Syndicates of Capital
A new world order is here. States (countries) are no longer the highest form of power globally. Power has shifted to wealthy individuals who work in groups and operate across borders: syndicates of capital.
Syndicates of capital cannot be categorized as legal or illegal. They exist primarily in the extralegal sphere, where either no regulations apply to their behavior or, where laws do exist, there is no entity powerful enough to enforce them in a manner that asserts control over the syndicates’ behavior.
Yeah. It’s seemed to me for quite awhile now that the most likely form of future world government evolves not from the United Nations but from big multinational corporations controlled by the billionaire class.
See also two recent pieces on the wealthy in America. The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations is Overwhelming U.S. Politics:
The extraordinary spending in Montana is part of a new era of political power for the rapidly growing number of billionaires minted over the past eight years. The Times analysis found that 300 billionaires and their immediate family members donated more than $3 billion — 19 percent of all contributions — in federal elections in 2024, either directly or through political action committees.
Five presidential elections ago, before the Supreme Court’s 2010 ruling that lifted many remaining campaign finance restrictions, the share of billionaire spending was almost zero — 0.3 percent, to be precise.
The billionaire families gave an average total of $10 million each in 2024, an amount roughly equal to what 100,000 typical political donors gave, combined. And that does not count money that billionaires contributed through dark money groups that do not have to disclose their donors.
And How America Chose Not to Hold the Powerful to Account:
One way to look at the rise of Donald Trump is as part of a decades-long backlash among the American leadership class to the idea of accountability. Since Richard Nixon was forced to resign, powerful people in both political parties have worked assiduously to ensure that their leaders would escape the consequences of their actions. Trump has evaded punishment for crimes both low (campaign-finance violations, for which he was convicted, though he will serve no time thanks to his 2024 victory) and high (his attempted overthrow of the federal government in the aftermath of his 2020 election loss, for which he was spared by the Supreme Court’s decision to grant him kingly immunity). This is not just about Trump; his impunity is the product of a society that has worked hard to help the rich and powerful elude punishment for criminal behavior.
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Funny, I was just discussing Ned Beatty's speech in the 1976 movie Network:
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOt-G2LVgfI
I did some quick calculations for the 2024 presidential election:
Approx. increase in Elon Musk’s wealth in 2024
$200,000,000,000.00
Amount Elon Musk ‘donated‘ to Donald Trump in 2024
$200,000,000.00
Typical income of ordinary person in 2024
$40,000.00
Same proportion of ordinary person’s income in 2024
$40.00
Number of ordinary people it would take to match Elon Musk’s donation
5,000,000
What the billionaires are injecting into U.S. politics is basically a rounding error compared with their actual wealth.
I remember listening to a podcast many years ago (which I thought I posted about at the time but cannot find in the archive). It was about lobbying and PACs and someone said something like, "it's incredible how cheap it is to buy political action in the US" and also "it's weird that more people aren't doing this". And now here we are, these billionaires spending relatively tiny amounts of money to mold the country & world as they wish.
It might have been this episode of This American Life from 2012 but I can't find anything like that quote. There is this however:
There are two important points here, which are really the same point.
One is that buying control over a country is actually relatively cheap by the standards of very rich people. You don't need to buy whatever it is you want, you just buy the government, who then give you whatever you wanted to buy.
The other is that when you become rich enough everything becomes cheap, including the tools to make yourself richer. I could hire someone to, probably, make my taxes be close to zero, but doing that would bankrupt me. Elon Musk can hire a much better version of the same person and it costs him effectively nothing.
Every time I read about how much billionaires are spending on anything, I think about this visualization of Jeff Bezos' wealth. I used to use it to help my students understand that the way information is presented impacts how we understand it.
When I showed teenagers the numbers (even with all the zeroes!), they knew billionaires were rich. When they looked at the visual representation of that wealth - and how it compares to other things they consider to be a lot of money - they got it in a whole other way.
That's a good site. I found this video helpful too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
It greatly altered my understanding of wealth in America — and this was 13 years ago. Things have only gotten more extreme.
I'd love to see this video updated to our current situation.
This whole idea of syndicates of capital to me is perfectly fictionalized in the Alien movie universe of the huge companies that run stuff. More recently seen in Alien:Earth where there’s the 4 big corps. Not so fictional now. We are headed this way.
We spend so much time engaging in a Kremlinology of Trump and regurgitated thought pieces policing language. My kingdom for a regular discussion and critical analysis of who and what is doing the most and best to impede the syndicates of capital and their future control.
It's 2014 and the focus is on architecture and the built environment, but Keller Easterling's book EXTRASTATECRAFT does a great job of discussing post-United Nations power dynamics that exist beyond state control. And generally, that means the control of global capital flows--the megarich and the megacorporations.
In looking for the podcast I mentioned in the comment above, I did find this 2012 piece from the archives, in which a bunch of super rich crybabies refer to Obama as Hitler for oppressing them.
dominant hegemony gotta dominant hegemony sad face. there is hope as long as we can read your blog there is hope :-)
This reminds me a lot of the background of William Gibson's Sprawl Trilogy where corporations were in control of everything. The only difference is corporations rather than just wealthy individuals (SORRY, this reply was meant to be to the original post, but I can't see how to move it)
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