RFK Jr. The Defender - BlackRock and Vanguard with Dr Michael Nevradakis

In this episode, Dr. Michael Neverdakis, a regular contributor to The Defender, shares his thoughts on the role of the two biggest financial houses in the world in profiting from the pandemic, and how they have profited from it. He also points out that they also own companies that are at the spear tip for pushing for vaccine passports, and that stand to profit greatly from making and controlling and orchestrating those passports. He also notes that Bloomberg and BlackRock own each other too, which makes it all the more remarkable that they control each other in a way that makes them a part of the same company and that they both exert a significant share of influence over the decisions that are made within these two companies and over those decisions that take place within them, like the one called Block 4, which is actually called "Block companies" and is the fourth branch of government, which was coined by Bloomberg in the fourth quarter of 2018. The result is a company that is worth more than $15 trillion, and could be worth as much as $20 trillion by 2028, according to a recent estimate by Bloomberg. We talk about how these two huge financial houses dominate the world economy, and why it's so important that they own so much of the world's most valuable assets and control so much control over so many of the most important things, and also why they should be worried about pandemic vaccines and other vaccines, especially since they stand to benefit from them. in the long-term. Dr. Neverdakakis shares his perspective on the link between vaccines and vaccines, vaccines, bio-tech, vaccines and bio-security, and the pharmaceutical industry. and vaccines and how the two major financial houses are working together to fight pandemic pandemic epidemics and their ability to profit from pandemic risk. He talks about how they leverage their influence in order to make money from vaccines, and their influence over vaccines and bioprism and vaccines. And how they use vaccines as a tool to fight against pandemic disease. the most effective way to protect against it. Michael talks about the role they can play in the fight against it, not only in fighting it, but how they can profit from it, and in the process of preventing it, as well as how they do so. what they can do so by using vaccines to help fight it and why they can be a powerful tool to spread the word about it and more.

00:00:00.000 Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast.

00:00:02.000 My guest today is Michael Neverdakis, PhD.

00:00:06.000 Dr.

00:00:06.000 Michael Neverdakis, who is one of our regular journalists for The Defender.

00:00:13.000 He's coming to us from Athens, Greece, where he's based.

00:00:18.000 And we're going to talk about his most recent article from The Defender, which I found fascinating, which is the role of the two biggest financial houses in the world in profiting from the pandemic.

00:00:36.000 have profited enormously.

00:00:38.000 And one of the opening salvos of your wonderful article, and I urge people to take a look at it, is your observation that many of our largest corporations Have dropped the COVID mandates as soon as the Supreme Court denied Biden administration's COVID plan, essentially.

00:01:04.000 Among the corporations that immediately dropped mandates were Boeing.

00:01:09.000 General Electric and Starbucks, but there were a number of companies that did not.

00:01:15.000 And I'm going to actually read this list of companies, which is going to take maybe one minute.

00:01:22.000 But it's interesting because the thing that they all have in common, as you pointed out, Is that they are owned in majority or in large part by these two big financial houses, which control a huge part of the world economy.

00:01:40.000 Between them, I think they're worth $15 trillion, which is about three quarters of the U.S. gross national product.

00:01:49.000 It's triple the GDP of Germany, and they are growing and growing.

00:01:55.000 Let's just list these companies.

00:01:57.000 American Express, Anthem, AstraZeneca, AT&T, Capital One, Carhartt, Centene, Chevron, Sigma, Cisco, Citigroup, Columbia, Sportswear, CVS, Deloitte, Delta Airlines,

00:02:13.000 DoorDash, Eli Lilly, Emergent BioSolutions, Equinox Group, Facebook, Ford Motor Company, Frontier Airlines, The Gap, Gilead Sciences, Goldman Sachs, Google, ASRO, Hawaiian Airlines,

00:02:29.000 Hershey, Hats, Humana, IBM, Intel, Jeffrey's, Johnson& Johnson, Kraft Heinz, Lyft, McDonald's, MGM Resorts, Microsoft, Moderna, Morgan Stanley, NBC Universal, Netflix, The New York Times Company,

00:02:46.000 Nike, Novartis, Pfizer, Pioneer Natural Resources, PwC, Roblox, Roche, Salesforce, TJX, T-Mobile, Twitter, Tyson Foods, Uber, United Airlines, UPS, Valero, Verizon, Viacom, Walgreens, Walmart, Walt Disney, Warner Media, and The Washington Post.

00:03:06.000 And those are only a few of the companies they own.

00:03:10.000 You also point out that these two huge investment firms are also, they own companies that are at the spear tip for pushing for vaccine passports and also that stand to profit greatly from making and controlling and orchestrating vaccine passports.

00:03:30.000 One of those is Microsoft, of course.

00:03:33.000 And who are the other ones?

00:03:35.000 There's a few others that I found.

00:03:37.000 There may be more, but the ones that I found and that I mentioned in the article include Apple, which has been involved in developing the Apple Wallet, which several US states and some countries are using.

00:03:50.000 As part of their rollout of digital wallets, as they're calling them.

00:03:54.000 There's MasterCard, which has also been involved in similar types of initiatives.

00:04:01.000 Oracle is another.

00:04:02.000 And Thales Group is another, which is a French defense contractor partially owned by the French government, but also it has its own separate shareholders as well.

00:04:15.000 And they are behind the development of some of these vaccine passports, as they're called as well.

00:04:24.000 One of the things you point out is that those two companies actually own each other, too.

00:04:29.000 Vanguard owns is, you know, the major shareholder in BlackRock, and BlackRock is one of the principal shareholders in Vanguard.

00:04:38.000 So it's really kind of one massive monopoly company that now owns a huge portion of the global economy.

00:04:48.000 That's very true.

00:04:49.000 You mentioned before that these two companies alone control over $15 trillion in assets.

00:04:56.000 That's predicted by Bloomberg to surpass $20 trillion by 2028 and has led various analysts to call these companies, which are essentially almost operating as one company because of the fact that they also have this cross which are essentially almost operating as one company because of the fact that they also have this cross ownership with each other as kingmakers, because they have such a significant share in so many companies, like the

00:05:25.000 That they exert a lot of influence over votes that take place and over presumably decisions that are made within these companies.

00:05:36.000 Bloomberg actually called BlockRock, specifically back in 2020, the fourth branch of government, which was an interesting way of putting it, and especially considering the source, which is Bloomberg.

00:05:49.000 But there's this very strange cross-ownership where Vanguard is the biggest shareholder in BlackRock, and BlackRock is the biggest shareholder in Vanguard.

00:06:00.000 And then it makes you wonder, well, can we dig any deeper than that to get any more information about the Yeah, I think.

00:06:24.000 Individuals who were trying to, in a way, defend Vanguard and say, well, it's not really like that.

00:06:31.000 Their ownership in BlackRock and in these companies is through mutual funds and through this and through that.

00:06:37.000 But it's been confirmed by many different sources.

00:06:41.000 I'm not the first person in the world that's reported that That one company owns the other company.

00:06:46.000 And all one has to do is really just look up any publicly available information.

00:06:51.000 Who are the top shareholders in such and such company?

00:06:55.000 Who are the top shareholders in Vanguard?

00:06:57.000 Who are the top shareholders in BlackRock?

00:07:00.000 The other company, you know, if you're looking for Vanguard, BlackRock shows up.

00:07:04.000 If you're looking for BlackRock, Vanguard shows up.

00:07:07.000 So regardless of how some people may try to spin it, it's obvious that these two companies are closely linked and their fortunes are closely linked to each other.

00:07:15.000 And then we see inevitably in that list that you read a few moments ago, whether it's American Express or CVS or Microsoft or Lyft or Tyson Foods or any of these companies on that list, Invariably, what those companies on that list, almost all of them have in common, is both Vanguard and BlackRock are in the top 10 shareholders of those companies.

00:07:41.000 And actually, usually, it's the top five.

00:07:44.000 So there were very few cases where only Vanguard or only BlackRock would appear in a top 10, but usually it was both.

00:07:52.000 So we're talking about significant power across not just a handful of companies, but really Dozens upon dozens of companies, which just that list that you read a few moments ago is, it's probably just the tip of the iceberg.

00:08:07.000 And those are just the companies I was able to find that have, at some level, a vaccine mandate for their employees and that also have this very close connection to these two very large asset managers.

00:08:19.000 You know, one of the other interesting and kind of sinister aspects up there is, Ownership compendium, this cornucopia of Fortune 500 companies that they control, is that many of those companies are ostensibly in competition with each other in the marketplace.

00:08:39.000 But when you trace who actually owns those companies, they're owned by the same people.

00:08:46.000 Pepsi and Coke are both owned by BlackRock.

00:08:51.000 Microsoft, Google, Apple are ultimately owned by BlackRock.

00:08:57.000 And so then you have to wonder, is this illusion that we are supposed to believe in a competitive capitalism, is it actually just corporate crony capitalism that is all with any sort of competition is really just an illusion?

00:09:18.000 I think there's a lot of terms that could be used to describe this phenomenon that you just laid out for us.

00:09:26.000 I wouldn't say that competitive capitalism is one of them at all.

00:09:29.000 It's obvious that if you have Coke and Pepsi or Google, Apple and Microsoft, Supposedly in competition for each other, but their top shareholders are the same companies that really the level of competition that actually can possibly exist between these companies is minuscule at best.

00:09:49.000 I would call it perhaps crony capitalism.

00:09:51.000 I would call it perhaps corporatism or oligopoly.

00:09:56.000 But it's definitely not capitalism for all of its flaws, and I'm not going to take a position for or against it, but for all of the flaws that capitalism has as an economic system, the original idea and theory behind it is that of competition.

00:10:12.000 And I think that we're not seeing that in reality, where you have very, very large companies, and those large companies are owned by even larger companies.

00:10:22.000 Asset management companies, and then the two largest ones of all also happen to own each other.

00:10:28.000 So I don't think there's any way that that could be spun as a competitive situation.

00:10:34.000 Perhaps the most disturbing part of their ownership.

00:10:40.000 Compendium is their almost total control of all the media, of virtually all the newspapers in this country, all of the television stations, all the radio stations, and also all the ways that Americans communicate with each other have to go through the funnel of these two multi-trillion dollar asset managers.

00:11:05.000 Let me just...

00:11:06.000 I mentioned a small number, just the tip of the iceberg of the media outlets that are purportedly competitors, but are actually all working for BlackRock and Vanguard in their worldview.

00:11:20.000 Fox News, CBS, Comcast.

00:11:24.000 CNN, Disney, ABC, Gannett, USA Today, and 250 newspapers throughout the United States.

00:11:34.000 Sinclair Media, whose television stations reach about 72% of the American people, and Graham Media Group, which is Slate, Foreign Policy, etc., And, you know, the political power that they get through this and the capacity to craft the narrative, including the COVID narrative, is something that I think should alarm anybody who cares about freedom of speech and democracy, ultimately.

00:12:02.000 This is a, it's an oligarchy of control.

00:12:06.000 It's a system that is bound to create it.

00:12:10.000 You know, an aristocracy of wealth and power that controls the rest of the entire now American experience.

00:12:18.000 I agree, and I think that's why it was so significant that Bloomberg itself, an arm of the media system, called BlackRock the fourth branch of government two years ago, because typically the fourth branch of government has been the news media and journalism, at least that's been...

00:12:40.000 What, in theory, people have said is the role of journalism and the news media to act as the fourth branch of government and to act as a watchdog over the other three branches of government.

00:12:51.000 And I think that if you have a situation like the one that you just described, where BlackRock has shares in ABC, CNN, NBC, USA Today, Sinclair Media, and so many other media outlets, Fox News as well and CBS... I don't think there's any way that one can reasonably expect that those media outlets are going to do any sort of serious reporting or,

00:13:16.000 in particular, any sort of serious investigative reporting about those companies that are their major shareholders.

00:13:25.000 So it creates a situation where not only is there already a lack of Competition in what we are told is the marketplace.

00:13:34.000 But then there's also a lack of oversight as well, because the supposed watchdog is owned by the same entity as well.

00:13:45.000 So I think it's a very dangerous situation for a democracy to find itself in a situation where these two gigantic funds not only exert influence over A large percentage of the Fortune 500 companies, but then they also ensure, in a sense, positive media coverage because they also own significant shares of media outlets that you would think they're competitors with each other.

00:14:13.000 You would think that MSNBC and Fox are two very different outlets, and yet their main stockholder is BlockRock.

00:14:22.000 So that's a dangerous situation in my view.

00:14:24.000 Yeah, I mean, Americans largely divide themselves as adherence to kind of the Fox worldview or the CNN worldview or the MSNBC worldview.

00:14:36.000 And I think most of them would be surprised to know that, you know, all of those outlets are controlled by one company and that the constraints of our debate are entirely taking place within guardrails.

00:14:54.000 That are controlled by these huge financial behemoths who are making sure that although there can be disagreement within that, you know, within that pasture, that we're all kept in safe constraints that don't threaten the prevailing economic model from which they're profiting.

00:15:16.000 Absolutely.

00:15:17.000 It's going to be very difficult in such a situation to get any sort of critical reporting that questions this economic model, essentially, and then that questions everything that is associated with that economic model.

00:15:34.000 I'm actually, at heart, I'm a media scholar.

00:15:38.000 I have a PhD in media studies.

00:15:40.000 Even if I If I enjoy practicing journalism, anyone that has studied, even at the undergraduate level of media and communication, will know what agenda setting is, the theory of agenda setting, and that the idea that powerful news organizations have the opportunity to set the news agenda, In other words, sort of determine what people think about in the first place, which by extension also means what they're not paying attention to, what they're not thinking about,

00:16:08.000 by choosing which stories and which topics and which issues to give attention to or to not give attention by choosing which stories and which topics and which issues to And then, of course, this leads to what we call the news cycle and the stories that make it into the news cycle that drop out of the news cycle.

00:16:25.000 So I would not expect a situation like this to allow for any sort of real critical commentary or any sort of critical comment about the very economic system that has allowed this level of concentration to take place.

00:16:48.000 And this is, by the way, not to get too far off subject, but it's not just an American phenomenon.

00:16:53.000 And I think that what we've seen in many parts of the world, certainly in Europe, where I am, is that beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, and continuing to the present, this high level of deregulation in the media has brought media outlets across this high level of deregulation in the media has brought media outlets across different countries into the hands of fewer and fewer companies, and in many cases into the hands of companies like

00:17:20.000 They, by all means, do not limit themselves just to the US.

00:17:24.000 And the same can also be said about big tech and the influence that Google and other major platforms, Twitter and so forth, have in how the public gets its information nowadays.

00:17:38.000 And we're seeing right now with everything that is going on in the world around us how these companies can flex their muscle and actually shut off media outlets from certain parts of the world and from certain origins because they might be presenting a narrative that is a little bit different than what they wish the public to be receiving.

00:18:02.000 And big tech If we look again at who their shareholders are, we once again see, in companies like Google, in companies like Facebook, and so forth, we see these two names, BlackRock and Vanguard, showing up.

00:18:16.000 And just to put this in historical context, when radio was invented at the beginning of the century, Congress recognized that radio was going to be the way that people communicated with each other, and that America Americans got information.

00:18:33.000 And, you know, one of the key assumptions of a democracy was, at the beginning of our democracy, a debate between Hamilton and Madison and Adams, on one side and Jefferson on the other, where Jefferson thought everybody should be given, you know, which at that point was all males, the capacity to vote.

00:18:56.000 And Madison, Adams, and Hamilton said, no, it should only go to the landed gentry.

00:19:02.000 And they didn't say that because...

00:19:05.000 They were anti-democratic, but they understood that people who were uneducated and most people who didn't have land at that time were uneducated.

00:19:17.000 And that they would easily, without education, without proper information, that cohort would easily fall to the seductions of demagogues.

00:19:31.000 And they would give away the constitutional rights that the revolutionary generation had won for us.

00:19:36.000 So they said, we can't allow uneducated people to vote because they will fall.

00:19:41.000 The demagogues, using these alchemy as a demagoguery, We'll be able to seduce them into relinquishing their constitutional rights.

00:19:50.000 And so one of the things that happened in Virginia and Massachusetts and all of these other states, the state constitutions, as Jefferson made the argument I agree with you, but the remedy is not to deprive the people of their vote,

00:20:10.000 unproperty people of their vote, or rather to forcibly educate them, to make sure that the entire population is educated and able to process information critically, to read and write, to think for themselves.

00:20:24.000 And so the states, like Massachusetts and Virginia, did something that nobody had done in history, which is to mandate public education.

00:20:32.000 And to require people to do that.

00:20:34.000 So in 1926, when radios started proliferating, Congress took a look at that and said, we will lose our democracy if we let this potent form of communication fall into the hands of, you know, large corporations who will operate it not for the good of democracy, but for their own profit.

00:20:55.000 So they passed a law, which we now call the Fairness Doctrine, The beginning of the Federal Communications Act required that TV and radio must stay separate from newspaper ownership, and that it had to be, there couldn't be national stations, that they had to be locally controlled so that you get a multiplicity of voices and of attitudes.

00:21:23.000 And that fell apart in 1986.

00:21:26.000 Ronald Reagan essentially abolished the Fairness Doctrine as a favor to the big studio heads who had gotten them elected and who wanted to control all of the media.

00:21:37.000 And as a result of that, we now have, I think, four companies that control all of our radio, all of our television, all of our newspapers.

00:21:47.000 And as I said, the billboards and those companies are now under the control largely of these two financial behemoths.

00:21:57.000 And the political power that has accrued to BlackRock and to Vanguard, which you talk about in this article, is extraordinary.

00:22:08.000 They basically have the capacity now to manufacture wealth.

00:22:13.000 They were, because of their political clout and their media control, President Obama designated them in the Treasury Department in 2008.

00:22:26.000 To buy up all the toxic assets from the 2007-2008 financial collapse, which was like printing money for those companies.

00:22:35.000 And in 2020, BlackRock received another no-bid contract from the U.S. Treasury to manage the $454 billion fund under the Coronavirus Relief and Economic Security Act, which is called CARES, where businesses adversely impacted by COVID lockdowns So,

00:22:55.000 you know, they get the government contracts, they get to basically print money, and now they're profiting from the lockdown by using all of their surplus cash to buy up virtually an unprecedented purchase of residential real estate in this country,

00:23:15.000 where they're buying whole neighborhoods and all regions, and they're displacing people from their homes, turning them into rental properties and bringing Absolutely.

00:23:33.000 I mentioned this in my piece, but it warrants really its own separate article.

00:23:38.000 BlackRock and Vanguard have been on a buying spree, in some instances buying entire neighbourhoods.

00:23:45.000 And in many cases, it's holding on to these houses.

00:23:48.000 So this creates an artificial shortage in the marketplace, which, as you can imagine, drives up the prices of both rentals and home purchases as well.

00:23:59.000 So it's artificially driving up the prices on the marketplace.

00:24:03.000 And as you can imagine, Vanguard and BlackRock having the ability to actually buy massive amounts of properties stand to benefit from a real estate market where those property values are then going up.

00:24:17.000 So it's a very similar strategy all across the different sectors of the economy that they are operating in, which has the common thread is that it's so anti-competitive.

00:24:29.000 If we go back to the media for a moment, you mentioned the fairness doctrine.

00:24:34.000 That eliminated this diversity of voices that previously one could find on the public airwaves.

00:24:42.000 There were a couple of other laws as well that went into the wastebasket at around the same time.

00:24:48.000 One, I believe, was called the Equal Time Rule or the Equal Time Act, which basically prevented broadcast stations from operating sort of as a...

00:24:58.000 A one-party platform.

00:24:59.000 So if they brought a candidate on from one party, they had to offer equal time to the candidate from the other party if it was requested and so forth.

00:25:07.000 And then there were also ownership caps.

00:25:10.000 And those began to be watered down in the 80s as well.

00:25:13.000 And then they were further watered down in the 90s with the Telecommunications Act of 96.

00:25:19.000 And then there's been further loosening of those restrictions.

00:25:24.000 And now actually major radio groups are asking for these caps to, in some cases and in some markets, to be repealed completely.

00:25:33.000 So you could have a situation in the not too distant future where the same company, the exact same company, owns all of the commercial stations in the market, and it would be perfectly legal.

00:25:47.000 And then if we go up the ladder, we see that whether it's company A or company B or company C that owns these radio or TV stations, like we mentioned before, Sinclair Media, they operate a lot of the local TV stations in local markets around the U.S.,

00:26:03.000 There's all these videos one could find on YouTube and on other platforms like this that show snippets of newscasts from all sorts of different places, whether it's like Tucson, Arizona, or Boise, Idaho, or Burlington, Vermont.

00:26:18.000 Same script, same news story, same exact language.

00:26:21.000 And it makes sense.

00:26:22.000 They're owned by the same company.

00:26:24.000 But then whether we're talking about Sinclair or any of these other media owners, going up the ladder, we see that above them, companies like BlackRock And Vanguard are major shareholders there.

00:26:37.000 So it is a danger for our democracy.

00:26:41.000 It is a danger for our economy, as we saw with the housing example.

00:26:45.000 And it all comes back to a situation that is grossly anti-competitive.

00:26:50.000 For the sake of our listeners, I know you know this, but let me just paint a portrait of a different view of America and the way things were under the Fairness Doctrine when it was still operating.

00:27:02.000 There was a case, and I think it was in the 70s or early 80s, but it was a case against one of the networks Pursued by a large group like the American Heart Association or an Asthma Association because they were airing ads for Mustang, which was the most fuel-inefficient automobile at that time.

00:27:31.000 The group that was, you know, the asthma advocacy group, they're advertising something that is making our lives more difficult.

00:27:40.000 And we need extra time.

00:27:42.000 We need a guarantee equal time so that we can explain why that automobile is actually hurting another group of Americans.

00:27:50.000 And the Supreme Court upheld that.

00:27:52.000 And so the networks, it was recognized that the airwaves were owned by the public.

00:27:59.000 The same as our rivers and our shorelines are owned by the public, that the government could license those networks to use the airwaves, but ultimately they had to use them for a public purpose.

00:28:12.000 And so they said to the network, you have to reserve 30 minutes a day to tell the Americans the truth about the news.

00:28:24.000 And that's why at that point in history, you had these really respected news anchors and producers of the evening news who were untouchable because you had Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley and Chad Huntley and Newt Minow and all these people who were managing the news stations and who were managing them for the American public and who were making sure that what they put

00:28:54.000 on the news was actually truthful and was not ideologically driven.

00:28:58.000 You could talk against Vietnam, as Walter Cronkite did at that time, without The American people were listening and they believed the news.

00:29:06.000 The news stations were money losers for all the networks.

00:29:10.000 They were losing huge amounts of money, but they needed to operate those news stations in order to maintain their licenses to sell entertainment for the other 23 and a half hours a day.

00:29:22.000 They sacrificed at one time at 6 o'clock, because Congress told them there's got to be one time at night when every American can watch TV and can find out the facts are relevant to policymaking and to our democracy, and you need to give them those facts.

00:29:38.000 The networks took their hands off the news departments.

00:29:42.000 They appointed really highly respected individuals to run them, and then they didn't touch them.

00:29:47.000 And they understood they were going to lose millions of dollars a year telling the news, but that was part of the condition of keeping their license.

00:29:55.000 To do that service for democracy.

00:29:59.000 And then in the, you know, after 1986, the networks, when Reagan changes the law, the networks started telling their news departments, you know, the bean counters in these networks, you got to make money, you got to get audiences.

00:30:16.000 And, you know, if it bleeds, it leads.

00:30:19.000 And gossip, and, you know, who's going out with Brad Pitt?

00:30:24.000 All of this became news because it was drawing viewership and increasingly ideologically driven news hours, which have now polarized and divided our country.

00:30:35.000 But that's not the way it started.

00:30:38.000 That's not the way it operated.

00:30:40.000 And Americans were much better informed and much better at democracy at that point.

00:30:45.000 The monopolization of the evening news issues, where they've got this kind of fake, you know, fight between CNN and Fox News, which is all orchestrated by, you know, BlackRock to maximize profits by extracting, by commoditizing everything, including the news, is something that most Americans should be regarding as really sinister, exploited, and dangerous.

00:31:14.000 Absolutely.

00:31:14.000 And just to add to that, if you look at cable news, like CNN and Fox News and MSNBC, they're not even under any sort of FCC regulation at this time, even to the limited extent that broadcast over-the-air networks like CBS and NBC and ABC are.

00:31:36.000 So they can get away with even more What their broadcast counterparts can, but even what their broadcast counterparts can do today is significantly more relaxed from a regulatory standpoint than it was up until the 1980s.

00:31:54.000 So it's created this sort of perfect storm where you have what I would Even describe as blatantly ideological.

00:32:04.000 I hesitate to even call it news a lot of the time.

00:32:07.000 It's commentary.

00:32:09.000 It's a lot of things, but it's not hard news reporting, unfortunately, and it's not, in many cases, truthful reporting.

00:32:17.000 If we look at the internet, the internet is not regulated in the same way that, let's say, telephone networks were regulated way back when.

00:32:29.000 And I'm not saying that the government needs to come in and start censoring.

00:32:33.000 Obviously, there's a lot of views on the internet that do not get onto the airwaves or cable.

00:32:39.000 But there is, however, something sinister about the fact that the major pipelines that people use to connect to the internet are companies that in many cases are associated with what we call the mainstream media and in turn associated with BlackRock.

00:32:57.000 And then what we've seen now in the European Union is the EU has net neutrality and yet they've blocked entire news websites From the entire continent, from, you know, most members of the public being able to access those sites, just because they were reporting a narrative different from the one that most EU governments want to present to the public.

00:33:20.000 So there's a dangerous situation And there's a lot of holes from a regulatory standpoint that are allowing this to take place.

00:33:29.000 And I think, again, it comes back to the fact that if all of these major internet service providers, major media outlets, et cetera, are operated or are owned by...

00:33:41.000 A couple of companies like Vanguard and BlackRock.

00:33:43.000 Those companies, if their total valuation is larger by far than, for instance, the GDP of Germany, which is Europe's largest economy and most powerful economy, That shows you just how strong these companies are.

00:34:00.000 They have larger GDPs.

00:34:02.000 If their valuation was a GDP, they have a larger GDP than most countries in the world.

00:34:10.000 So this means they have massive political influence.

00:34:13.000 And he gave those examples before from the Obama administration and from 2020, no bid contracts and just receiving these major, major In a situation like that, I would think that politicians would be very reluctant to enforce a heavy hand of regulation against those same companies.

00:34:35.000 Yeah, I mean, it goes back to, like I said, when they, when the news divisions became profit centers.

00:34:41.000 They went from independent, untouchable entities within, they were part of kind of the licensing fee.

00:34:48.000 You're going to tell the news, the real news.

00:34:51.000 And they became profit centers for the network.

00:34:53.000 And the network came, bean counters came in and said, you've got to get more viewership.

00:34:58.000 So put on more about Hollywood gossip, put more on violence, put anything that...

00:35:04.000 It's going to make more viewership and allow us to sell more ad revenue.

00:35:09.000 You get eyeballs on your site.

00:35:11.000 Consider this.

00:35:12.000 If the evening news put something on the air that was not true, any viewer could petition the FCC to pull their license and basically destroy the network.

00:35:25.000 So they were terrified of putting anything on that even I'm not being true.

00:35:33.000 And you had appointed to run these news divisions, the most respectable journalists in the world, who would fact check, who would make sure that what they were putting on was important for Americans to understand in order to make rational choices about political policies, about foreign policies.

00:35:53.000 And they had to make sure it was true.

00:35:55.000 If it wasn't true, then the FCC could come in And pull their license and give it to somebody else.

00:36:04.000 And, you know, now it's a wild west and there's no regulation of the cable news and there's almost no regulation of the airwaves.

00:36:14.000 That's very true.

00:36:15.000 And I think it also, you know, we've been talking about the economics of it all, but it has major societal effects, in my opinion.

00:36:24.000 I think that we've in recent years, even before COVID, We're seeing a trend in the U.S. certainly and also I've seen this in many European countries as well.

00:36:38.000 Society is just more polarized and people just sort of join one camp or the other camp and they find not just the media outlet that in a sense becomes sort of like their echo chamber But also,

00:36:56.000 they kind of begin to, in the same way that the media might sensationalize the news or turn what they call their news coverage into a shouting match or into an us versus them type of proposition, that kind of trickles down to the public.

00:37:15.000 There's no room in that sort of landscape for reasoned debate.

00:37:19.000 You've brought up the fairness doctrine.

00:37:22.000 When you hear multiple viewpoints on the same station, that encourages reasoned debate.

00:37:28.000 That reasoned debate, I think, has gone out the window not just in the media, but unfortunately also quite often in broader society as well.

00:37:37.000 And it leads to all sorts of just ugly situations where over any given issue, whether it's Vaccine mandates or whether it's what's going on now in the Ukraine and Russia, it leads to just nasty situations where everyone sort of just picks up their bowl and goes home and no one wants to hear the other side out and try to find some common ground.

00:38:05.000 Also identify the areas where they disagree and agree to disagree.

00:38:09.000 There's a lot less of that, and so I feel it creates a toxic situation for society in addition to being a toxic situation economically.

00:38:19.000 Here's something that people should think about, and it's exactly along the lines of what you're saying.

00:38:24.000 There's this illusion that CNN and Fox are opposite sides of a political spectrum.

00:38:31.000 If you actually look at the debate that occurs there, there's a lot of poison, there's a lot of smoke, there's a lot of anger and vitriol and name-calling.

00:38:42.000 But both networks, if you look at their coverage of COVID, it was almost identical.

00:38:49.000 There was no experts on what are the lockdowns going to do to the economy.

00:38:53.000 There's nobody going on and saying, let's look at the mask, the science.

00:38:58.000 Let's say, do masks work?

00:39:00.000 You know, let's get some people on here.

00:39:01.000 There's hundreds of studies about this.

00:39:04.000 Let's get some of the scientists on to talk about alternative views.

00:39:08.000 Social distancing.

00:39:10.000 The vaccines, et cetera.

00:39:12.000 There are many, many experts who differed.

00:39:14.000 There were people like Pierre Corey and Peter McCulloch from the beginning who were saying we should be looking at these repurposed medications.

00:39:21.000 There was not a spot for them on either network.

00:39:25.000 Now, recently, there's a few journalists like Dr.

00:39:28.000 Carlson and others who have let their voices on, but it was in the very tail end of the COVID pandemic.

00:39:38.000 That these alternative voices on one of the networks were given airtime.

00:39:44.000 Throughout the whole time, they were all for warp speed, they were all for lockdowns, they were all for masking, all for social distancing.

00:39:51.000 Nobody's asking about the impact on the poor.

00:39:54.000 Nobody's asking about the impact on children.

00:39:58.000 None of that was discussed on either network. 0.64

00:40:02.000 The debates that they do have, which are filled with this smoke and fire and anger, they're ridiculous debates.

00:40:11.000 They're debates about whether or not we should build a wall.

00:40:14.000 You know, with one side saying yes, one side, listen, if you wanted to end the immigration problem in this country, there's an easy way to do it overnight. 0.86

00:40:23.000 Put one employer in jail for hiring illegal immigrants, you know, and it's over. 0.99

00:40:29.000 There's no jobs left.

00:40:31.000 You prosecute people for illegal, you don't have to build a wall, you don't have to do anything, you don't have to have patrols on the Southwest.

00:40:37.000 It's all kind of contrived.

00:40:40.000 Debates about Black Lives Matter, etc.

00:40:43.000 They're all on the fringes and don't go to the central concerns of Americans at this point in history.

00:40:50.000 You know, the central concerns, there's always a consensus right now in the Ukraine.

00:40:55.000 There's no difference between the Fox coverage of the Ukraine and CNN coverage.

00:40:59.000 Everybody wants to go in and have a war.

00:41:02.000 It was the same thing when we went into Iraq.

00:41:05.000 The voices of dissent, of real dissent, are not occurring in our society.

00:41:11.000 And if you hear incredible journalism, if you're tracking how all of these people are owned by the same financial entities, It is a good explanation of why that never happens.

00:41:24.000 So, thank you.

00:41:26.000 Thank you very much.

00:41:27.000 We all follow your writings on Children's Health Defense, on the Defender, and I urge you, if you haven't read Michael Neverdoch's writing, Dr.

00:41:38.000 Michael Neverdoch, please go to the Defender, read his recent article, Corporate Vaccine Mandates and Vaccine Passports, brought to you by BlackRock Thank you, Michael.

00:41:53.000 Thank you for having me.

RFK Jr. The Defender - March 23, 2022

BlackRock and Vanguard with Dr Michael Nevradakis

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