bitter end to wring every ounce of profit from the war.

Beginning in February 2020, as the US military started to wind down its Afghanistan operations, defense contractors lobbied even more in efforts to extend the war’s duration and assure one more round of huge contracts before the bonanza finally ended. The top five defense companies—Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman—spent a combined $34.2 million in lobbying in the first half of 2021, added to about $33 million in the same period of 2020.⁵ Raytheon spent more than $15.3 million on lobbying in 2021, the most of any defense contractor; Lockheed Martin was second, shelling out more than $14.4 million that year.⁶ As Phillips notes, all of these defense contractors receive significant investments from the Titans of Capital. As OpenSecrets reported in August 2021:

The Congressional Research Service found that the Defense Department also obligated more money on federal contracts during the 2020 fiscal year than all other government agencies combined with around 31% of its contracts going to the five companies.

People with ties to the defense industry have also been in positions to influence decision-making about the withdrawal from Afghanistan—including Retired General Joseph F. Dunford and former Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), who are two of three co-chairs on the congressionally-chartered Afghanistan Study Group.

The majority of plenary members on the Afghanistan Study Group, which advised President Joe Biden to extend the originally-negotiated May 1 deadline for withdrawing from Afghanistan, also have ties to the defense industry. A couple of those members include former President Donald Trump’s principal deputy director of national intelligence, Susan M. Gordon, and Stephen J. Hadley, former President George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser.⁷

What we witness here is the power of the military-industrial complex, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower termed it, which dictates US foreign policy to its benefit without regard to the welfare of the Afghan people, the American taxpayer, or US military personnel.

This is the tail wagging the proverbial dog, which was also evident in conflicts such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s 2011 operation in Libya and in Ukraine today, where the US maneuvered the world into a conflict that has benefited the arms industry.⁸ Defense manufacturers are making a killing on the war along with Titans of Capital, such as stakeholders of BlackRock—the biggest of the Titans—which has made deals with Ukraine’s President Zelensky to oversee and benefit from the huge development opportunities that the war creates.⁹ Zelensky’s official statement quoted Charles Hatami, the head of BlackRock’s Financial & Strategic Investors Group, who noted that the firm was honored to be assisting the Ukrainian people by advising the government on the launch of the Ukraine Development Fund. The reconstruction of the country will create significant opportunity for investors to participate in rebuilding the economy.¹⁰ And BlackRock made sure that it will benefit from this opportunity. Again, the capitalists will never let a good crisis go to waste.

Titans of Capital points to the firms and individuals laying waste to the world in pursuit of unlimited profit. Knowing who these Titans are, we can then target them for protest and public outrage. And it is indeed these firms and individuals whose lives must be inconvenienced by protest. While this should be an obvious point, we often see quite the opposite. That is, we see activists who are concerned about the environment and global climate change attack great works of art and inconvenience fellow citizens—for example, by creating a ten-mile traffic jam when they set up a roadblock (on tribal land, by the way) leading to the 2023 Burning Man event in Nevada—instead of confronting the firms and individuals who constitute our class enemies as well as the enemies of humanity.¹¹ This kind of misdirected activism is not only ineffective but also counterproductive. It alienates people from struggles they might otherwise embrace. The change we seek will only come when politically concerned people, informed by the gross inequalities documented in Titans of Capital, undertake direct activism.

______________

1. It’s Time for a Wealth Tax, Warren for Senate, accessed September 6, 2023.

2. Megan Cerullo, Maui Residents ‘Disturbed’ by Outside Realtors Offering Quick Cash for Land, CBS News, August 28, 2023.

3. Andrew Hay and Liliana Salgado, Maui Wildfire Victims Fear Land Grab May Threaten Hawaiian Culture, Reuters, August 22, 2023.

4. Alex Oliveira, Maui Wildfires Spark Conspiracy Theories about Space Lasers, Oprah Land Grabs and Suspicious Trees, New York Post, August 15, 2023, updated August 16, 2023.

5. Anna Massoglia and Julia Forrest, Defense Contractors Spent Big in Afghanistan before the U.S. Left and the Taliban Took Control, OpenSecrets, August 20, 2021.

6. Client Profile: Raytheon Technologies, OpenSecrets, accessed September 6, 2023; Client Profile: Lockheed Martin, OpenSecrets, accessed September 6. 2023.

7. Massoglia and Forrest, "Defense Contractors Spent Big