Giants: The Global Power Elite, by PeterPhillips (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018), 384 Pages (Incl. Acknowledgements, Notes and Index)

Giants: The Global Power Elite follows the tradition of C. Wright Mills' work, The Power Elite (1956), and the work by G. William Domhoff, Who Rules America? (1967), and debates on the power structure in the USA and globally. Peter Phillips, an author and professor of political sociology at Sonoma State University, reviews the decades-long transition from a nation-state power elite, as initially proposed by Mills and Domhoff, to a transnational power elite. Power elite groups have globalised over the past several decades and built international institutions to safeguard their status quo. Nowadays, the capitalist class is a transnational class that functions as a largely informal network of ultra-wealthy people with common interests in managing and protecting their concentrated wealth. The global top 0.1 per cent comprises approximately 2400 billionaires who employ their capital with asset management firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, and J.P. Morgan Chase. The top 17 of these trillion-dollar asset management firms – which Phillips calls the Giants – controlled over $40 trillion by the end of 2010s. These asset managers are all invested in each other and managed by a tiny group of financiers sitting on Giants' boards. Philips explains the structure of the global power elite with four categories, namely Managers, Facilitators, Protectors and Ideologists. A tiny group of 199 individuals form the core of the financial global elite and are called ‘Managers’. They are the directors of the Giants who make the decisions regarding the management of global capital and include, among others, Jamie Dimon (J.P.Morgan Chase), Larry Fink (BlackRock) and John McFarlane (Barclays Bank). The ‘Facilitators’ are non-governmental organisations that ensure the accumulation and concentration of global capital. These policy planners serve the Giants' interests by developing policies that advocate the free flow of capital and the market as a regulator of a global society. The major Facilitators are the Group of Thirty, the Trilateral Commission, the World Economic Forum, the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank, the Bilderberg Group, the Atlantic Council and the Council on Foreign Relations. They are privately funded and hence independent from the state. The Facilitators recommend policy to national governments and international institutions. ‘Protectors’, or military-intelligence apparatus, protect private capital and capital flows. They include the U.S. military and intelligence and NATO. The U.S./NATO military operates in nearly every country of the Western world, serves as a force and protects the freedom of the Giants to invest. Private security companies such as Blackwater and G4S supplement the U.S./NATO military in providing security for the global power elite. Philips rightly notes that the USA maintains over 800 military bases in approximately 70 countries and territories, whereas Britain, France and Russia have only approximately 30 bases overseas. Finally, the ‘Ideologists’ are the global media organisations that serve as public relations operatives. Both public and private media outlets oversee ideological news management and engineer public opinions, beliefs and values. Philips identifies six major ‘transnational news and entertainment corporations’: Comcast, Time Warner, Disney, Bertelsmann, 21st Century Fox and Viacom/CBS. Philips further assesses the ‘propaganda firms’, including public relations and advertising firms like Omnicom, WPP and Interpublic Group. The author highlights how important the media and PR firms are in framing issues, blunting opposition and creating the impression that global capitalism is not only inevitable but is improving the lives of everyone. The global elite has increased its transnationally organised power over global society through the interconnections of the Managers, Facilitators, Protectors and Ideologists. The goal of the power elite is nothing short of reinforcing their international capitalist class interests, and it requires considerable work to ensure their class interests dominate the economic, political and social spheres. It also requires the capacity to anticipate and control democratic social movements and to marginalise resistance movements. The global power elite is an extreme minority in today's impoverished world. Approximately 70 per cent of the world's population lives on less than $10 a day, and about half live on less than $5 a day. Philips points out that such extreme wealth concentration leads to various social and economic problems like poverty, war conflicts and environmental devastation. Phillips identifies the global power elite members by name and incentivises them to act to contribute to the common good. He argues that power elites are the only ones able to correct socioeconomic problems without major civil unrest, war or societal chaos. Systemic changes and redistribution of wealth are urgent and necessary, and the Giants could lead these efforts. The book then concludes with a letter to the power elite, which petitions for greater awareness of the global problems and challenges, co-signed by Phillips and 90 other signatories. The author recommends using the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the General Assembly in 1948, as a base for promoting the understanding of the causes of global poverty and inequality. Phillips writes with the notion that capitalist domination has been fully realised and that the nation-state power has been subdued. Yet is this the case? The nation-state is not obsolete, and under certain types of anti-globalisation and anti-capitalism conditions, Phillips's proposed system of power could be destabilised. One could imagine that in another depression brought about by a shock in the financial sector, the Fed or other central banks could impose severe constraints, if not outright nationalisation, on the finance operations. Similarly, what if a nation-state declared military or economic war on another country? What would happen to the closely linked global network of financial capitalism? Something distantly similar we can already observe around the Russia-Ukraine conflict and China-U.S. tensions. One could also suggest that elites are camped and fractioned, and no unified power elite exists in the USA or globally. Although the degree of coordination may have increased, competition between interest groups exists within the global capitalist class. Also, although elite groups influence the political process, their power is checked by public opinion and the balances built into the political systems of democratic states. The global power elite is not independent of nation-state power. A few isolated examples illustrate the power of the nation-state. In Japan, the arrest of Carlos Ghosn, Renault-Nissan's chairman and CEO, demonstrates the contending power elite relationships. The arrest was based on the allegations of Ghosn's financial misconduct. At the time of Ghosn's arrest, Renault owned 43.4 per cent of Nissan, whereas Nissan owned non-voting shares equal to 15 per cent of Renault. The French government owned a 15.01 per cent share of Renault. In contrast to Phillip's portrait of the state's near-absolute support of big capital, the French government intervened in Renault-Nissan's corporate decisions. In 2015, for example, the government increased its stake in Renault, intending to block a resolution that could reduce its control over the firm. It was further reported that Japan's Nissan had resisted losing its control over the integrated operations, and the CEO arrest was called a coup d'état from the side of Nissan, as Ghosn was beginning to side with the French authorities. This conflict between two global firms was due to the struggle for control, which is directly connected to inter-state competition. In October 2003, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the wealthiest man in Russia and the owner-director of Yukos, one of the largest Russian companies, was arrested. In the months that followed the arrest, the general prosecutor's office of Russia raided the headquarters of Yukos and detained some key executives for tax evasion and financial crimes. The general prosecutor subjected the company to severe restrictions that led to the sharp decline of its market value and brought it to the verge of bankruptcy. Officially, all these actions occurred because of Yukos's illegal dealings. Still, the real reasons were that Khodorkovsky had publicly criticised the president of the Russian Federation, that he had funded opposition political parties and that he had also played with the idea of becoming a presidential candidate. The major economic reason behind the state attack was Khodorkovsky's intention to sell Yukos, producing 20 per cent of Russia's oil output, to the U.S. oil giant Exxon. This conflict between the largest oil company and the Russian state illustrates the contradictory relationship between transnational capital and national state interests. In 2018, Meng Wanzhou, CFO and board deputy chair of Huawei, China's leading technology company, was detained in Canada on fraud charges at the request of the U.S. authorities, which accused Huawei of violating U.S. sanctions against Iran. The arrest occurred against the backdrop of the trade war and trade negotiations between the USA and China. Some experts argued that the timing of the arrest could hint that nationalist factions in the U.S. administration were trying to sabotage the trade deal. Whatever the reason behind the detention, this case illustrates that nation-states could use legal force to control global corporations within the range of their jurisdictions, and the level of judicial power is highly correlated with a state's power. Last, the Australian Tax Office has successfully ‘grilled’ Australia's largest national and multinational entities over little-to-no taxes paid onshore. Since the Tax Avoidance Taskforce commenced in 2016, it has helped secure more than $27 billion in additional tax revenue from multinational enterprises, and large public and private businesses. This tax collection was a product of the state's forceful intervention in the top 500 corporations. Although these examples are single and, to some extent, extreme, they show that conflicts of interest remain between big corporations and national states. Together with today's trends of rising nationalism and emerging deglobalisation, the use of judicial control by states over global corporations seems to be on the rise. Although the Giants' power may grow through their intimate connections with national and global politics, it is not immune to the influence of states' actions. Also, corporate actors that are partially or entirely state-owned (recall China, Russia and Gulf monarchies) are growing in power and wealth, and state-capitalist countries advance their market-oriented policies to accumulate more profits and influence. Giants is no doubt an ambitious and exciting book. It thoroughly details how an international capitalist class emerged, the basis of its unity and how it advances its class interests on the global stage. In future work, however, in addition to Phillips's deep analysis of the Giants and their power influence, we may need an analytical framework that includes both nation-state power and geopolitical competition between nation-states to comprehend a transition from a U.S.-centric to a multi-polar power structure.

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