Protesters camped at St Pauls

[Pellacraft]

Had to laugh at the fact that most of the protesters go home to their comfy beds at night. Nothing like fighting the power from the comfort of your cosy sofa!

[MrSmith]

For the fifth time in this topic i repeat....

 

I went to #OccupyLSX on the first day of the protest. We all met at Paternoster Way and tried to get to the Stock Exchange but the lovely MET police force had it blocked on all sides.

 

The 5000 people/protesters in the group where then kettled by the MET surrounding all the sides of St Pauls, for the next 4 hours. The protestors decided at this point to camp here. The staff from St Pauls came out to us on the steps at one point, and told us if we required water or toilets we could use their facilities which we thought was a lovely gesture. Within 2 hours though the MET closed these options down.

 

I then went home with my friends after the police kindly stopped the kettle and allowed us out. I followed the protesters on the twitter feed and noted they camped outside St Pauls and within a few hours the Rev. had come out and given his full support and blessing.

 

Of course, within a few days, the trustees of St Pauls, whom are predominately BANKERS started hankering the church to have the protest stopped. You see is not enough that they have our politicians, police and press in their back pockets. They now wanted the Church to turn their back on the people.

 

Here's a list of the Trustees of St Pauls :-

 

Trustees

The Right Reverend Graeme Knowles, Dean of St Paul’s

Dame Helen Alexander DBE Deputy chair of the CBI, director of Centrica plc

Lord Blair of Boughton Former Metropolitan Police Commissioner

Roger Gifford Investment banker, big in City of London

John Harvey – Not clearly identified

Joyce Hytner OBE – Theatre director

Gavin Ralston Global Head of Product and leading international asset manager at Schroder Investment Management

Carol Sergeant CBE - Chief Risk Director at Lloyds TSB, formerly Managing Director for Regulatory Process and Risk at the FSA

John Spence OBE – Former Managing Director, Business Banking, LloydsTSB

 

Now it’s not for me to judge.

 

But that looks like a very high association rate with the 1% to me.

They should just make life easier for everyone and change their name to Occupy St Pauls,

But at least I now know how to protest, if I have a problem with business A and they won't let me protest, I should protest at business B and disrupt them in the hope that Business A takes pity on Business B and comes round to my way of thinking.

[Jeffrey Shaw]

Had to laugh at the fact that most of the protesters go home to their comfy beds at night. Nothing like fighting the power from the comfort of your cosy sofa!

Wonder why their tents can't be removed whilst vacant. Someone's not doing a very good job, there...

[green]

Wonder why their tents can't be removed whilst vacant. Someone's not doing a very good job, there...

 

The tents are not vacant. Its another right wing lie.

 

We are so gullable in this country we never question that our press may actually be lying to us. Its a very sad state of affairs.

[Jeffrey Shaw]

The tents are not vacant. Its another right wing lie.

No. Infra-red imaging shows the absence of anyone alive. I suppose that a tent containing a corpse would not show its presence!

[green]

No. Infra-red imaging shows the absence of anyone alive. I suppose that a tent containing a corpse would not show its presence!

 

I believe the protesters went to Buckingham Palace and that was only 1% occupied.

[rickiethecat]

The tents are not vacant. Its another right wing lie.

 

We are so gullable in this country we never question that our press may actually be lying to us. Its a very sad state of affairs.

 

Infra red cameras revealed that only 1 in 10 of the tents is occupied. The press didn't fly the helicopter that gathered this information, they just reported it!

[green]

Taken from forbes website...

 

AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

 

The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

 

The idea that a few bankers control a large chunk of the global economy might not seem like news to New York's Occupy Wall Street movement and protesters elsewhere (see photo). But the study, by a trio of complex systems theorists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, is the first to go beyond ideology to empirically identify such a network of power. It combines the mathematics long used to model natural systems with comprehensive corporate data to map ownership among the world's transnational corporations (TNCs).

 

"Reality is so complex, we must move away from dogma, whether it's conspiracy theories or free-market," says James Glattfelder. "Our analysis is reality-based."

 

Previous studies have found that a few TNCs own large chunks of the world's economy, but they included only a limited number of companies and omitted indirect ownerships, so could not say how this affected the global economy - whether it made it more or less stable, for instance.

 

The Zurich team can. From Orbis 2007, a database listing 37 million companies and investors worldwide, they pulled out all 43,060 TNCs and the share ownerships linking them. Then they constructed a model of which companies controlled others through shareholding networks, coupled with each company's operating revenues, to map the structure of economic power.

 

The work, to be published in PLoS One, revealed a core of 1318 companies with interlocking ownerships (see image). Each of the 1318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. What's more, although they represented 20 per cent of global operating revenues, the 1318 appeared to collectively own through their shares the majority of the world's large blue chip and manufacturing firms - the "real" economy - representing a further 60 per cent of global revenues.

 

When the team further untangled the web of ownership, it found much of it tracked back to a "super-entity" of 147 even more tightly knit companies - all of their ownership was held by other members of the super-entity - that controlled 40 per cent of the total wealth in the network. "In effect, less than 1 per cent of the companies were able to control 40 per cent of the entire network," says Glattfelder. Most were financial institutions. The top 20 included Barclays Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and The Goldman Sachs Group.

 

John Driffill of the University of London, a macroeconomics expert, says the value of the analysis is not just to see if a small number of people controls the global economy, but rather its insights into economic stability.

 

Concentration of power is not good or bad in itself, says the Zurich team, but the core's tight interconnections could be. As the world learned in 2008, such networks are unstable. "If one [company] suffers distress," says Glattfelder, "this propagates."

 

"It's disconcerting to see how connected things really are," agrees George Sugihara of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California, a complex systems expert who has advised Deutsche Bank.

 

Yaneer Bar-Yam, head of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), warns that the analysis assumes ownership equates to control, which is not always true. Most company shares are held by fund managers who may or may not control what the companies they part-own actually do. The impact of this on the system's behaviour, he says, requires more analysis.

 

Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power, the analysis could help make it more stable. By finding the vulnerable aspects of the system, economists can suggest measures to prevent future collapses spreading through the entire economy. Glattfelder says we may need global anti-trust rules, which now exist only at national level, to limit over-connection among TNCs. Sugihara says the analysis suggests one possible solution: firms should be taxed for excess interconnectivity to discourage this risk.

 

One thing won't chime with some of the protesters' claims: the super-entity is unlikely to be the intentional result of a conspiracy to rule the world. "Such structures are common in nature," says Sugihara.

 

Newcomers to any network connect preferentially to highly connected members. TNCs buy shares in each other for business reasons, not for world domination. If connectedness clusters, so does wealth, says Dan Braha of NECSI: in similar models, money flows towards the most highly connected members. The Zurich study, says Sugihara, "is strong evidence that simple rules governing TNCs give rise spontaneously to highly connected groups". Or as Braha puts it: "The Occupy Wall Street claim that 1 per cent of people have most of the wealth reflects a logical phase of the self-organising economy."

 

So, the super-entity may not result from conspiracy. The real question, says the Zurich team, is whether it can exert concerted political power. Driffill feels 147 is too many to sustain collusion. Braha suspects they will compete in the market but act together on common interests. Resisting changes to the network structure may be one such common interest.

 

When this article was first posted, the comment in the final sentence of the paragraph beginning "Crucially, by identifying the architecture of global economic power…" was misattributed.

[Jeffrey Shaw]

I believe the protesters went to Buckingham Palace and that was only 1% occupied.

Wholly irrelevant, as you well know.

[Jeffrey Shaw]

The tents are not vacant. Its another right wing lie.

The tents are mostly vacant overnight. To pretend otherwise is just another left wing lie.