Amid the excitement, excitement, and tension of the election, the big picture of what the United States is and how it operates often escapes people’s attention. Many people think that electing a candidate will dramatically change their future to better represent their values, but in reality there is only one group of people who matter most: Sonoma State University professor emeritus Dr. Peter Phillips, “giants of capital.”

in it new book The eponymous Phillips examines economic trends in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and how the concentration of wealth around the world has taken a dramatic turn towards the already ultra-rich. He joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of Scheer Intelligence to further analyze these trends and how serious inequality has become.

The basic problem is simple to understand: The ultra-rich have “doubled their concentration of wealth.” According to Phillips, this means that “the top half of the population is getting richer and basically the rest of the world is getting poorer.”

Phillips cites top 10 equity investment firms such as BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Morgan Stanley and others as the main culprits. According to Phillips, more than $50 trillion is controlled by 117 people in these 10 companies.

This enormous concentration of wealth inevitably renders any semblance of democracy almost useless, as the real decision-makers are those with the biggest purses. “Whoever we elect as president is not going to make any difference because they are run by capital,” Phillips tells Scheer.

“They are there to protect global capital. This is the purpose of the American political system. This is the purpose of political systems in the West. “They see capital as a vital interest of the West, and that is why we have military bases all over the world to protect capital, to ensure that debts are repaid and that this capital continues to grow and expand.”