NOTE: The following is a reworked version of an earlier post.
There once was a society terrorized by a three-headed monster. One head breathed fire and burned them, the next head produced salve to sell them for the burns (making huge profit), and the last head produced a hypnotic siren song that made the people forget who burned them — so that the cycle of wealth extraction continued.
The End
In current times, the above story fits with the recent COVID debacle. One might say that markets would never result in the sale of harmful things, because investors would run as fast as they can away from the harmful products — so as to avoid bankruptcy and a tarnished reputation. But let’s check the top 5 owners of Moderna once:
Most ownership of Moderna is by institutions, and among the top 5 owners are Vanguard, Blackrock, and State Street. But to make certain that the market is working well, and that competition is protecting the consumer, let’s double-check who owns Pfizer:
Oh … crap. Not those 3 again! Well, while it is the same 3 investment outfits that own both, perhaps there is ample diversity in ownership of the investment outfits, but let’s double-check to be certain, first by checking out who owns Blackrock:
Oh … S#!^ — it’s starting to look like an incestuous cesspool of opaque funding! But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. After all, it’s likely that the ownership of State Street has some diversity to it which might serve as a check on harmful behavior. But just to be certain, let’s double-check:
Holy %#$%! These guys have their fingers in each other’s pies — almost as if it is the same 79 people who own a lion’s share of all voting rights of each thing. But all is not lost, because we ought to be able to rely on media corporations to do the dirty work of consumer advocacy and break the news if a product being sold to us is harmful.
Because the owners of media outlets such as AT&T— the parent company of CNN — are the ones with the responsibility for consumer reporting with regard to whether people are getting a bad deal from a new medicine, let’s check who owns them:
Fricken fracken! Okay, CNN is not the only independent and objective news outlet — er, scratch that and replace it with “mainstream media outlet” — because we ought to be able to rely on some other ones, such as CBS News, owned by Paramount. But to make certain, let’s double-check who owns them:
#$%^#$%! Okay, everyone calm down. Let’s take stock of where we are at. We just discovered that the same guys who own the products that might be harming us also own the media which might have told us the truth about those products harming us. But all is not lost. Why the optimism? Well, that’s because we can go online for truth.
In other words, we can do our own journalism and consumer advocacy. But to make certain, let’d double-check who owns voting shares on the primary search engine for online searches of things, Alphabet Inc., or more commonly known as Google:
What the #$%^#%^!
Okay, last try. How about other Big Tech firms? Let’s double-check who owns Microsoft:
The evidence suggests that oligarchs, working with the government against the people, have created a “captive audience” scenario only different from the fictional story at top by a matter of degree, at least for now. A happy ending for the story would have been for the people to find a way to slay the three-headed monster.
In our current times, what is needed is a return to the checks and balances of free enterprise — where firms putting out harmful products get outcompeted by good firms. This means dramatic reduction in the size and scope of governance, because government intervention is how the oligarchs have crystalized their position at top.
If we smash that crystal, we release their hold on us.
Reference
[example Yahoo Finance page with the ticker code for Moderna: MRNA] — https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MRNA/holders/
What about BioNTech?