Breaking news: powerful corporations really do control the world's finances

[Cain]

Oh yes, indeed they do

http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-08-powerful-corporations-world.html

For many years conventional wisdom has said that the whole world is controlled by the monied elite, or more recently by the huge multi-national corporations that seem to sometime control the very air we breathe. Now, new research by a team based in ETH-Zurich, Switzerland, has shown that what we've suspected all along, is apparently true. The team has uploaded their results onto the preprint server arXiv.

Using data obtained (circa 2007) from the Orbis database (a global database containing financial information on public and private companies) the team, in what is being heralded as the first of its kind, analyzed data from over 43,000 corporations, looking at both upstream and downstream connections between them all and found that when graphed, the data represented a bowtie of sorts, with the knot, or core representing just 147 entities who control nearly 40 percent of all of monetary value of transnational corporations (TNCs).

In this analysis the focus was on corporations that have ownership in their own assets as well as those of other institutions and who exert influence via ownership in second, third, fourth, etc. tier entities that hold influence over others in the web, as they call it; the interconnecting network of TNCs that together make up the whole of the largest corporations in the world. In analyzing the data they found, and then in building the network maps, the authors of the report sought to uncover the structure and control mechanisms that make up the murky world of corporate finance and ownership.

To zero in on the significant controlling corporations, the team started with a list of 43,060 TNCs taken from a sample of 30 million economic "actors" in the Orbis database. They then applied a recursive algorithm designed to find and point out all of the ownership pathways between them all. The resulting TNC network produced a graph with 600,508 nodes and 1,006,987 ownership connections. The team then graphed the results in several different ways to show the different ways that corporate ownership is held; the main theme in each, showing that just a very few corporations through direct and indirect ownership (via stocks, bonds, etc.) exert tremendous influence over the actions of those corporations, which in turn exert a huge impact on the rest of us.

The authors conclude their report by asking, perhaps rhetorically, what are the implications of having so few exert so much influence, and perhaps more importantly, in an economic sense, what the implications are of such a structure on market competitiveness.

[Adios]

This theme seems to be cropping up a lot lately. I wonder if they will expand their studies to show direct influence over various governments as well.

[Cain]

That would be much, much harder to quantify.

There have been advances in social software which could probably quantify the amount of lobbying done by those companies, and the links between those companies and government officials.

It'd be a nightmare to code it all and get the inputs, though.

[Disco Pickle]

All I want to know is when the Shadow Runs begin and where I can get fitted for a data jack.

Corporate espionage should be much easier if you have fewer targets.

[Adios]

That would be much, much harder to quantify.

There have been advances in social software which could probably quantify the amount of lobbying done by those companies, and the links between those companies and government officials.

It'd be a nightmare to code it all and get the inputs, though.

True enough. It would be interesting as hell though. Probably make some politicians extremely nervous as well.

[LMNO]

I'd like to see a graph that compares the top amount of money spent by lobbies to actual policy decisions, laws written, regulations lowered, etc.

In other words, solid, easily understood evidence that the corporation who pays the most money in lobbying gets the laws they want.

In other words, something that shows how irrelevant the voters actually are.

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

I'd like to see a graph that compares the top amount of money spent by lobbies to actual policy decisions, laws written, regulations lowered, etc.

In other words, solid, easily understood evidence that the corporation who pays the most money in lobbying gets the laws they want.

In other words, something that shows how irrelevant the voters actually are.

Isn't the proof still in the whitehouse?

[Cramulus]

I'd like to see a graph that compares the top amount of money spent by lobbies to actual policy decisions, laws written, regulations lowered, etc.

In other words, solid, easily understood evidence that the corporation who pays the most money in lobbying gets the laws they want.

In other words, something that shows how irrelevant the voters actually are.

yeah, this is excellent data... but to get it to motivate people, somebody has to reframe it and present it in a more easy-to-digest package.

I mean, this is cool ----



---- but it is hard to understand.


I hope somebody comes up with an infographic or other quick visual way of conveying that information.

for example, this image takes something really complex and makes it simple to understand by organizing the data into bite size chunks and presenting it a visually attractive way
http://www.creditloan.com/infographics/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/aig.jpg

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

That one pic looks like a cell phone advertisement..... 

[Cain]

I'd like to see a graph that compares the top amount of money spent by lobbies to actual policy decisions, laws written, regulations lowered, etc.

In other words, solid, easily understood evidence that the corporation who pays the most money in lobbying gets the laws they want.

In other words, something that shows how irrelevant the voters actually are.

There is a project in the UK which uses public records to show how frequently lobbied different MPs are.  It's quite interesting, and can tell you a lot about access to the Prime Minister and influence within the party.  For example, Francis Maude, our Minister for the Cabinet Office, is practically Lobbyist Central, especially when it comes to debt consolidation firms.  Meanwhile, Nick Clegg, alleged Deputy PM, is barely lobbied at all.