Who Runs The World? Solid Proof That A Core Group Of Wealthy Elitists Is Pulling The StringsMichael Snyder, Contributor As you will see later in this article, the ultra-wealthy have enough money sitting in offshore banks to buy all of the goods and services produced in the United States during the course of an entire year and still be able to pay off the entire U.S. national debt. That is an amount of money so large that it is almost incomprehensible. Under this neo-feudalist system, all the rest of us are debt slaves, including our own governments. Just look around everyone is drowning in debt, and all of that debt is making the ultra-wealthy even wealthier. But the ultra-wealthy dont just sit on all of that wealth. They use some of it to dominate the affairs of the nations. The ultra-wealthy own virtually every major bank and every major corporation on the planet. They use a vast network of secret societies, think tanks and charitable organizations to advance their agendas and to keep their members in line. They control how we view the world through their ownership of the media and their dominance over our education system. They fund the campaigns of most of our politicians and they exert a tremendous amount of influence over international organizations such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. When you step back and take a look at the big picture, there is little doubt about who runs the world. It is just that most people dont want to admit the truth. The ultra-wealthy dont run down and put their money in the local bank like you and I do. Instead, they tend to stash their assets in places where they wont be taxed such as the Cayman Islands. According to a report that was released last summer, the global elite have up to 32 TRILLION dollars stashed in offshore banks around the globe. And of course that does not even count the money that is stashed in other locations that the study did not account for, and it does not count all of the wealth that the global elite have in hard assets such as real estate, precious metals, art, yachts, etc. The global elite have really hoarded an incredible amount of wealth in these troubled times. The following is from an article on the Huffington Post website But as I mentioned previously, the global elite just dont have a lot of money. They also basically own just about every major bank and every major corporation on the entire planet. According to an outstanding NewScientist article, a study of more than 40,000 transnational corporations conducted by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich discovered that a very small core group of huge banks and giant predator corporations dominate the entire global economic system The researchers found that this core group consists of just 147 very tightly knit companies The following are the top 25 banks and corporations at the heart of this super-entity. You will recognize many of the names on the list 1. Barclays plc The ultra-wealthy elite often hide behind layers and layers of ownership, but the truth is that thanks to interlocking corporate relationships, the elite basically control almost every Fortune 500 corporation. The amount of power and control that this gives them is hard to describe. Unfortunately, this same group of people have been running things for a very long time. For example, New York City Mayor John F. Hylan said the following during a speech all the way back in 1922 These international bankers created the central banks of the world (including the Federal Reserve), and they use those central banks to get the governments of the world ensnared in endless cycles of debt from which there is no escape. Government debt is a way to legitimately take money from all of us, transfer it to the government, and then transfer it into the pockets of the ultra-wealthy. Today, Barack Obama and almost all members of Congress absolutely refuse to criticize the Fed, but in the past there have been some brave members of Congress that have been willing to take a stand. For example, the following quote is from a speech that Congressman Louis T. McFadden delivered to the U.S. House of Representatives on June 10, 1932 Sadly, most Americans still believe that the Federal Reserve is a federal agency, but that is simply not correct. The following comes from factcheck.org According to researchers that have looked into the ownership of the big Wall Street banks that dominate the Fed, the same names keep coming up over and over: the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, the Lazards, the Schiffs and the royal families of Europe. But ultra-wealthy international bankers have not just done this kind of thing in the United States. Their goal was to create a global financial system that they would dominate and control. Just check out what Georgetown University history professor Carroll Quigley once wrote Sadly, most Americans have never even heard of the Bank for International Settlements, but it is at the very heart of the global financial system. The following is from Wikipedia The ultra-wealthy have also played a major role in establishing other important international institutions such as the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO. In fact, the land for the United Nations headquarters in New York City was purchased and donated by John D. Rockefeller. The international bankers are internationalists and they are very proud of that fact. The elite also dominate the education system in the United States. Over the years, the Rockefeller Foundation and other elitist organizations have poured massive amounts of money into Ivy League schools. Today, Ivy League schools are considered to be the standard against which all other colleges and universities in America are measured, and the last four U.S. presidents were educated at Ivy League schools. The elite also exert a tremendous amount of influence through various secret societies (Skull and Bones, the Freemasons, etc.), through some very powerful think tanks and social clubs (the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Bohemian Grove, Chatham House, etc.), and through a vast network of charities and non-governmental organizations (the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund, etc.). But for a moment, I want to focus on the power the elite have over the media. In a previous article, I detailed how just six monolithic corporate giants control most of whatwe watch, hear and read every single day. These giant corporations own television networks, cable channels, movie studios, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, music labels and even many of our favorite websites. Time Warner Walt Disney Viacom News Corporation CBS Corporation NBC Universal And of course the elite own most of our politicians as well. The following is a quote from journalist Lewis Lapham Have you ever wondered why things never seem to change in Washington D.C. no matter who we vote for? Well, it is because both parties are owned by the establishment. It would be nice to think that the American people are in control of who runs things in the U.S., but that is not how it works in the real world. In the real world, the politician that raises more money wins more than 80 percent of the time in national races. Our politicians are not stupid they are going to be very good to the people that can give them the giant piles of money that they need for their campaigns. And the people that can do that are the ultra-wealthy and the giant corporations that the ultra-wealthy control. Are you starting to get the picture? There is a reason why the ultra-wealthy are referred to as the establishment. They have set up a system that greatly benefits them and that allows them to pull the strings. They do. In fact, they even admit as much. David Rockefeller wrote the following in his 2003 book entitled Memoirs There is so much more that could be said about all of this. In fact, an entire library of books could be written about the power and the influence of the ultra-wealthy international bankers that run the world. But hopefully this is enough to at least get some conversations started. So what do you think about all of this? Please feel free to post a comment with your thoughts below This article first appeared here at the Economic Collapse Blog. Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here. 