The top 50 of the 147 superconnected companies:

1. Barclays plc
2. Capital Group Companies Inc
3. FMR Corporation
4. AXA

5. State Street Corporation
6. JP Morgan Chase & Co 
7. Legal & General Group plc 
8. Vanguard Group Inc
9. UBS AG
10. Merrill Lynch & Co Inc 
11. Wellington Management Co LLP
12. Deutsche Bank AG
13. Franklin Resources Inc
14. Credit Suisse Group
15. Walton Enterprises LLC
16. Bank of New York Mellon Corp
17. Natixis
18. Goldman Sachs Group Inc
19. T Rowe Price Group Inc
20. Legg Mason Inc
21. Morgan Stanley
22. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc
23. Northern Trust Corporation
24. Société Générale
25. Bank of America Corporation
26. Lloyds TSB Group plc 
27. Invesco plc
28. Allianz SE 29. TIAA 
30. Old Mutual Public Limited Company
31. Aviva plc 
32. Schroders plc
33. Dodge & Cox
34. Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc*
35. Sun Life Financial Inc
36. Standard Life plc
37. CNCE
38. Nomura Holdings Inc
39. The Depository Trust Company 
40. Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance 
41. ING Groep NV 
42. Brandes Investment Partners LP 
43. Unicredito Italiano SPA 
44. Deposit Insurance Corporation of Japan 
45. Vereniging Aegon 
46. BNP Paribas 
47. Affiliated Managers Group Inc 
48. Resona Holdings Inc 
49. Capital Group International Inc 
50. China Petrochemical Group Company

rideronthedrumbeat:

This is from 2009, but the insider look at Wall Street is invaluable for understanding the protests that are underway in NYPD and the movements that are building across the country in solidarity against corporate greed and corruption.

From The Independent:

Fine wines, lobster lunches and…

THIS ARTICLE.
THIS ARTICLE IS RELEVANT.

The easiest thing was buy into the system, convince ourselves that there was no other way to live. A few semesters worth of economics classes certainly helped; the in-house economics classes taught by the bank helped even more. The financial markets operate on the principle that, at our core, we’re all basically shit: selfish, self-interested creatures. There’s a whole branch of economics devoted to proving that if you help someone, say, run in front of a speeding train to push another person out of the way, you are actually acting out of self-interest, not altruism; that what most of us would consider humankind’s cardinal virtues - love, honor, compassion - do not actually exist.

The idea that we’re nothing more than selfish animals is an attractive philosophy to a person pulling down a few million dollars a year. It is a philosophy that negates guilt. The guilty feeling a normal person gets while visiting a Third World country is the same feeling a senior investment banker gets when they see a working class neighborhood in Birmingham or Philadelphia. When your paycheck could cover the salaries of a few hundred nurses or teachers, you need some explanation for why that’s okay. The only one that really works is that life is a pure meritocracy. That whether rich or poor, we’re all getting what we deserve.

THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT WHEN I SAY WE HAVE STOCKHOLM SYNDROME. THIS IS THE IDEOLOGY THAT IS RUINING AMERICA, AND WE’LL DO ANYTHING TO DEFEND IT, EVEN IF IT MEANS GOING DOWN WITH THE SHIP.

It’s not that people in the City or on Wall Street are necessarily bad people, it’s just that they, like almost anyone, will do anything to keep their million or ten million dollar paycheck. They’ll creatively interpret data, they’ll understate risks, they’ll put the best spin on things. Some will lie, cheat, and steal. But most of them, like most of us, will simply resist looking at the world from any perspective other than their own. And if we are intelligent, we will keep a careful watch on them - both now and into the distant future.

THAT.

MAINTAINING THE IMAGE OF PROSPERITY AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHERS, DUE TO A BRAINWASHED GROUPTHINK OF SELF-INTEREST OVER THE BELIEF IN ALTRUISM AND SACRIFICE; DUE TO SOME BOORISH ALPHA MALE CONCEPT OF SUPERIORITY THROUGH MONEY.

IT IS NOT SUSTAINABLE, IT IS NIHILISTIC AND HEDONISTIC ALL AT ONCE, AND IT PROTECTS ITSELF IN THE SAME WAY YOU AND I PROTECT OURSELVES FROM PSYCHOLOGICAL DISTRESS; FROM PAINFUL FACTS; FROM THE TRUTH.

REPRESSION.

PROJECTION.

DENIAL.

I am SEETHING, and it feels RIGHTEOUS.   

(via thatshephap-deactivated20111116)

Are we seeing the final crisis (pdf) of capitalism? What I mean is that Marx envisaged that the end of capitalism would see four features, all of which are in place now.

1. The rate of profit would fall, reducing the motive to invest and producing slower growth and bigger recessions.
Although observed, past profit rates are high, companies’ reluctance to invest and the low valuations on shares suggest that bosses and shareholders anticipate very low future profit rates.
2. Low returns on real assets would lead to speculative bubbles and swindles and hence financial crises. 
To some extent, the banking and euro area debt crises are the results of the dearth of real investment opportunities arising from the fall in (expected) profits. This lack of investment, combined with high Asian savings drove bond yields down. That led to the growth of mortgage securities, as banks tried to synthesize securities to meet demand for them, and encouraged governments to borrow. In this way, the seeds of the financial crises were sown by the fundamental crisis of real profitability.
3. Increased inequality would exacerbate economies’ propensity for crises, by creating a mass of people too poor to buy the goods which capitalism produced. 
This has not quite happened. But, as IMF research has argued, inequalityhas had a very similar destabilizing effect. It led to the build-up of debt which contributed to the banking crisis. 
4. By its end, capitalism would cease to be a means for developing the economy’s productive forces and become instead a barrier to their development. As Marx put it:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production…From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.

Me with my sign. :D

Not the most flattering picture of me, but I did it for equality, not vanity. 
************
Lots of folks have been saying “WELL WHY AREN’T YOU IN MIDTOWN, THAT’S WHERE ALL THE MULTINATIONALS WENT, DON’TCHAKNOW?” Location doesn’t really matter. The target is the entire system for some of these folks protesting. The system that told them to go to college and do what they love, no matter what the cost, only to graduate and find an inhospitable job market. The system that destroyed dreams of home ownership and illegally forecloses on mortgages. The system that lays off people and destroys life savings of entire families. The very same system that was provided with unprecedented monetary support by our very government in order to prevent a larger economic collapse…a collapse that is slowly occurring irregardless. People SHOULD be questioning the fairness of a government that supports institutions like Bank of America, AIG, Bear Sterns, JP Morgan Chase, Merrill Lynch, and Citigroup while neglecting the needs of the citizens affected by their crimes.  

The only reason most people in America are “okay” with capitalism is that we have a government mandated safety net, there to protect the weakest and the poorest, created by the government policies of the very same man that I quoted, a man who was dealing with very similar enemies to the ones we have today. FDR understood that you cannot have an America that is solely focused on profit margins. (Greed has no logical endpoint; money can be amassed ad infinitum.) You cannot build your country’s economy on the backs of the people without giving them some margin of security, some way to cope with the inequality that is an integral part of any capitalist system. That is why you provide them with affordable health care, Social Security, public education, unemployment insurance and benefits, and so on. 

Now, the oligarchy is trying to cut it up, piece by piece, all for the sake of sparing “job creators”. What are the so-called “job creators” doing now? Probably sitting on fat wads of cash, complaining about how much they’re taxed already, while mentioning nothing about how they actually get most of their money (i.e. Capital gains). Probably waiting for Obama to be kicked out of office so they can push their agendas through Congress with nothing more than a weak-willed Democratic majority in the Senate to oppose them. 

I’m jobless. I have loans to be paid back. I accept some of the blame for the decisions that got me to this point. But even if I had a job, even if my loans had been paid in full, I’d still be protesting, because there are plenty of people that believe that the economic system in this country has turned against them. I seriously question whether its orientation was towards helping people in the first place! A corporation isn’t alive. It doesn’t breathe, eat, shit, piss, think, love, get sick, have children…it exists for one reason only: profit, and profit at any (human) cost. It is ludicrous to think for one second that it can or should be treated as an individual when it treats living, breathing individuals as nothing more than risky debt to be bought and sold in credit default swap schemes!

My friends and I are on Wall Street to make our presence known. That’s what matters; our beings and our words.

Hearts and minds.