Posts Tagged ‘99%’
Visually bracketing the Davos Class
An invaluable graphical reference about the ‘Davos Class’ has been provided by the Transnational Institute, a worldwide fellowship of scholar activists, as part of its new Corporate Power project. In this superbly designed series of powerful infographics, TNI provides visual answers to the following questions: Who are the global 1%? What companies do they run? How do they escape accountability?

Planet Earth: A Corporate Run World - which are the biggest companies in the world? Which corporations control them? How does their power compare with states? Graphic by Transnational Institute
The economic, social and ecological crises humanity face are no accident, but a result of policies pursued by a small corporate elite – best known as the Davos class – that has systematically hijacked political and economic policy throughout the world. In her ‘Introduction to the Davos Class’, Susan George exposes the reality of corporate power, and our need to fundamentally change direction.

The Global 0.001% - Just 10.9 million people, or 0.15%, control $42.7 trillion dollars or two thirds of world GDP. An even tinier group of people, 0.001%, control a third of that amount. Where are they based? What could this money pay for? Graphic by Transnational Institute
“The Davos class run our major institutions and know exactly what they want, but they face a huge crisis of legitimacy because their ideology isn’t working and they have virtually no ideas nor imagination to resolve this,” said George. I’d say they do know quite well how this can be resolved, but since ‘fairness’, ‘equity’ and ‘justice’ are not part of their vocabulary, we are left with searing infographics that expose the social and environmental costs of global corporate power (this TNI page has links to hi-res files).
Occupy, pepper spray, democracy and the cop meme
Occupy has led to an outburst of creativity. One example is the many photos circulated on the internet showing the cop who pepper sprayed non-violent students at a California campus superimposed on works of art and other pictures, pepper spraying the people picnicking in a Seurat painting, pepper spraying the members of the Constitutional Convention and so forth. It was American Police Lieutenant John Pike who pepper-sprayed the students at the University of California Davis on November 18th, 2011. Here’s a gallery of the casually pepper spraying cop.