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Hosted by
Tereza Coraggio

Third Paradigm is an out-of-the-box thinktank on community sovereignty and regenerative economics.

We look at how to take back our cities, farmland and water; our money, production and trade; our media, education and culture, our religion and even our God.

We present a people's history of the Bible and a parent's view on how to raise giving kids in a taking world.

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3rd Paradigm is broadcast on:

Radio Free Brighton
Tu 2:30 pm, Th 5:30 pm (UK)
Tu 6:30 am, Th 9:30 am (PST)

Free Radio Santa Cruz
Listen Live Sun 1:30 PST

Upstart Radio online

Tereza has been interviewed on...

Talkabout with Kevin Spitzer, KZSC Santa Cruz

3rd Paradigm has been featured on these shows and stations:

Unwelcome Guests
by Robin Upton
on multiple stations

The Wringer
by Pete Bianco

WHCL Hamilton College

Global Notes
by Roger Barrett
CHLS Radio Lillooet

New World Notes
by Ken Dowst, WWUH
West Hartford, CT

3rd Paradigm has been viewed from: 3rd Paradigm is grateful for:

Past Shows

Welcome to the 65th episode of Third Paradigm. Our title this week is "Who Rules the World?" There are a lot of answers about who thinks they rule the world coming out of WikiLeaks recently. But if there's one thing that the WikiLeaks have proven, it's that politicians and diplomats have someone else to answer to, and it's not their own conscience. The higher powers they serve can be found in mahogany offices and off-shore tax havens, not in AA meetings. We're going to examine the exponential wealth of those who are one in 100 million. As John Perkins said in a recent episode of Unwelcome Guests, "It's not even a pyramid, it's like a needle going up with a few very wealthy, very powerful people sitting at the top." If you were to plot global wealth distribution on a graph, this line would be invisible to the naked eye. Are they invisible? A google search comes up with the 50 richest people. But these aren't the 120 people at Bilderberg. Who are the Bilderbergers anyway? And whose funds inhabit the World Bank, the IMF, and the InterAmerican Development Fund? We'll get one answer in rhyme with a YouTube video called the Banker.

Next we'll go from the richest .000001% or one in 100 million to the mere top .001% or one in 100 thousand. This includes (who'd a thunk it?) the chidren's author, Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket.

We'll excerpt his very funny article in the New York Times called Adjusted Income. After that lighter moment from the king of dismal, we'll ask , 'Is the world bankrupt?' But first, let's hear some poems to keep things in perspective. This is one of Ranier Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, a poem of Anna Akhmatova, and a Native American story. The music is Moonflower by Keiko Matsui. The music was Moonflower by Keiko Matsui from her Deep Blue CD. In Ranier Maria Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, he talks about the Machine. This is an appropriate metaphor for our question today of Who Rules the World? Analyst and historian Michael Parenti distinguishes between structuralists and functionalists. A structuralist is a person who believes that the system determines what a person can or can't do in the role. A functionalist thinks that if you get the right person into the right role, they can do anything. A structuralist would say that it's not a question of who rules the world but what. The system, or the machine as Rilke calls it, has taken over. Rafael Correa revealed himself to be a structuralist when he said of Obama, "I know he's a very good person but the system has his own agenda…" I notice that "system" is masculine in Spanish. Of course.

In the Native American story, we each have the potential for good and evil. Which side does the system feed? When we look at the principles of capitalism, it's easy to see why a psychopath would rise to the top. The system isn't personal. It doesn't pick and choose. But someone who operates without a conscience is unencumbered, while the rest of us are busy keeping the wolves fighting in our hearts at bay.

But we, as a society, also feed the system that determines which wolf will win. With the help of the website Visual Economics, I assembled a list of the wealthiest families in the world. The Waltons top the list with $72.4 billion altogether. Robson, the #1 son, spoke at the Climate Change Conference about sustainability as a key issue to Wal*Mart. Democracy Now tried to ask him how Wal*Mart affects the sustainability of local businesses. Or, I'd add, the sustainability of sweatshop factory workers. He dodged the question.

The wealthiest individual, who's now overtaken Bill Gates, is Carlos Slim Helu. He generated a wave of privatizations in Mexico starting with Tel-Mex, the telecom monopoly. In the UK Guardian, Paul Harris writes that his controlling stakes in 222 companies and minority stakes in countless more add up to a third of Mexico's stock market index. Although he lives a modest life, his tentacles have turned Mexico into Slimlandia.

Next are two sibling pairs - Mukesh and Anil Ambani who rule India, and Karl and Theo Albrecht of Germany. A "banned in India" biography called The Polyester Prince touts itself as "the real story of [Anil] Ambani." He sued his brother Mukesh and the New York Times for writing that he oversaw an intelligence agency that tracked the activity of bureaucrats and competitors. Carlos Slim just put in $250 million to prop up the New York Times, so this would be suing his neighbor on the list. The Albrechts made their fortune with the Aldi supermarket chain. Theo, who just died at 88, started Trader Joe's, which swaddles vegetables in plastic and sells unsustainable seafood to the crunchy granola set.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, next on the list, have a reputation for philanthropy. Although Gates' investments in the Green Revolution and Monsanto seem self-serving, Buffet's quote that he wants to pay more taxes is everyone's favorite sound bite, it seems. He also suggests that we read When Money Dies by Adam Fergusson, about Weimar Germany in the 1920's, and suggests that the same hyperinflation is around the corner. He doesn't, however, tell us what to do about it.

The Koch Brothers are next up, whose nefarious dealings need no elaboration. Then the Mars siblings, Jacqueline, Forrest and John, who inherited the candy and pet food dynasty. Along with Hershey and the chocolate industry, M&M Mars has manipulated the price of cocoa beans to be under the cost of production, making child slavery prevalent in the Ivory Coast. Other brand name billionaires include Larry Ellison of Oracle, Ingvar Kamprad of IKEA, and Hans and Birgit Rausing, whose father invented the TetraPak you know from your school milk carton. Then comes Bernard Arnault, who made his money with Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton, Li Ka-shing of Hong Kong, and Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York City, where information technology scams that embezzled taxpayer funds have been making the news lately.

Altogether these 50 people have $715 billion in assets. Societies have fed these fat cats with our consumer dollars, whether it's through housewares, entertainment, cheap goods, cheap chocolate, or overpriced ugly purses. They haven't stolen it. What's listed on this chart is funny money for sure - the last amount that a Ponzi scheme stock sold for, multiplied by their shares, or the face value of real estate on the green side of the monopoly board. These are publicly disclosed funds. But what concerns me is that I don't see the names of any bankers here or defense contractors - the wolves that we haven't chosen to feed. What about the money in Basel, Panama, and the Caymans? For every dollar in circulation, interest is being paid to someone. Where do those who own the Federal Reserve put their ill-gotten gains? They certainly wouldn't leave it in the US. Pay taxes on it? Don't be ridiculous. Somewhere there's another layer of wealth that makes these guys look like chump change. What I'm wondering is, who is the core convening committee at Bilderberg; the ones who invite in a rotating staff of politicians and elite fixers to do their bidding?

In Unwelcome Guests episode #528, Robin Upton asks

He plays a reading of David Southwell's Secrets and Lies, and then an interview with Tony Gosling, who set up the website http://Bilderberg.org, followed by two radio reports about Bilderberg from BBC world service. The second hour is Daniel Estulin's speech to the EU parliament on the Bilderberg Group, in which he suggests that their main function is to undermine national sovereignty and set up "one world company limited." Robin then examines the 'conspiracy theory' label, with a quick sketch by Bill Hicks and a section of Michael Parenti's talk at the 2010 Santa Cruz Deep Politics conference. The show concludes with Adrian Salbuchi, the Argentinean political commentator and economist. Adrian's conclusion is that national government is used to put an acceptable face on the reality that a small coterie of corporate and financial leaders rule the world out of self-interest, unhampered by considerations of public welfare.

The show is well-worth a listen, to understand the structure of Bilderberg, at unwelcomeguests.net. But for the functionalists among you, here's a character study of the Bilderberger: a youtube video called The Banker.

That was The Banker, produced by 33rd degree films. Written, directed and produced by Craig-James Moncur, with William Montague III played by Michael Daviot. There's another youtube video called The Banker, which is also good. It describes the effect of the Robin Hood tax, a .05% tax on each financial transaction that would create over $400 billion dollars a year. It could be used to end world hunger, combat climate change, or any number of other merry deeds for men in tights. It's being promoted at Cancun as a way to fund the climate debt with $100 billion at only a quarter of the revenues, as opposed to the $30 billion that nations have collectively pledged at the Copenhagen Accord. It would also cut down on currency manipulations and the millions of stock trades bought and sold in a fraction of a second for huge profits.

Now let's go from wealth at the level of global carnage to wealth that's been earned and is only charmingly obscene. This is an article in The New York Times called Adjusted Income by Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket. He writes:

Handler then agrees to lunch with a friend who wants funding to repair a historical building in San Francisco. His wife asks how much money, and he replies “I don't know,” and guesses a number that, had it been your yearly salary, would put you with those 60 million people outside your home. “That seems like a lot of money,” his wife says.

They have lunch and the guy asks for five million dollars. He writes,

That was an article in the 2007 New York Times by Daniel Handler. So how much is a lot of money? From an article at Jakarta Updates, I read:

And so, working backwards, I came up with this. For 1 in 100 million families, their average assets are worth $19 billion. For 1 out of 100,000 families who are in Lemony Snicket's shoes, I'm guessing they have about $200 million. 1 out of 200 has over a million, while one in 100 has over $500,000. One in 10 has $72,000 in assets, and every other person has $4000 or more.

What does all this mean? If the net worth of everyone in the world were put on a graph where each degree equaled $100,000, the line would be flat for 90% of the world's population. At 10% it would rise one degree, and at 1% it would rise 5 degrees, then 10 degrees at half a percent. But to represent the wealthiest 60 families on average, our chart would need to extend 190,000 degrees vertically, and then another 400,000 degrees to show Carlos Slim and another 120,000 degrees to show the Waltons. Now picture this global money supply as if it's mercury. Every time that pressure is applied to the skinny little bulge at the bottom, that 10% that we call the middle class, it shoots up the needle of the wealthiest even further. An even better strategy is squeezing the other five and a half billion people, through microloans or IMF loans. That's a cool five and a half billion for one measly dollar each. What difference is that going to make to them anyway, going one more day hungry? It's not like they're used to eating.

But it's the combination that makes these strategies magic. Debt pressure on the bottom half keeps them working for starvation wages to supply the products, which are then sold to the other indebted 50%. Only 10% of the world's population has any chance to escape the Wal*Mart chains, but what are the chances of that? The entire net assets of that 10% are less than it costs to be out of work for one year, or send a kid to college for four.

But that's not even the full absurdity of this concept of money that rules the world. I was posting on the discussion board for Wikipedia's List of Countries by External Debt, when I noticed an interesting section asking, "If all countries are in debt, who is the creditor?" Shouldn't some of these debts cancel each other out between nations? Someone posted their opinion that many of these debts are owed to private institutions. I googled, "What is the net worth of the whole entire world?" and it sent me to getmoneyenergy.com, which informed me that the world owed more than it had. Total world debt in the form of bonds equals $82 trillion dollars, but the total value of world equity markets amounts to only $44 trillion. Therefore, the world owes $38 trillion more than it has. This begs the question, to whom?

These bonds are so much money "printed," and most of it belongs to the US. As we know, however, these are really debt obligations owed to the Federal Reserve, which is majority-owned by the Rothschilds...as are 165 other "national" banks out of 195 nations. So if your plan to change the world involves a redistribution of money, think again. Money exists to concentrate power in the fewest hands possible, and it's doing a damn fine job of it.

This has been Tereza Coraggio with Third Paradigm. Thanks to Robin Upton and to Daniel Handler for my excerpts from their work. Thanks to Mike Scirocco for the thirdparadigm.org website, where this and all previous transcripts can be found embellished with photos, links, and videos. We go out with The Jayhawks from their Rainy Day Music CD, which is appropriate for this blustery pre-Christmas day. The song is Stumbling Through the Dark, appropriate to this blustery era.

Thank you for listening.