Uranium, War and Hegemony: From the Black Rock to BlackRock in Eighty Years
“Dene traditional
knowledge is that the black rock [uranium ore]
should stay underground—on pain of unleashing demons—and be kept in its place
by Thunder Beings, its continuously burning sacred fire acknowledged as a deity
and never touched.”
--
Candyce and Marius Paul, from English River First Nation, Dene band, northern
Saskatchewan,
interview with Nikki Sanchez in “People just like
you are defending us all against a toxic future,” David Suzuki Foundation, January 25,
2018
 |
| Samples of uranium-bearing ore have been called pitchblende, uraninite or BLACK ROCK. Radioactivethings.com describes this sample from Great Bear Lake, Northern Canada, as weighing 112 grams and giving off 340,000 CPM (counts per minute) or 139 millirads/hr (=1.39 millisieverts/hr). After the triple meltdown in Fukushima, allowable exposure limits for children in Japan were raised from 1 millisievert per YEAR to 20 millisieverts per YEAR. In other words, 15 hours of exposure to this sample would put a child at the 20 millisieverts annual limit. |
“BlackRock is the largest transnational
investment company in the world. This year they’ve got six trillion dollars’
worth of assets that they’re investing worldwide. They have 50 billion in
Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman each, and so they’re doing huge amounts of
investment and benefiting from war. They benefit from investments in
everything, but a lot of military companies are involved. All the highest
CO2-producing companies are involved. They’re just a massive capital investment
company, run by a guy named Larry Fink who’s from LA, and it’s been the most
successful investment company. It’s not a bank. It’s just an investment
company, and it’s been the most successful in the world. Its massive, and he’s
the one who’s on Trump’s advisory board. He’s very active and in encouraging
the privatization of Social Security.”
Black rock,
BlackRock: Coincidence?
It
is too strange a coincidence not to wonder if the demons unleashed by digging
up the black rock worked on the mind of Larry Fink when he chose to name his
investment company BlackRock. I once told a nuclear engineer about Dene beliefs
about the black rock, and he just scoffed at the notion, suspecting perhaps that
it was a convenient myth made up in modern times. One may try to dismiss
indigenous beliefs as irrational, but it is possible to see rational reasons
behind them. There are rational reasons to fear snakes, and thus primates
evolved an instinctive fear of them, and in turn human cultures described them
as religious and mythical symbols of evil. In the same way, humans in tune with
their natural environment notice, consciously or unconsciously, subtle signs
that indicate danger. Perhaps the patches of land around the black rocks looked
barren, or the soils smelled weird because of different bacteria and fungi that
thrived in it, or the soil didn't smell at all because nothing was alive in it. Maybe plants didn’t grow well there, or their berries tasted sour
and animals stayed away. People who used the stones as tools over a long time would have developed skin lesions and other illnesses. From such observations could be born the admonition to leave the black
rock in the ground, that the black rock possessed a demonic force that one had
to respect. Then the foreigners came and trampled through the land, oblivious
to this hard-earned knowledge.
Now
here we are eighty years into the nuclear age and the multi-trillion-dollar
investment firm called BlackRock is the leading force behind a global hegemony
of capitalism backstopped by a nuclear arsenal of 7,000 warheads. It was the US
president who said in 2018, “As part of our defense we must modernize and
rebuild our nuclear arsenal, hopefully never having to use it, but making it so
strong and powerful that it will deter any acts of aggression.” That is, the
arsenal exists to deter people in other nations from challenging the economic
system imposed on them. The name BlackRock is extremely well chosen, and the
miraculous rise of the company since its founding in 1988, surpassing many
long-established firms, is certainly suggestive of a trip “down to the crossroads,” to use the term
that Southern folklore has for a Faustian bargain.
Peter
Phillips notes in the interview cited above “… we have less than 200 people who
are deciding the investment policies for 50 trillion dollars’ worth of wealth
in the world, and a lot of those decisions aren’t favorable to most people.”
This is indeed an indication of a frightening absence of democracy in the
decisions about how resources are to be developed and shared globally, but in
this interview Peter Phillips overlooks an important element of this economic
hegemony. That small clique of 200 investment managers seeks higher returns for
millions of retail clients who demand returns on their life savings and pension
funds. This hegemony has co-opted much of the working class and middle class to
the point where civil servants and teachers share the same interests as “the
1%” because their pension funds are managed by the giant firms that rule the
world. As fewer people can rely on government pensions, they have no choice but
to seek security in the system of private investment. Likewise, people who work
in the oil and defense industry have their interests aligned with the
super-wealthy. Fossil fuels are bought by people who would rather not freeze in
their apartments in January, to say nothing of their desires for the comfort of
transportation and the luxury of a holiday once in a while. We can’t blame only
200 individuals for their decisions to invest in fossil fuels. If they all died
on one day, the next day they would be replaced and the instituted system they
led would carry on. Obviously, it is imperative to demand a democratization of
investment policy and a planned economy that will mitigate climate change as
much as possible. Monumental, unprecedented collective action on a global scale
is needed, but it may be an oversimplification to vilify a tiny elite for a
problem in which hundreds of millions of people are complicit. It’s unlikely that
a green new deal will lead to systemic change if it is viewed, as it has been
so far, as a way to save capitalism (see http://www.wrongkindofgreen.org/
for more on this).
***
Highlights from the Empire
Files interview with Peter Phillips, author of Giants: The Global Power Elite
When
I write about the giants (Giants:
The Global Power Elite), the giants are these transnational investment
companies with over a trillion dollars’ worth of assets. A trillion is a lot.
That’s a thousand billions, so when we talk about money in the world, free
flowing money, they’ve got the core of it for sure and they invest in the
hundred big companies that are putting out 70% of the CO2 in the world. It’s
coming from a hundred companies. This has massive negative impacts on the world
and the environment, and people are getting poorer, and thousands are dying
every day…
There’s
got to be better way. We have enough resources in the world. We could take care
of everybody. How we do that is not to make people richer or concentrate wealth
more, but to share it better, and to make sure that the resources don’t trickle
down but that there is a river down, a flow of money so that people can have an
adequate living, they can feed their children, and they can engage in productive
activities…
We
know that in that 1% of the world, eight of them have half the wealth in the
world and the top 1% are controlling 90 percent of the wealth in the world, so
it is very concentrated. These giant transnational investment companies
represent 36 million millionaires and 2,000 to 3,000 billionaires. These
companies manage their money for them and invest it in places where they want
to get a return. There are 17 of these trillion-dollar investment giants. They
collectively control, in 2017, 41 trillion dollars’ worth of wealth
($41,000,000,000,000), so it’s just a massive concentration of wealth and there
are only 199 people that are on the boards of directors of those companies. So
we have less than 200 people who are deciding the investment policies for 50
trillion dollars’ (which is this year’s figure) worth of wealth in the world,
and a lot of those decisions aren’t favorable to most people. It’s favorable to
them, so they’re trying to get a return. That’s one of the problems with
capital and capitalism: it needs to continue to grow. So the problem with this
kind of capital concentration is they run out of places to invest it with good
returns, but even then they still have more capital than they’ve got good
places to put it. So part of the global neoliberal economic policies is to buy
up the world—literally privatize the world so that the highways are bought up, or
the water resources in the world. It could be universities and cities. Everything
becomes privatized. The public domain is bought up. That’s another way of
trying to get a return on investment, and even after that, there’s still more
money than there are good places to invest, so we’ve reached a level now of a
permanent war…
Protectors
are NATO, the US military, the police state, and private military. G4S is the
second largest private employer in the world with 625,000 people. The only one
bigger is Walmart. G4S were the people with the dogs up in the Dakotas that
were attacking the demonstrators around the pipeline. They do everything from
mercenary activities, war-type activities in Africa and South America to
protecting the Israeli settlements from Palestinians. They do it all... It’s to
protect capital. It’s not to protect you and me. It’s to protect capital and
have capital penetration in all regions of the world. If there’s any
interference, they want to try to do a regime change and do debt collection. If
a country’s in debt, the military is there to really threaten the government if
it’s not going to return debts.
***
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Abby Martin and
Mike Prysner (producers), “Giants: Who Really
Rules The World?” Empire Files,
April 13, 2019
INTRODUCTION
We live in a world
of overabundance yet the gap between the rich and the poor continues to
dramatically deepen. The 26 richest people on the planet now hold the same
wealth as the 3.8 billion poorest—50 percent of the population. Occupy Wall
Street popularized the term “the 1%,” the notion of a nebulous ruling elite
that holds a wildly disproportionate concentration of wealth and power at
humanity’s expense. But those who sit at the top of the pyramid, the financial behemoths
running this oppressive and violent economic order, have largely operated in
the shadows—until now.
The new book Giants answers in great detail the
commonly-asked but little-known question: who really pulls the strings? Through
exhaustive research, sociologist Peter Phillips outlines the top 17
trillion-dollar investment management firms which control over $40 trillion in
wealth, and he exposes the few hundred people who decide the investment of
global capital.
Peter Phillips is a
professor of political sociology at Sonoma State University and the former
director of Project Censored. While in the Bay Area, I sat down with Peter to
learn more about those who hold the reins of empire and capitalist hegemony.
INTERVIEW
Abby Martin (AM): Let’s
get started by talking about the state of the world today as a result of our global
economic system. Can you give us a quick assessment on the current state of
human civilization?
Peter Phillips (PP):
Well, 80% of the people live on less than $10 a day. That’s all the people in
the world, so there’s only 20% that we would call the middle class, so to speak,
and then about 1% who are the transnational capitalist class. Those are the
really, really rich people. So for the bottom 80%, $10 a day is not very much,
and half of those people live on less than $2.50 a day, and the bottom third—over
a billion—live on $1.25 a day. So that gross inequality is dramatic. In fact,
we have 700-800 million people that are nutrition-malnourished, and 30,000 of
them die every day from starvation or malnutrition. So we have an ongoing
slaughter of people who aren’t fed, and there’s more than enough food in the
world to feed everybody. One third of the food in the world is wasted, but it’s
not profitable for capitalism to try to sell them that food, and it’s not
profitable to give it to them, so they won’t do it. They’re just seen as
surplus people and they’re allowed to die. So that I consider to be a major
humanitarian crisis in the world today.
AM: But Peter, the
proponents of global capitalism have told us that that’s been decided already. We’ve
tried other systems, and capitalism is the best for humanity. What’s your
response to that?
PP: Well, they
argue that it’s going to trickle down, and that they can continue to grow
capital, and that’s part of the problem of capitalism because you have this
concentration of money, of capital, that continues to need to grow and expand
because they want a return on it. When I write about the giants, the giants are
these transnational investment companies with over a trillion dollars’ worth of
assets that they are managing. A trillion is a lot. That’s a thousand billions,
so when we talk about money in the world, free flowing money, they’ve got the
core of it for sure and they invest in the hundred big companies that are
putting out 70% of the CO2 in the world. It’s coming from a hundred companies. This
has massive negative impacts on the world and the environment, and people are
getting poorer, and thousands are dying every day.
AM: It’s hard to think
that that would be the best that we have.
PP: There’s got to
be a better way. We have enough resources in the world. We could take care of
everybody. How we do that is not to make people richer or concentrate wealth
more, but to share it better, and to make sure that the resources don’t trickle
down but that there is a river down, a flow of money so that people can have an
adequate living, they can feed their children, and they can engage in
productive activities.
AM: And your book Giants largely focuses on the profiles
of the power elite, what you call the activist core of what’s called the
transnational capitalist class. Explain this concept.
PP: We know that in
that 1% of the world, eight of them have half the wealth in the world, and the
top 1% are controlling 90 percent of the wealth in the world, so it is very
concentrated. These giant transnational investment companies represent 36
million millionaires and 2,000 to 3,000 billionaires. These companies manage
their money for them and invest it in places where they want to get a return.
There are 17 of these trillion-dollar investment giants. They collectively
control, in 2017, 41 trillion dollars’ worth of wealth ($41,000,000,000,000),
so it’s just a massive concentration of wealth and there are only 199 people
that are on the boards of directors of those companies. So we have less than
200 people who are deciding the investment policies for 50 trillion dollars’
(which is this year’s figure) worth of wealth in the world, and a lot of those
decisions aren’t favorable to most people. It’s favorable to them, so they’re
trying to get a return. That’s one of the problems with capital and capitalism:
it needs to continue to grow. So the problem with this kind of capital
concentration is they run out of places to invest it with good returns, but
even then they still have more capital than they’ve got good places to put it. So
part of the global neoliberal economic policies is to buy up the world—literally
privatize the world so that the highways are bought up, or the water resources
in the world. It could be universities and cities. Everything becomes
privatized. The public domain is bought up. That’s another way of trying to get
a return on investment, and even after that, there’s still more money than
there are good places to invest, so we’ve reached a level now of a permanent
war.
AM: Let’s go back
to the players here, and let’s call out some of these institutions here because
we hear about billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates. We hear these names
often.
PP: Bezos is the
richest man in the world with $160 billion. I think he lost $6 billion last
week, which is kind of a laugh for him, but he is the richest person in the
world, but he’s just one big tree in a forest. We don’ even list them in the
book as part of the global power elite because the global power elite is a
sociology of who’s in the forest. These people are interacting together like redwood
trees. All their roots are interconnected, and Bezos is just one big tree, but
the rest of them are making the policy decisions through a variety of
institutions and the direct control of the money they’re investing that impacts
the entire world, that impacts us all. They’re all invested in each other, so this
is a cluster of interconnected capital with very similar investments. They are all
watching each other, and the number of people controlling that could fit in a
small mid-sized university auditorium. They could have cocktails together. They
all know each other and know of each other. Most of them know each other
personally. They all go to Davos together and they hang out.
AM: How did we get
here? A hundred years ago we had capitalist powers warring over World War One. We
saw a lot that had merged in that fighting. That’s basically why the war
happened. After World War Two, obviously, the US took hold in the world with
the dropping of nuclear bombs and stated its hegemony. Now it has these
collaborators, but how did global capitalism come to this point from there one
hundred years ago to where it is today?
PP: The short
version essentially is we globalized. We developed and have been developing for
a while people at a transnational level who are in corporations. Of the largest
200 economic entities in the world, 150 of them are corporations, so these
corporations are massive—bigger than countries. They supersede countries in
many cases, and then they use the WTO rules and the IMF rules to loan countries
money and then obligate them to invest and produce things that will benefit
capital and capitalism. So these companies are totally in charge of the world. That
that’s where we’re at, and they operate everywhere. So Amazon’s everywhere. They
just reached a trillion dollars’ worth of wealth, and part of that is massive
investments by the investment giants. 56% of Amazon’s stock is held by
transnational investment giants, and that pushes Bezos’ wealth up rapidly. His
wealth went up over 50% in just the last decade.
AM: Your book
breaks down several components of the transnational capitalist class, how it
protects itself and expands this wealth. Peter, you talked about the
facilitators. You talked about the G30 and the trilateral commission. Why do
you think that people have no idea really about the think tanks that you’re
talking about and what role they really have?
PP: The facilitator
groups are the ones that actually make policy, policies of international
security and defense, protecting global capital, allowing it to expand and grow
everywhere in the world, and undermining governments that resist in any way—governments
that are trying to protect their people with laws or rules. That’s the policy
of global capital facilitators. These are the people that are advising the
World Trade Organization to change rules, change laws, and implement policies
that allow for the continued expansion and growth of capital. The number one
policy group that is non-governmental is the Atlantic Council. The Atlantic
Council is made up of NATO nations, representatives from NATO governments, but
they’re not necessarily representatives of government. They’re high-level
security people, investment people intermixed, and big corporate officials—high-level
corporate officials. The Atlantic Council has a large private budget. They’re
putting out annual reports, and these are very powerful non-governmental
policymaking entities. To help that along they hire big public relations firms.
The big three are Omnicom, WPP, and Interpublic Group, and there are several
hundred smaller public relations firms under those three that put out press
releases for government, the State Department and corporations on various
policy issues. And then there is the corporate media, who we call the
ideologists, which are also owned by the giants. They invested in all of them.
The big six corporate news media in the world today are putting out as news
content what the public relations firms are preparing for them. So what we hear
in the news today is Venezuela is a dictatorship, and they’re destroying the
country, and they have socialist orientations. It’s actually very democratic,
but it’s also challenged by the elites in Venezuela and by US capital elites
here, and so the ideologists, the media, are putting out stories of how
terrible they are, which are just ludicrous.
AM: The ideologists
are a very important component of this, Peter. We have the Atlantic Council now
working in concert with Facebook to curate the news. Talk about how problematic
that is as well as just the concept of the ideologists’ role to protect the
transnational capitalist class. We hear all the time that these Beltway
publications like The Washington Post and the New York Times are the premier
arbitrators of our objective reality, yet they couch all of their opinions in
these so-called experts and policy makers of the exact same think tanks.
PP: There has been
massive penetration in that capacity over the last decade and still, of course,
there were Facebook pages and Twitter accounts that were considered too extreme
by the Atlantic Council, and those got named and several hundred have been
purged. We’ll probably see more purging going on in that capacity as well. In the
deeply penetrating corporate media today, 80% of the stories that are coming
from television news stories are packaged are prepared by public relations
firms working for governments or corporations. 80%! That’s a study that’s been
validated. We don’t recognize the importance of how much corporate news is
managed in very deliberate ways to give us certain messages and not allow criticism
of capitalism in any way.
AM: The structure
of the corporate media obviously exists to protect capitalism. That’s very
obvious, but how exactly is the corporate media also weaponized for Empire. They
do it by building these false narratives about everything from Venezuela to
Iran in this cartoonish way to build that consensus among the American public.
PP: These are
symbolic of how capital is concentrated. So if we’ve got 200 people managing 50
trillion dollars’ worth of capital, and the ownership of course is spread
around, but it’s the managers and the ideologist, the big TV stations that are
putting out news in our faces every day. They are all the same thing. They have
consolidated just in the last 30 years from 50 major media corporations down to
six, and then the Washington Post is owned by Bezos, so they’re buying up and/or
controlling media content worldwide. It makes your kinds of programs incredibly
important. We have to have these alternative voices out there really explaining
what’s going on, and I shouldn’t say alternative. I want to say that we’re
mainstream. You are mainstream because you’re speaking for the mainstream
populations in the world, and these are humanitarian values that we hold. These
are very important kinds of concepts that we have to continue to express in
every way that we can, and we’re going to get censored. We’re going to get
repressed in some capacity. There has been zero coverage of my book Giants: The Global Power Elite in terms
of corporate media, and if I get covered, I’m sure it will be negative.
AM: I love that you
said that our ideas are mainstream because that contrasts exactly with what the
corporate media is designed to do: make us feel disempowered, disenfranchised, and
marginalized. That’s the whole neoliberal doctrine. You’re an individual, and you
make it on your own, and you don’t need anyone to help you, but we do. And we need
to be communicating this with each other.
PP: Absolutely.
AM: This is my
favorite part of your book, the part about the protectors of the transnational
capitalist class. Talk about who they are.
PP: Protectors are
NATO, the US military, the police state, and private military. G4S is the
second largest private employer in the world with 625,000 people. The only one
bigger is Walmart. G4S were the people with the dogs up in the Dakotas that were
attacking the demonstrators around the pipeline. They do everything from
mercenary activities, war-type activities in Africa and South America to
protecting the Israeli settlements from Palestinians. They do it all. They
guard banks. They run prisons. They’re a massive private security company. If a
company wants to have a green zone, a protection zone, in the middle of any
anywhere, they’ll do it for them, and they kill people. Then, of course,
Blackwater, which is now Academy, is the other big private military group. Eric
Prince is trying to convince Trump to let him take over the war in Afghanistan.
They have their own private Air Force in Africa. Private security is rapidly
growing internationally. The US military, and NATO in particular, is all over
the world now, with 1,000 bases—some of these are lilypad bases in every
country in Africa that they can go to immediately. They don’t necessarily have
troops there, but they build them ahead of time. We’ve got troops in 140
countries, literally killing people, training people, killing people. It’s to
protect capital. It’s not to protect you and me. It’s to protect capital and
have capital penetration in all regions of the world. If there’s any
interference, they want to try to do a regime change and do debt collection. If
a country’s in debt, the military is there to really threaten the government if
it’s not going to return debts.
AM: The US military
says that this global empire is because of freedom and democracy. You’re saying
that that’s not the case.
PP: It’s a lie. For
them, freedom and democracy is the freedom of capital to do business anywhere
in the world. Corporations are closely linked with what democracy means. It
means free enterprise. It doesn’t mean people making decisions at grassroots
levels about their lives and passing laws to make people upwardly mobile. It
doesn’t mean regulating corporations. It means exactly the opposite.
AM: As a
sociologist, Peter, how do you see the interaction between defense companies
and these financial investment firms in profiting off of war?
PP: They’re closely
interconnected. All these big investment companies are invested in war. They
make money from it.
AM: Peter, let’s talk
about an example here. What about BlackRock and its role in this death machine?
PP: BlackRock is
the largest transnational investment company in the world. This year they’ve
got six trillion dollars’ worth of assets that they’re investing worldwide. They
have $50 billion in Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman each, and so they’re
doing huge amounts of investment and benefiting from war. They benefit from
investments in everything, but a lot of military companies are involved. All
the highest CO2-producing companies are involved. They’re just a massive
capital investment company, run by a guy named Larry Fink who’s from LA, and
it’s been the most successful investment company. It’s not a bank. It’s just an
investment company, and it’s been the most successful in the world. Its
massive, and he’s the one who’s on Trump’s advisory board. He’s very active in encouraging
the privatization of Social Security.
AM: Briefly discuss
how the corporate media is also subsidized by these very institutions.
PP: The big
investors are invested in corporate media. They’re also invested in the military
contractors, so there’s clearly an overlap of capital interests.
AM: Sometimes it’s
very brazen because you’ll be seeing a report on, let’s say, MSNBC, and then they’ll
go to an actual commercial from BP or from Lockheed Martin, as if the public is
interested in buying weapons or oil.
PP: It always amazes
me that Lockheed Martin will run ads about how wonderful their weapons are.
AM: You mentioned
climate change, and this kind of adds a new urgency to your studies, Peter. I
think 100 companies are responsible for two-thirds of the global emissions. Where
do you see this going? Where do you see the inequality going if we don’t
correct global capital?
PP: Part of writing
the book was to identify the central core, the 300 people who are vital to the
central policymaking, facilitating and protecting global capital. There are
others, thousands that are associated with that, but I wanted to identify who
these players are, and develop the idea that these policy groups and this
concentrated capital are really managed with these small numbers of people. We
can identify who they are, and so we can lobby them. We can pressure them and we
can protest them. People in big metropolitan areas around the world, if they’re
starving and they have no resources, and there’s a state trying to control them,
ultimately they’re going to resist in a variety of ways. Governments, people
inside governments will realize there’s a problem and resist. We see resistance
movements all over the world, and whether it’s Bolivarian movements in South
America or workers movements in China, or what we had here with Occupy, and
other types of movements like it occurring, all that makes them afraid.
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