 speaker giving his testimony is Peter Phillips. He's a political sociology professor Sonoma State University. He is the author of 14 project censored yearbooks from 1997 to 2011. His most recent book is Giants, The Global Power Elite. Seven stories press and I'm pretty sure Peter was a director of the projects. Are you there, Peter? Okay, Peter, you were the director of product censor for many years, I believe. Fourteen years, yeah. Fourteen years, okay. And Peter, I love you, man. Take it away. Well, thank you, Frank and Rachel for an inspiring program. I've really been enjoying the last few hours I've been here and I know you've been here all day so I will do this as quickly as I can. The main point of my book, The Giants, The Global Power Elite, was that if we look at what the Cold War and the US military empire is about, it's primarily the protection of concentrated global capital and the ability for people with money to move it anywhere in the world to invest without any interference from other governments or local populations. That's what a military empire is about, what it's for. That's the primary reason. So driving this engine of global wealth concentration are giant transnational investment companies like BlackRock who control $7 trillion worth of capital. In 2017, there were $17 trillion investment companies that were collectively worth $41.1 trillion in capital. There's about 20 now and it's closer to $50 trillion. These firms all directly invest in each other so there's this huge cluster of centralized capital managed by only 199 people. So part of my goal in my book was to say who are these people that are controlling this $50 trillion worth of wealth and what are they doing with it and who helps them. So when you think about Jeff Bezos, worth $100 billion or more, he's incredibly wealthy. But what we're really talking about is the idea that the mantra that Occupy gave us, the 1% versus the 99%. But even 1%, several hundred million people in the top 1%, is still a huge amount of people out of $8 billion in the world that they own almost everything. And so what we're really talking about is who are the managers of this money? How do they get the U.S. military empire to support them? What are the policy makers in the direction? So these these elites and there's about six or seven thousand of them who go to Davos that go to the big World Bank forums and all of that. They're the core of the transnational capitalist class and global capitalism. These elites interact through governmental policymaking organizations, privately funded by large corporations, which include the Council of 30, the Trilateral Commission, and the Atlantic Council. Now the Atlantic Council just came out with a policy statement on China. They want to see regime change there in the next 20 years. They had come out with a policy statement on Putin. They wanted to see regime change in Russia. So you have a policy group funded by corporate money that's making recommendations to governments, the NATO intelligence services, security services, the Pentagon transnational government groups, as to how they're going to manage global capital and what needs to be done. And that includes regime changes around the world. So they also inform they also talking to G7, G20, the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the National Bank of Settlements. This is very core. It's global massive amounts of money involved, trillions of dollars worth of wealth, and the power elites are in support of capital investment. They're collectively embedded in a system of mandatory growth. Failure for capital achieved continued expansion leads to economic stagnation, which could result in depression, bank failures, currency collapses, and mass unemployment. The power elites are kind of trapped in a web of enforced growth that requires ongoing global management and the formation of new and ever expanding capital investment opportunities. They really would like to get into Siberia and invest there wildly. They want total control and penetration around the world. That's what this capital is essentially about. So the biggest problem the global power elite face is that they have more capital than there are safe investments and opportunities. So this can lead to risky speculative investments like the subprime mortgage, the backhoe that we had in 2008 and almost total collapse of the world economic system, but also it leads to permanent war spending. A major part of the profits and the continued growth for global capital of 50 trillion is war spending. So wars meet that goal. They buy up products, they blow up bombs, they destroy things that have to be rebuilt. It's a massive profit making mechanism. And so we see that. And then also the continued privatization of the commons. So everything that we hold in commons is up for grabs and privatizing. So the world's total wealth is estimated about 250 trillion. So we say, well, 50 trillion is the only part of that wealth. But that's true. But this is the free floating money part. This is a concentrated global capital money that can be invested basically anywhere that they can get a good return. And so that is what drives our military. That's what drives our governments. It drives all capital governments. And it drives the motivating force behind the intelligence agencies and what they're doing worldwide. So we have 80% of the people in the world are living on less than $10 a day. And the poorest half of the global population was on less than 250 a day. So the inequality is just massive. It's incredible. And there's more than 1.3 billion people in the world live on $1.25 a day. So and then each day, every day, 30,000 people die from starvation and malnutrition internationally. And that's a staggering loss. 10 million fatalities a year just from chronic hunger and hunger that we have more than enough food in the world to feed everybody. Hunger is a failure to distribute that food where people can eat it and have access to it. But there's in my book, Global Power Elite, I identify 300 people individually with their bios, their net worth, where they went to college, how they're interconnected, what policy groups they're on. This is the they when we say they are doing this to us. And I for years heard, you know, they did this, they did that, they assassinated Kennedy. This is who benefits from military empire and global power. And these are the activists within that system, these 300 people. So I think it's really important to know who they are and to be able to act on that in a real open way. It's sort of like pulling the covers off the global elite and saying, this is who they are, and we need to be in their faces about what's happening in the world. So the danger is that global power elites will fail to recognize the inevitability and economic disasters. Capitalism will collapse again. And next time we may be in for for global war that goes along with that, massive unrest and starvation. We already know what a pandemic can do to the world. And so these are very important issues that we all face. So without significant corrective adjustments by the global power elite themselves, mass social movements and rebellions will occur and they have to occur. They will occur and expand and challenge the global power elite who already many of them are seeing the writing on the wall. That's what the Davos refit is all about. We're going to remake capitalism and have the top corporations of the world take care of everybody. That's not going to solve it. That is not going to be the end all and solve that whatever. But it requires action at all levels. I'm certainly inspired about all the people here today. We need to be aware of who the elite are and what they're doing. And we need to be challenging them very openly, very directly in person whenever possible. And that's and following a common code. And I in my book with the reprinting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which I think is one of the best moral instruments out there for us in terms of a guidance for whatever social action we're engaging in. So I'll rest with that. Thank you. And with that he rests. Thank you. And your testimony will be submitted into the record. Thank you very much. Next Frank. All right. Thanks Rachel. Thank you Peter.