Welcome to the Empire Files podcast. This is your host, Abby Martin. This is the audio of our show.

You can watch the episodes on our YouTube channel or at the Empirefiles.tv.

We live in a world of overabundance, yet the gap between the rich and the poor continues to dramatically deepen.

The 26 richest people on the planet now hold the same wealth as the 3.8 billion poorest,

50% of the population.

Occupy Wall Street popularized the term the 1%, the notion of a nebulous ruling elite that holds a wildly

disproportionate concentration of wealth and power at humanity's expense. But those who sit at the

top of the pyramid, the financial beemoths running this oppressive and violent economic order,

have largely operated in the shadows, until now.

The new book, Giants, answers in great detail the commonly asked but little-known question.

Who really pulls the strings?

Through exhaustive research, sociologist Peter Phillips outlines the top 17 trillion dollar investment management firms,

which control over $40 trillion in wealth, and exposes the few hundred people who decide the

investment of global capital. Peter Phillips is a professor of political sociology at

Sonoma State University and the former director of Project Censored. While in the Bay Area, I sat down with Peter to learn more about those who hold the reins of empire and capitalist hegemony.

Let's get started by talking about the state of the world today as a result of our global economic system.

Can you give us a quick assessment on the current state of human civilization?

Well, 80% of the people live on less than $10 a day. That's all the people in the world.

So there's only 20% that we would call the middle class, so to speak, and then about 1%

who are the transnational capitalist class. Those

are the really, really rich people. So for the bottom 80%, $10 a day is not very much. And

half of those, half the people in the world live on less than $2.50 a day. And the bottom

...