Monopoly – Follow the Money

Monopoly – Follow the Money

Directed by Tim Gielen (2021)

Translated by Vrouwen voor Vrijeid (Women for Freedom)

Film Review

This Dutch documentary attempts to pinpoint the main corporations and individuals responsible for the Covid plandemic.

It begins by examining the key institutional investors that own the vast majority of the global share market. Going company by company, filmmakers reveal that approximately 8-10 institutional investors own 80% of the stock of nearly all global corporations. Some of the smaller institutional investors include mutual and pension funds. However the top three of every corporation they examine include BlackRock* and the Vanguard Group.**

The film looks at the institutional shareholdings of company after company, including Google, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Phillips, Boeing, Airbus, Coca Cola, Pepsi, all the mining companies, all the oil companies, Cargill, ADM, Bayer (the largest seed producer in the world since their acquisition of Monsanto), all the textile and fashion brands, Amazon, Ebay, Master Card, Visa, Paypal, and all the banks, tobacco companies, defense contractors, insurance companies, processed food companies, cosmetic brands and publishers and media outlets.***

In every case, both Vanguard Group and BlackRock are both within the top three institutional investors.

They also own stock in each other’s companies. In fact, Vanguard is  the biggest shareholder in BlackRock, which Bloomberg refers to as the “fourth branch of government” because it both advises central banks and lends them money.

We don’t know exactly who owns shares in Vanguard as it’s not a publicly traded company. However we do know that it’s a safe place for many of the most powerful families in the world to hide their wealth (eg the Rockefellers, Rothschilds and British royal family).

The film also explores how wealthy families use nonprofit foundations to shape global politics in their own interest without attracting public attention. The big three featured in the film are George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the Clinton Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

All these rich and powerful elites meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland every January and mingle with world leaders and significant non-profit groups, such as Greenpeace and UNESCO.

Chairman and founder of the WEF is Klaus Schwab, a Swiss professor and businessman. In his book, The Great Reset, he states that the coronavirus is a great “opportunity” to reset our societies. According, to Schwab, our old society must switch to a new one because the consumption society the elite has forced on us is no longer sustainable. Under the new society he proposes, people will own nothing and rely primarily on the state to get their needs met.

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*BlackRock, Inc. is an American multinational investment management corporation based in New York City. Founded in 1988, initially as a risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $8.67 trillion in assets under management as of January 2021.

**The Vanguard Group, Inc. is an American registered investment advisor based in Malvern, Pennsylvania with about $7 trillion in global assets under management, as of January 13, 2021. It is the largest provider of mutual funds and the second-largest provider of exchange-traded funds in the world after BlackRock’s iShares.

***What this means, In essence, is that a handful of individuals control all public information.

 

 

A People’s History of the Russian Revolution

A People’s History of the Russian Revolution

by Neil Faulkner

Pluto Press (2017)

Book Review

This book corrects the common misportrayal of the Russian Revolution as an event imposed on workers by a Bolshevik vanguard of self-appointed intellectuals. In his careful reconstruction of the origin to the October 2017 insurgency, Faulkner demonstrates quite ably that the Russian Revolution was a true example of mass democracy executed by ordinary workers, peasants and soldiers. After 1920, it would be destroyed by the most murderous counterrevolution in history.*

In Faulkner’s view, Russia’s revolution took nearly 100 years. It was Russian soldiers exposed to Western liberal democracy during the Napoleonic wars who began the first underground networks against czarist totalitarianism. As Russia began to industrialize in the late 1800s, workers engaged in regular mass strikes to protest starvation conditions. The brutal government repression that greeted these strikes led to the formation of a number of revolutionary parties as workers began to demand political change as well.

Organizing in a Police State

The Bolshevik Party first came together in the years 1899. Organizing a mass democratic party in a police state is extremely difficult. The strategy Lenin and other party leaders employed was to start a newspaper, which they printed abroad and smuggled into Russia via underground groups. Avoiding police infiltration police required a large degree of decentralization and independent function of workers’ committees and subcommittees. Eventually a large underground network arose around distribution of the party newspaper.

Part of Bolshevik strategy was to foster strong relationships with the military. The eventual success of the October 1917 would depend on soldiers’ refusal to support the Provisional Government.

All the revolutionary activity, starting with the failed 1905 Revolution, began as spontaneous strikes and demonstrations launched by workers themselves to protest their abominable living and working conditions. The February 1917 revolution, in which Tsar Nicholas II was deposed, began as a bread strike led by women.

Dual Power by the Duma and Workers’ Soviets

The Tsar’s removal led to dual power, in which three successive provisional governments were jointly run by the pro-war Duma, made up of bourgeois liberals and the Petrograd Soviet consisting of delegates of democratic assemblies which had formed in factories, barracks and battleships. The Duma had no real power as they could only enact measures approved by the soviets.

A series of mass military mutinies led to the collapse of the the first and second Provisional Government in April and June. During the 3rd Provisional Government, increasing government repression led to a surge in membership in both the Bolshevik Party and local soviets.

At Lenin’s urging, soviets** across Russia overruled the Bolshevik Central Committee in September 2017 and called for a new government run by workers and peasants, as well as mass insurrection. In the end, the soviets would assume power with very little violence by merely disestablishing the 3rd Provisional Government. Owing to mass military defection during 1917, the government was left with no means of defending itself.

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*It would take Joseph Stalin, who assumed power after Lenin died in 1922, six years to complete the counterrevolution. He would eventually liquidate the entire leadership of the Bolshevik Party. According to Faulkner the great Bolshevik experiment of mass democracy from below officially ended in 1920. Although the Soviet Union would ultimately beat back a military invasion by White Russians, British and Americans, this civil war, on top of a brutal settlement with Germany that devastated Soviet industrial and agricultural capacity, would shatter the Soviet economy. In a desperate hope revolution in other European countries would reopen trade, Lenin officiated over the rise of centralized state control (enforced by the Cheka and the Red Terror) to manage extreme scarcity, malnutrition and epidemic levels of disease.

**The first soviets were formed as a result of the 1905 Revolution.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The 161 Bankers Who Run the World

In following video, Peter Phillips from Project Censored lays out exactly how the richest one-thousandth of 1% maintain iron control over all world governments.

He cites a study Project Censored published in their Top 25 Censored Stories of 2012-2013 edition of the world’s most “integrated”* corporations and those with the largest financial asset concentration.

Unsurprisingly, there’s considerable overlap between the two groups.

The 161 board members of the top 13 companies control $28 trillion of wealth. They also help the 1% hide another $30 trillion offshore so it can’t be taxed.

They’re 88% white (and nearly all male) and 63% come from the US or Europe.

They work with secret (and not so secret) groups, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Bohemian Grove, the World Economic Forum, the G7, the G20, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to ensure that the domestic and foreign policy of all western governments benefits themselves and the capitalist investors they represent.

They also ensure that the national security state, busy killing people in 130 countries, acts in the exclusive interest of transnational capital. The fascist coup they engineered in Ukraine is only the most recent example.

They regularly engage in illegal conspiracies but are always too big and powerful to jail.

Here are the top 13 companies identified in the study:

1 BlackRock US $3.560 trillion
2 UBS Switzerland $2.280 trillion
3 Allianz Germany $2.213 trillion
4 Vanguard Group US $2.080 trillion
5 State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) US $1.908
6 PIMCO (Pacific Investment Management Company) US $1.820 trillion
7 Fidelity Investments US $1.576 trillion
8 AXA Group France $1.393 trillion
9 JPMorgan Asset Management US $1.347 trillion
10 Credit Suisse Switzerland $1.279 trillion
11 BNY Mellon Asset Management US $1.299 trillion
12 HSBC UK $1.230 trillion
13 Deutsche Bank Germany $1.227 trillion

*The researchers use the term “integrated” to describe financial corporations with major holdings in key  non-financial sectors (i.e. energy, defense and mass media).