Page 18 - Lunacy and the Age of Deception

Figure 2 D
[Source: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0025995]

The image below represents the transnational corporations’ control relationships, with the power
being primarily held by the small number of entities in the center of the bow-tie.

The Strongly Connected Components in the center number 147 corporations at the time the report
was published. This number has since shrunk as power is even more concentrated now due to the
shakeup in the financial and corporate world which began in 2008. Following the publication of this
study, it was commented on by numerous other magazines and Internet websites. Immediately below
is an excerpt from an article posted on the Forbes website.

The 147 Companies That Control Everything
Bruce Upbin, October 22, 2011

Three systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have taken a database
listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide and analyzed all 43,060 transnational
corporations and share ownerships linking them. They built a model of who owns what and what
their revenues are and mapped the whole edifice of economic power.

They discovered that global corporate control has a distinct bow-tie shape, with a dominant core
of 147 firms radiating out from the middle. Each of these 147 own interlocking stakes of one another
and together they control 40% of the wealth in the network. A total of 737 control 80% of it all...
This is, say the paper’s authors, the first map of the structure of global corporate control.
[ S o u r c e :
http://www.forbes.com/sites/bruceupbin/2011/10/22/the-147-companies-that-control-everything/]

Next is an extract from an article published by New Scientist.

Revealed – the capitalist network that runs the world
New Scientist, October 19, 2011

As protests against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the
protesters’ worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations