Three Lenses
I will begin by offering three different perspectives. These perspectives, these angles, they offer worldviews supported by reasoned facts and measured estimates. They are cohesive, grounded, and explain much of the world. The first lens will be the Selfish-Clown angle, the second lens will be the Corporate Governance angle, and the third lens will be the Hegemon angle. In each one, relationships will be established between corporations, other corporations, and the government. The fourth section will discuss, in brief, what can be done.
The Selfish-Clown Angle
So, what is the Selfish-Clown angle? It is, in essence, the view that there is no collaboration. The people in power are those who have that desire, innate or imparted, to seek and gain power by any means, legal or illegal. This means that corporations and executives and government actors are scheming against each other, undercutting each other, making backroom deals, and so on. The only collaboration that occurs is fully with the belief that it is an unfair deal in their own favor, on both sides. A truly free market and country for the major players, not beholden to any moral codes nor laws unless enforcing those laws would strengthen the position of the government agents executing them.
What is the evidence of this? Well, let's start with something simple. Two brands everyone knows: Lays and Oreos. This may sound silly, but bear with me. Have you seen the chip aisle at your local grocer? A Wal-Mart for example. Mine contains the big four flavors: classic, barbecue, salt and vinegar, and sour cream and onion. It also had lime, cheddar and sour cream, honey barbecue, sweet southern heat barbecue, hickory barbecue, flamin' hot, chile lime, sweet and spicy honey, dill pickle, masala, cajun spice, jalapeno, IHOP strawberry pancake with bacon and syrup, Funyuns, and honey habenaro.
Let's consider Oreo, as well, though it occurs to a lesser extent. Original Oreos, double stuf Oreos, toffee crunch Oreos, Oreo thins, pumpkin spice Oreos, golden Oreos, chocolate cream Oreos, birthday cake Oreos, peanut butter creme Oreos, Oreo cakesters, chocolate peanut butter pie Oreos, mega stuf Oreos, dark chocolate Oreos, dirt cake Oreos, mint chocolate chips Oreos, holiday red creme Oreos, white fudge covered Oreos, mint Oreos, lemon Oreos, java chip Oreos, strawberry frosted donut Oreos, and ice cream cake Oreos.
Genuinely, why do all these flavors exist? Are the people at Nabisco and Pepsi-Frito-Lay just lunatics? Why do they feel a constant need to push out new varieties and flavors, one-off runs and exotic flavor combinations. They know that these are not going to stick. Nobody at Nabisco genuinely thinks that Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie Oreos are going to replace Original Oreos. Nobody at Lays think that IHOP Strawberry Pancake with Syrup and Bacon flavored Lays will become as much of a staple as Barbecue or Salt and Vinegar. They just need to look like they're expanding, growing, and innovating. Even if it comes at the long-term cost of pulling focus away from their core product line. They absolutely should be content with simply resting on the fact that they have made their billions of dollars, and will continue to make their billions. Mondelez International, the owner of Nabisco, pulled in thirteen billion dollars of gross profit in 2023. PepsiCo, the owner of Frito-Lays, pulled in forty-nine billion dollars of gross profit in 2023. (Numbers are presented as gross profit and not income net of expenses other than cost of goods sold, as this argument is solely focused on the sales figures on their brand and not the actual financial well-being of the company). Now, do these corporations really seem like they need to innovate and make derivative product lines, given these numbers? And let's be honest, these aren't new products, they're derivatives. Chocolate Peanut Butter Pie Oreos are not a new product, they are simply a derivative of Oreos. Now I'm sure that some market researcher and flavor-ologists worked really hard on this product, and I'm sure they're proud of it. I'm not discounting their work, but I'm saying that there is no reason why they really needed to do that work in the first place. Was it fruitless? No. Was it pointless? Yes.
Now let's shift to a different topic: logos. We all know that corporations change logos over time to suit with what styles are 'in'. But these come at ridiculous costs. British Petroleum went to their iconic logo, the strange flower-like symbol made of diamonds. How much did that logo design cost? Two hundred million dollars. Maybe if they hadn't spent two hundred million dollars on a new logo twenty-five years ago, they could be paying their cashiers more than an average of ten dollars an hour. What about Tropicana's redesign, the horrible design of their box that they reverted from? Thirty-five million. And a lot of these companies nowadays are redesigning their logos in worse ways. Removing depth, removing color, removing fonts, removing everything that makes those brands unique. And for what? To look sleek and modern, so they can redesign these logos thirty years down the line again? Nonsensical. But again, why do they do it? They need to appear like they are innovating, like they are ahead of the curve, like they are growing. They must appear to be making great strides and gains, even if it harms their long-term prospects by diverting money that could be used on investing in infrastructure, raising wages (higher paid workers perform better, just look at CostCo (21/hr) vs. Walmart (15/hr) cashiers and stockers), or even just putting the money into bonds or money-market accounts. But no, they must innovate and grow. Heck, even Burger King's app allegedly cost half a billion dollars to develop, for a mobile app.
Now let's look at another example. Sears. Sears has always been a bulwark of American retail, a titan of the industry. Essentially the pre-internet Amazon, with the Sear's catalogs. And their products and brands were known to last, too. Made in the U.S.A., high quality construction. Many of these tools are used to this very day. There's a reason why the decades-old vintage Craftsman tool sets are worth hundreds. They're just better. So what happened to Sear's? Now they're bankrupt, Craftman is a shadow of its former self, how did this happen?
Growth and innovation. You see, Sears did have a niche. High quality products. Some speciality goods as well. But then what happened? Wal-Mart began to grow, selling low cost goods at an even lower quality. People began to shop at Wal-Mart for their occasional goods. So what did Sear's do? Sabotage themselves. Cut down on quality so they can cut down on cost and be appealing to consumers. This relies on the assumption that Sear's and Walmart should compete. A high-quality and low-quality goods retailer do not compete directly, but in parallel. They attract different buyers of the same products. Take, for example, CostCo and Wal-Mart, versus Target and Wal-Mart. Target competes directly as a department store, while CostCo competes in parallel as a wholesale retailer. Though they target the same products, they target different types of buyers. Sear's sought to switch from a parallel to a direct form of competition. This was doomed from the start. Sear's could never beat Wal-Mart at its own game. To do so would require lowering your quality and costs even lower than Wal-Mart, which could never happen in the model of Sear's.
So what happened? They began to fail. How did they react? Bringing in a new CEO who stripped important and recognizable brands from Sear's, selling them to his own financial company who then sold them off to other retailers who would manufacture different products overseas under the same name. Let me emphasize this again. The CEO of Sear's, Eddit Lampert, sold vital brands to his own financial group. This is one of the more blatant displays of sacrificing long-term viability for short-term gains and profits on the balance sheet. But perhaps Sear's was already doomed at that point, and he was merely a vulture, picking at the corpse for what he could scrounge.
Want another example of companies seeking short-term gains over long-term viability? Look no further than the cities along the Rust Belt. Milwaukee, Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Bethesda, Buffalo, Philadelphia, the list goes on. These cities were absolute behemoths of manufacturing and output, they carried the nation through the Civil War and the World Wars. The raw output of these regions was unparalleled. Then what? They were stabbed in the back and left for dead. Vultures at work again.
Let's look at some numbers. How much steel did America produce in 1969? One hundred and fifteen million tons. And how much did we make in 2023? Eighty million tons. A thirty per-cent decline.
Let's talk about why this happened. It's the same reason as always. Short-term profits at long-term costs. People want cheaper goods. Companies can save on labor costs by going overseas. This increases their profits, and makes their products more attractive. So, off the jobs go. Why manufacture domestically when we can simply import? Why hire American workers with quality material and production standards, when we can pay a Laotian eight year old five cents an hour to work sixteen hours weaving shirts? And when the first company left, the genie was out of the bottle, with no way to put it back in.
Companies did begin to realize that they had a great opportunity to increase profits here. They took it. But the fickle thing about economies is that they're cyclical. There's two methods to calculate GDP. One by adding up the amount of money from consumption, from sles, from investment, and so on. But the other is made up by totalling wages, rent incomes, interest, and profits. These two add up to the same number. So naturally, when the jobs leave the country, unemployment rises. When unemployment rises, there becomes a sudden drop in the amount of freely-available capital for people to spend at stores. When there is less capital, there is less consumption. When there is less consumption, there is less profit for business. Ford saw the inverse of this back in the olden days; by raising wages and making more jobs, the workers could buy the very cars they were assembling, allowing Ford to grow even larger and increase sales.
So then, companies were faced with a dilemma. They had already shut down the factories to open new ones overseas. They couldn't just shut down the overseas ones, cut their losses, and go back to the original model. That's admitting defeat. Instead, the manufacturing will stay overseas, and they will instead create jobs domestically. Not in manufacturing, but in service.
Nowadays, eighty-five per-cent of Americans are employed in some sort of service industry. Burger flippers, cashiers, stockers, baristas, consultants, accountants, advertising agents, real-estate agents. These people are not really producing anything, let's be completely honest here. An accountant facilitates what? Guidance of a company's future. An accountant can improve efficiency, yes, but an accountant does not directly produce the goods that are sold. Real-estate agents, what do they produce? Nothing. They facilitate transactions, yes, but they themselves do not create the land nor improve the land. A cashier, what does a cashier really produce? Nothing. They facilitate transactions between retailers and consumers. Stockers, what do they produce? Nothing, they facilitate the transport of goods to the consumer. These jobs facilitate and improve upon the capacities for manufacturing and goods, but themselves do not produce goods. They lead to higher quality or easier access to goods, but themselves are not responsible for producing the goods; they are auxiliary, and each middle-man between producer and consumer takes their cut out of the chain, raising costs for the consumer. Again, let's look at PepsiCo's financials. PepsiCo, in 2023, had a net revenue of ninety-one billion dollars, but a cost of sales of only forty-one billion. In other words, a bottle of Pepsi sold for two dollars costs less than a dollar to actually make. Where does all that extra cost come in? Paying the salaries of the workers, sure, but also paying the salaries of the executives, the marketers, the advertisers, the inspectors, the accountants, the lawyers, the tax experts, dividends to shareholders, phone and internet for the corporate offices, the office vending machines stocked with Pepsi, and so on. In essence, many costs imparted upon the consumers have no real need to exist, and are just another check down the line for the cost for consumers.
Look at TEMU. Do you know why it is so cheap? Because when you buy from the manufacturer directly, you avoid all those middlemen along the way, you cut them from the chain. And speaking of buying from manufacturers, as a side note, bulk discounts. On small scales it makes sense. Yes, a larger box does cost less in packaging than a small one with respect to the ratio between surface-area and volume. But when you get to the large-scale, really step back and look at this. A bulk discount on, say, cardboard boxes. Does it really matter whether you're buying one or ten pallets of boxes? What true effect does it have on the cost for the manufacturer? None. But the more you buy, the more of a discount you get. This is to attract the larger buyers, the big spenders. But think about the effect that has on the manufacturers. The larger manufacturers can afford the higher-quantity products with the larger bulk discounts, while the smaller manufacturers cannot. This directly saves costs for the larger manufacturer, it helps their bottom line. In other words, the large businesses can leverage this to increase their profit margins, while the smaller business cannot. It is another way to ensure that the rich get even richer. I doubt this is intentional by the distributors, but a very unfortunate coincidence.
Enough with that tangent. Let's go back to what we were discussing. Jobs in America, and the American economy in general, has made a fundamental shift called de-industrialization. We used to manufacture goods at large quantities. We used to leverage the military, not for conquest, but to simply open up other countries' markets for American goods. But now, most jobs are simply those to facilitate manufacture of goods, and not the goods themselves.
So, let's get back to it. The companies that exported the jobs did it for short-term gains. They then shot themselves in the foot by not returning the jobs and instead creating useless jobs in the value chain. That's partially why there's so many new variants and derivates of brands, these fundamentally pointless jobs need to justify their own existence. So now? Large sectors of the manufacturing industry have completely collapsed, leaving towns abandoned. Manufacturing supply chains have collapsed, and this is a danger for many reasons. Despite the American GDP being ten times higher than Russia's, Russian artillery shell manufacturing is at a quarter million per month, while the American manufacturing capacity is hoping to be at a tenth of a million per month by 2025. Though the GDP is large, much of the economy is not actually productive economically, and instead is just facilitative. As such, when the mask is pulled away, the American economy is much weaker than initially thought, and more propped up by a circular flow of service jobs.
All in all, my point is this. A corporation is run by greed. Even if it means long-term catastrophe, it isn't off the table if it means short-term gain. This could either be individual, like with Sear's, or systemic, like with the whole of deindustrialization. The corporations are all fighting amongst each other to maximize their profits. They will write up bad deals, they will cheat and betray their country to create more wealth for themselves. The consumer is a means to generate profits, to appease the shareholders. As the dictator Ion Antonescu once said, 'people don't matter, only what they represent.' And for these companies, the people represent profit. So they will hold no loyalty to anything except their own greed. Destroy American manufacturing? It'll save on costs. Weaken our core product? It'll look good on the quarterly earnings.
The Corporate Governance Angle
There is another angle. Perhaps the corporations and businessmen do not fight each other. After all, they do have many interests in common. Perhaps working together would be more profitable. But working together for what? Well, what's the largest obstacle to corporate dominion over the nation? The government already in place. And perhaps, this fight is already over. Don't believe me? Let's look at the facts.
There's many examples of corporations doing whatever they can to gain power. Firstly, let's talk about labor. Organized labor has been a thorn in the side of business, or even an equal opponent, at many times. Especially in the late 1800's and early 1900's in the USA, unions would gain much ground against corporate dominance, giving people things like 'enough money to support their families' and 'a work day less than sixteen hours'. Obviously, these things harm the bottom line. So corporations go after them through extralegal means.
We all know murder is illegal. Or, is it? Coca-Cola and many fruit companies have operations in Central America. There have been many, many recorded instances, with some companies even being found to have done these things in American courts, of death squads. What do I mean by this? I mean that these corporations, in their great wealth, have funded paramilitaries to kidnap, torture, murder, and massacre labor leaders and unionizing workers. Let that really click in your mind, they have paid mercenaries to massacre civilians with chainsaws, because they wanted safer conditions. This really happened. Corporations will do these things freely. But it isn't corporations doing it. Corporations aren't a thing. It's free associations of men. Take their masks off. The individuals who conspired, funded, and ordered these killings, did they ever see the inside of a prison? No.
Want something more explicit? The Ludlow massacre. Coal miners went on strike because they had some demands. These demands were a recognizing of the union as an entity to bargain with, pay for coal mined to be based on every 2,000 pounds and not every 2,200 pounds, an eight-hour work day, payment for work like cutting trees or laying railroad tracks, third-party inspection of company scales, the right to use doctors and stores not owned by the company, and for the company to follow the already existing labor laws. These demands were obviously outrageous. Rockefeller's company hired Baldwin-Felts, known for their aggression. The company brought in armored cars with mounted machine guns, militias with automatic weapons, and snipers to attack not just the strikers, but their families as well. By the end of the battle, dozens of women and children were killed, along with many strikers. Did Rockefeller go to prison for this? Did Baldwin-Felts receive penalty? No, the strike failed. Hundreds were arrested and the strike's leader was convicted of murder. The mercenaries were not.
What about Blair Mountain? More coal miners went on strike. What did the company do? Send in Baldwin-Felts. What happened? Fighting broke out. Bullets started to fly. The army came in again, but this time they backed up the company. The army used explosives and chemical-gas bombs, dropped from airplanes, against the strikers. By the end of it, over a million bullets were fired and over a hundred were dead.
And the battle of Matewan? This time, the law was on the side of the miners. Baldwin-Felts evicted several families of miners, before trying to leave the town. They were intercepted by the police chief and mayor, who presented warrants for their arrests. The detectives then countered by producing a warrant for the police chief's arrest, the mayor pointing it out as fraud. Then fighting broke out, the mayor was shot to death by the detectives. Later, as some men and their wives came to testify about the incident, they were assassinated by more detectives on the stairs of the courthouse. The assassins weren't arrested.
Let these stories be clear, corporations will kill people if it means saving money. And don't think that all this stopped. When the manufacturing went overseas, so did the labor violence. Labor organizers overseas are still murdered to this very day by corporations who know they will never be punished. Even some of the ones in America are still under threat. Remember those Boeing whistleblowers?
And let's talk about another time that corporations used extreme violence to enforce their rule. PBSuccess. Workers in Guatemala democratically elected reformist presidents. What reforms did he enact? Things like a minimum wage, built hospitals, and so on. This made the corporations very nervous. Then, he did something extreme. He took various 65-acre sections of company land that sat unused and uninhabited, seized it and paid the company for the value of the land with government bonds, and gave that land to the peasants who didn't own any land for farming. Obviously, this would not be good. So, the corporations got in touch with the government, calling it communism. So, the CIA comes in and overthrows the government with an attempted coup with naval and air support, and the threat of a full-scale American invasion forces the Guatemalan army to back down. A dictator is installed, who begins to torture and execute the members of the previous presidency. But he's business friendly, so the corporations are happy. This led to forty years of civil war, and a hatred for America in these people. Dole, Chiquita, all of them did this. People are dead because these companies found it to be profitable.
But they would never try it here, right? Wrong. The Business Plot was a scheme cooked up on Wall Street back in the 1930s. Essentially, FDR was too communist, with his banning of child labor and his social security. So what do they do? Organize a plan to trick half a million veterans into marching on Washington DC, storming the White House, and forcing FDR at gunpoint to appoint a dictator who would be much more business friendly. This would all be funded and supplied by Wall Street companies. The plan failed when the military man reached out to to lead the veterans turned out to be loyal to his country, reporting the plot to Congress. The media decried it as a hoax, until Congress found that the plot very well did exist. But don't worry, the people on Wall Street never actually were punished for it. Coincidentally, people like the DuPonts and the Morgans (Of J.P. Morgan) who largely orchestrated the scheme, were of families linked to the Roosevelts by marriage. Also, the man who had propositioned the military man about the plan initially, died five weeks after the committee's report, at 37. And also after the report's findings, which did not call for testimony of those implicated, recommend further action, and omitting much information, the senator responsible went on to lead a very, very successful political career.
And let's talk about that for a second. Seriously, look at a lot of these successful businessmen, these 'wonder stories' of 'self-made men'. Rockefeller's dad was a literal snake oil salesman. Steve Jobs' father was a welathy Syrian. Bill Gates' dad was a Lawyer, and his mother was on the board of directors at multiple banking firms. Elon Musk's father was a real estate developer, emerald salesman, consultant, and many other things. Jeff Bezos' biological parents were poor. But his adoptive father? Rich. Bezos was given a quarter million dollars for a six per-cent stake in Amazon by his parents. These people do not come from destitute backgrounds. Nikola Tesla is proof that having a good idea isn't enough to make you rich. Edison is proof that you need business connections as well.
And what else about these families? You know how I mentioned how the Roosevelts were related to the DuPonts and Morgans? Here's a helpful, explanatory chart.
Reminds me of the old Hapsburg monarchies, marrying into each other. Many of these families married their first cousins. The net isn't exhaustive, and I'm sure this pattern continues with other old-money families like the Rothschilds and such. The Rockefeller family itself is barely explored. But from what we can see, these families do keep to themselves, they keep the power to themselves. Like a feudal aristocracy, these families are interlinked and connected very intimately. So perhaps that would lend credence to the idea that they're working together. But we need more proof.
The proof is self evident. Do corporations give orders to the government? Yes, duh. Back in the 1800s, corporations would directly bankroll politicians. Senators and Representatives paid directly to shill for the companies. But now? That's illegal, it's bribery. Now we have lobbying. Instead, a 'political action committee' funded by billionaires and wealthy corporations will instead be the ones giving them luxurious gifts and financing their political campaigns. Remember, spending money is free speech, and corporations are people whom the Bill of Rights apply to.
And let's not forget who controls the candidates. Teddy Roosevelt was a very popular man. But he wasn't the nominee. He was appointed as vice-president, a largely ceremonial role, by the political establishment that was coincidentally funded by wealthy businessmen. And only when the president died did he actually enact reforms. He was a greatly popular man. He wanted to run for reelection. The party refused. They could have easily secured a victory with a massively popular candidate, but instead chose someone else. So the vote was split. Roosevelt, running under a third party, got over twenty-seven per-cent of the votes. Let this show that he was extremely popular. So why didn't the party approve of him? Because their corporate donors did not approve of him. In other words, the corporations don't need to rig elections when they can just rig candidates. It's called controlled opposition, and it was practiced even with early Oilmen's Unions opposing Rockefeller, led by Rockefeller's close allies.
Even many supposedly grassroots campaigns are entirely manufactured. Manufactured opposition. Just Stop Oil, for example. The group that performs ridiculous stunts like blocking roads, gluing themselves to roads, sabotaging (cooking) oil railroad cars, and so on. They're often ridiculed by corporate media organizations, called out for being stupid. And you know who funds Just Stop Oil? Oil billionaires. It's a psy-op to discredit environmentalist organizations publicly.
What other signs are there of meddling and collaboration between corporate and political interests? Look no further than the many, many societies and organizations. The Club at Rome, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the World Economic Forum, the Bohemian Grove, and the Bilderberg Meetings, just to name a few. Important, influential businessmen, politicians, artists, and public figures all meet together to organize and coordinate on policy going forward. There isn't really much more explanation needed than this.
But oh yes there is. The Trilateral Commission was founded by David Rockefeller, who created it essentially as a Bilderberg Group that included Japan. He was also associated with the Clintons and Carnegies, he was a director of the Council on Foreign Relations. His father donated the land that the United Nations headquarters was founded on. Here's a couple quotes from him: "Some even believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as 'internationalists' and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure--one world, if you will. If that's the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it", and "The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries". Is this a man worth trusting? Because he was one of the wealthiest men alive, from one of the most influential families.
What other types of benefits do corporations get from their control and influence over the government? Well here's a few of the financial ones. Firstly, taxes. Let's look at how tax rates have changed over time.
| Year | Corporate Tax % | Individual Tax % |
| 1945 | 35% | 48% |
| 1960 | 23% (-12%) | 60% (+12%) |
| 2023 | 9% (-14%) | 85% (+25%) |
And more about taxes, the automotive workers on the assembly lines at Ford and General Motors are paying fifteen percent in taxes on their paychecks. What about Ford and General Motors themselves? General Motors paid six per-cent. Ford paid negative nine per-cent. Ford got so many tax credits that they can get money back on taxes. How do they do this? A legion of tax lawyers and accountants. We could do it too, if we had the money to fund that many professionals. And we don't. Another example of the snowblling of wealth
Want another example? Look at 2008. Seven hundred billion dollars of bailout money to banks and investors, who were failing. Banks like Goldman-Sachs, who made over two billion dollars in profit in 2008. And what did they receive? One hundred billion dollars of bailout money. What did they do? Cut checks for five billion as bonuses to the corporate suits on top.
Ever see those corporations who say that raising wages will drive up costs? Know what else drives up costs? Yearly multi-million dollar bonuses to executives.
Wages also haven't really increased much over time, but corporate compensation has. You know how much the average worker's hourly wage has raised since 1965, adjusted for inflation? Ten ccents. Ten cents in nearly eighty years. You know how much the average hourly wage for an executive has risen? Around five thousand dollars. Worker's wages increased by zero-point-five per-cent. Executive's wages have risen? Eleven-hundred per-cent. No wonder companies are needing bailouts. Seems like they need to 'curtail workforce redundancies'.
What is all this trying to say? Corporations work together, their families are interlinked. They will use violent, horrible means to maintain this power, with no morals or institutions more sacred than the dollar. They would kill you if it saved them money. They bankroll and bribe the politicians through shell PACs, they control which candidates are up for election, they host the debates and conventions, they collude at closed-doors meetings. The government was set up to protect the people from foreign invasion, from crime, all physical and violent threats. The government never has had the capacity to deal with threats not only existential and internal in nature, but of a purely economic source. Unless push comes to shove and people can't be bought, the corporations conquer through backroom deals and finances. The government never stood a chance. By the time they realized what was happening, it was far too late. America has been sold for centuries. All we can do is hope. What, will someone run claiming to kick money out of politics? Good luck appearing for interviews, getting the candidacy, getting campaign financing. The best chance is a subverter from the inside who wishes to break the cycle. But what real incentive would an insider have to reform the system, truly? None.
The Hegemon Angle
But is that really all true? I mean, let's be honest here. That's a compeletely defeatist angle. No issue, no matter how systemic, is unchangeable. The Catholic rule over Europe fell with the Reformation. Slavery, a system as old as humanity, has been prohibited in the free world. Systems can change, with time, awareness, and dedication.
The government hasn't been entirely bought out yet. I mentioned many labor movements. After the Ludlow massacre, much of the population and government did shift attitudes towards labor. FDR, part of the powerful Roosevelt family, was the one who implemented labor reforms, banning child labor and implementing minimum wage, even implementing social security. Theodore Roosevelt broke up monopolies, which though ineffective, was at least an attempt. Even now, there have been and are lawsuits against firms as giant as Google and Microsoft.
And local, regular-guy politicians do often get elected, not always, but it is a reason to do some campaigning, organizing, and genuine grassroots politics. There are proper procedures where people can get onto the ballot, even if not endorsed by mainstream parties. For example, 1924, Follette ran as a third party, even won a state, getting over sixteen per-cent of the vote. And in 2016, the Libertarian party won over three per-cent of the vote. In the early 1900s, plenty of large cities like Milwaukee have elected socialists. Many people from the Green or Libertarian party often win seats in cities and such, and local electors do still hold much sway over policy in cities.
And also, organizations like the FDA and EPA, while often bought out by large companies, do sometimes perform their duties. A glaring example is the rejection of Thalidomide by the FDA, even after being approved in Europe.
There is still hope.
So then, is the first lens correct? Perhaps not. The second lens isn't correct, but neither is the first. Perhaps there are two unseen entities fighting for control, striving for dominance. Not in open conflict, but through legalism and economics. The federal government, and the corporate hegemony, both united in one purpose and goal, each attempting to control and sway each other.
Isn't that a large accusation, though? That these entities, corporations are all united? How can companies like Wal-Mart and Target be united, when they're obviously competitors. Companies like Wal-Mart aren't old money, centuries old companies. Same with many technology firms. Aren't they in competition? They are. For what? Money. Not just from customers and income, but from investors. Why do they feel that desperate urge to innovate and grow constantly? That tendency mentioned earlier to pursue short-term gains over long-term viability? Because better statements now mean more investment, more reward from Wall Street.
So it's the investment banks that are really the ones competing then? Each vying for control over corporate America? Nope. Let's look at some asset management companies. The institutions that hold the shares of other companies. We'll only be looking at the publicly traded ones, even multi-trillion dollar ones like Fidelity and Vanguard are private and so don't need to disclose their holders. Additionally, all percentages are rough, rounded to the nearest percentage, and most other numbers are rounded as well. As a brief overview, the per-cent held by institutions means how much of the company is owned (and therefore controlled) by institutions, other investment corporations, banks, and so on. Insiders would be people like CEOs who would have leverage and insider information. Let's say fifty-one per-cent of a company's shares are held by an institution, and forty-nine are held by individuals. As all voting systems, even if every person was united, they would not have enough voting power to overrule the institution. Keep that in mind.
| Corporation | Assets Under Management (In $USD) |
% Held by Institutions | % Held by Insiders | % Held by Shareholders |
| BlackRock | 10,000,000,000,000 | 80 | 1 | 19 |
| Charles Schwab | 4,200,000,000,000 | 81 | 6 | 13 |
| State Street | 4,100,000,000,000 | 95 | 1 | 4 |
| JP Morgan Chase | 2,900,000,000,000 | 74 | 0 | 26 |
| Franklin Resources | 1,700,000,000,000 | 44 | 47 | 9 |
| Invesco | 1,700,000,000,000 | 89 | 2 | 9 |
| Bank of America | 1,600,000,000,000 | 61 | 10 | 29 |
| Price T Row Associates | 1,570,000,000,000 | 75 | 2 | 23 |
| Morgan Stanley | 1,500,000,000,000 | 62 | 24 | 14 |
| Northern Trust | 1,300,000,000,000 | 86 | 0 | 14 |
| Ameriprise | 1,170,000,000,000 | 87 | 0 | 13 |
| Wells Fargo | 600,000,000,000 | 78 | 0 | 22 |
Again, many large firms like Fidelity and Vanguard, who themselves manage a respective 14.1 Trillion and 9.3 Trillion in assets. These companies are simply not public.
Now, realize what this means. If a company does not own itself, it is beholden to the interests of its own shareholders. With investment firms, this means that each investment firm is beholden to the interests of each other investment firm. In essence, they all act in unison, as one, large, interwoven company. Not as individual firms in competition.
So what kind of influence do they have? Here's a little list.
Retailers
| Name | % Institutional | % Insider |
| Wal-Mart | 35 | 46 |
| Target | 83 | 0 |
| CostCo | 72 | 0 |
| Kroger | 77 | 8 |
| Best Buy | 86 | 9 |
| Amazon | 64 | 9 |
| Barnes & Noble | 29 | 61 |
Social Media
| Name | % Institutional | % Insider |
| FaceBook/Instagram/WhatsApp | 79 | 0 |
| Google/YouTube | 62 | 0 |
| SnapChat | 64 | 24 |
| 95 | 0 |
News Agencies
| Name | % Institutional | % Insider |
| Paramount (CBS) | 74 | 6 |
| Warner Brothers (CNN) | 63 | 9 |
| Fox | 55 | 44 |
| ComCast (MSNBC) | 88 | 1 |
| New York Times | 92 | 2 |
Food and Agriculture
| Name | % Institutional | % Insider |
| General Mills | 81 | 0 |
| Pepsi-Frito-Lay | 78 | 0 |
| Tyson | 84 | 2 |
| Archer-Daniels-Midland | 81 | 1 |
| Bunge | 96 | 1 |
Any company that's public and even reasonably large is bought by institutions.
| Index | % Institutional |
| S&P 500 | 80% |
| DJIA | 66% |
| Overall Stock Market | 80% |
The stock market, frankly is just owned by institutions. If it exists, they own it. So, what does this mean? The entire financial power of the United States, all of our corporations and manufacturers and banks, they're in control of the investment firms, the body that formed from them all. The Black Swan. They own the stores, they own the news, they own the farms. If it can be bought, they own it.
You know who else they own? Fact Checkers. Those fact-checking people you see on Facebook and Google, where do you think their paychecks come from? Snopes, Politifact, FactCheck, they are funded by billionaires, by Google and Facebook, ironically the same companies that use their fact checking.
They're all part of a group called the Trusted News Initiative. Remember when fact-checkers pushed very hard against 'vaccine disinformation'? Interestingly enough, the head of the TNI was on the board of directors at Pfizer. And now, a lot of researchers and whistleblowers are leaking that much of the Pfizer studies on the vaccine didn't follow up with patients, log side effects, or really do much of the actual scientific process.
Even other 'independent' news sources like Reuters, look into their history. From the beginning, Reuters was funded by the Rothschilds, an extremely wealthy banker family that for a long while was the wealthiest family in the world. And other news outlets, like the Washington Post, are just directly owned by billionaires. A lot of what you read in the news is fearmongering, propaganda, misleading. Objective news outlets are frankly dead. Why do you think there are so many anti-government media pieces ran, but so few anti-corporations-in-media pieces ran?
And besides the news, they have other propaganda outlets. For example, think tanks. Really think about them, what are they? Do they ever put out findings or research against their own agenda? Obviously not. Who funds them? Wealthy billioinaires or corporations. What are they, when you pull off the mask? Corporate propaganda spouts.
As much as it pains me to say this, the government is the only real counterbalance to corporate power. Like the saying goes, the west was so afraid of strong government that now there's no government, only financial power. Ever hear of affluenza? A man in 2013 drove drunk and killed four people. A psychologist argued that he had affluenza, a mental condition from having too much money, that he couldn't comprehend the consquences of his actions. In other words, the man was too rich for laws to register with him, so he shouldn't be held to as strict a standard. Bluntly, the law is only for poor people. And what about tickets, huh? Tickets and citations, really, what are they? A poor man can't afford a four hundred dollar ticket. But a wealthy businessman can. When the punishment is purely financial, the rich are released from the law.
There are three agents. The government, the people, and the corporations. The government and the corporations push their propaganda to vie for the people's support. Without the support of the people, neither can exist. If everyone stopped paying their taxes, what would happen? The government would arrest them? With what police, without money? And if everyone stopped buying from certain corporations? They would go out of business. Naturally, the people are what the two other agents fight over. Only through unity of the people against both, or a delicate balance between the two other agents, can some modicum of peace and sensibility be established. But for now, the government is on the back foot, struggling against the powers of finance through the mess of bureaucracy that had attempted to prevent strong government when it was unnecessary.