Who Owns the World?

An eye-opening article everyone MUST read and watch the video located at Rumble.

Who Owns the World?
By Joseph Mercola
Mercola.com
October 30, 2021

Until recently, it appeared economic competition had been driving the rise and fall of small and large companies across the U.S. Supposedly, PepsiCo is Coca Cola’s competitor, Apple and Android vie for your loyalty and drug companies battle for your health care dollars. However, all of that turns out to be an illusion.

Since the mid-1970s, two corporations — Vanguard and Blackrock — have gobbled up most companies in the world, effectively destroying the competitive market on which America’s strength has rested, leaving only false appearances behind.

Indeed, the global economy may be the greatest illusionary trick ever pulled over the eyes of people around the world. To understand what’s really going on, watch Tim Gielen’s hour-long documentary, “MONOPOLY: Who Owns the World?” above.

Corporate Domination

As noted by Gielen, who narrates the film, a handful of mega corporations — private investment companies — dominate every aspect of our lives; everything we eat, drink, wear or use in one way or another. These investment firms are so enormous, they control the money flow worldwide. So, how does this scheme work?

While there appear to be hundreds of competing brands on the market, like Russian nesting dolls, larger parent companies own multiple smaller brands. In reality, all packaged food brands, for example, are owned by a dozen or so larger parent companies.

Pepsi Co. owns a long list of food, beverage and snack brands, as does Coca-Cola, Nestle, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Unilever, Mars, Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Danone and Associated British Foods. Together, these parent companies monopolize the packaged food industry, as virtually every food brand available belongs to one of them.

These companies are publicly traded and are run by boards, where the largest shareholders have power over the decision making. This is where it gets interesting, because when you look up who the largest shareholders are, you find yet another monopoly.

While the topmost shareholders can change from time to time, based on shares bought and sold, two companies are consistently listed among the top institutional holders of these parent companies: The Vanguard Group Inc. and Blackrock Inc.

Pepsi and Coca-Cola — An Example

For example, while there are more than 3,000 shareholders in Pepsi Co., Vanguard and Blackrock’s holdings account for nearly one-third of all shares. Of the top 10 shareholders in Pepsi Co., the top three, Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation, own more shares than the remaining seven.

Now, let’s look at Coca-Cola Co., Pepsi’s top competitor. Who owns Coke? As with Pepsi, the majority of the company shares are held by institutional investors, which number 3,155 (as of the making of the documentary).

As shown in the film, three of the top four institutional shareholders of Coca-Cola are identical with that of Pepsi: Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation. The No. 1 shareholder of Coca-Cola is Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

These four — Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street and Berkshire Hathaway — are the four largest investment firms on the planet. “So, Pepsi and Coca-Cola are anything but competitors,” Gielen says. And the same goes for the other packaged food companies. All are owned by the same small group of institutional shareholders.

Big Tech Monopoly

The monopoly of these investment firms isn’t relegated to the packaged food industry. You find them dominating virtually all other industries as well. Take Big Tech, for example. Among the top 10 largest tech companies we find Apple, Samsung, Alphabet (parent company of Google), Microsoft, Huawei, Dell, IBM and Sony.

Here, we find the same Russian nesting doll setup. For example, Facebook owns Whatsapp and Instagram. Alphabet owns Google and all Google-related businesses, including YouTube and Gmail. It’s also the biggest developer of Android, the main competitor to Apple. Microsoft owns Windows and Xbox. In all, four parent companies produce the software used by virtually all computers, tablets and smartphones in the world. Who, then, owns them? Here’s a sampling:

    Facebook — More than 80% of Facebook shares are held by institutional investors, and the top institutional holders are the same as those found in the food industry: Vanguard and Blackrock being the top two, as of the end of March 2021. State Street Corporation is the fifth biggest shareholder
    Apple — The top four institutional investors are Vanguard, Blackrock, Berkshire Hathaway and State Street Corporation
    Microsoft — The top three institutional shareholders are Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation

You can continue going through the list of tech brands — companies that build computers, smart phones, electronics and household appliances — and you’ll repeatedly find Vanguard, Blackrock, Berkshire Hathaway and State Street Corporation among the top shareholders.

Same Small Group Owns Everything Else Too

The same ownership trend exists in all other industries. Gielen offers yet another example to prove this statement is not an exaggeration:

    “Let’s say we want to plan a vacation. On our computer or smart phone, we look for a cheap flight to the sun through websites like Skyscanner and Expedia, both of which are owned by the same group of institutional investors [Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation].

    We fly with one of the many airlines [American Airlines, Air France, KLM, United Airlines, Delta and Transavia] of which the majority of the shares are often owned by the same investors …

    The airline we fly [on] is in most cases a Boeing or an Airbus. Again, we see the same [institutional shareholders]. We look for a hotel or an apartment through Bookings.com or AirBnB.com. Once we arrive at our destination, we go out to dinner and we write a review on Trip Advisor. The same investors are at the basis of every aspect of our journey.

    And their power goes even much further, because even the kerosene that fuels the plane comes from one of their many oil companies and refineries. Just like the steel that the plane is made of comes from one of their many mining companies.

    This small club of investment companies, banks and mutual funds, are also the largest shareholders in the primary industries, where our raw materials come from.”

The same goes for the agricultural industry that the global food industry depends on, and any other major industry. These institutional investors own Bayer, the world’s largest seed producer; they own the largest textile manufacturers and many of the largest clothing companies.

They own the oil refineries, the largest solar panel producers and the automobile, aircraft and arms industries. They own all the major tobacco companies, and all the major drug companies and scientific institutes too. They also own the big department stores and the online marketplaces like eBay, Amazon and AliExpress.

They even own the payment methods we use, from credit card companies to digital payment platforms, as well as insurance companies, banks, construction companies, telephone companies, restaurant chains, personal care brands and cosmetic brands.

No matter what industry you look at, the top shareholders, and therefore decision makers, are the same: Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street and/or Berkshire Hathaway. In virtually every major company, you find these names among the top 10 institutional investors.

Who Owns the Investment Firms of the World?

Diving deeper, we find that these major investment firms are in turn owned by their own set of shareholders. One of the most amazing things about this scheme is that the institutional investors — and there are many more than the primary four we’ve focused on here — also own each other. They’re all shareholders in each other’s companies.
At the top of the pyramid — the largest Russian doll of all — we find Vanguard and Blackrock.

“Together, they form an immense network that we can compare to a pyramid,” Gielen says. Smaller institutional investors, such as Citibank, ING and T. Rowe Price, are owned by larger investment firms such as Northern Trust, Capital Group, 3G Capital and KKR.

Those investors in turn are owned by even larger investment firms, like Goldman Sachs and Wellington Market, which are owned by larger firms yet, such as Berkshire Hathaway and State Street. At the top of the pyramid — the largest Russian doll of all — we find Vanguard and Blackrock.

    “The power of these two companies is something we can barely imagine,” Gielen says. “Not only are they the largest institutional investors of every major company on earth, they also own the other institutional investors of those companies, giving them a complete monopoly.”

Gielen cites data from Bloomberg, showing that by 2028, Vanguard and BlackRock are expected to collectively manage $20 trillion-worth of investments. In the process, they will own almost everything on planet Earth.

BlackRock — The Fourth Branch of Government

Bloomberg has also referred to BlackRock as the “fourth branch of government,” due to its close relationship with the central banks. BlackRock actually lends money to the central bank, the federal reserve, and is their principal adviser.

Dozens of BlackRock employees have held senior positions in the White House under the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations. BlackRock also developed the computer system that the central banks use.

Who Owns BlackRock?

While Larry Fink is the figurehead of BlackRock, being its founder, chairman and chief executive officer, he’s not the sole decision maker, as BlackRock too is owned by shareholders. Here we find yet another curiosity, as the largest shareholder of BlackRock is Vanguard.

“This is where it gets dark,” Gielen says. Vanguard has a unique structure that blocks us from seeing who the actual shareholders are. “The elite who own Vanguard don’t want anyone to know they are the owners of the most powerful company on earth.” Still, if you dig deep enough, you can find clues as to who these owners are.

The owners of the wealthiest, most powerful company on Earth can be expected to be among the wealthiest individuals on earth. In 2016, Oxfam reported that the combined wealth of the richest 1% in the world was equal to the wealth of the remaining 99%. In 2018, it was reported that the world’s richest people get 82% of all the money earned around the world in 2017.

In reality, we can assume that the owners of Vanguard are among the 0.001% richest people on the planet. According to Forbes, there were 2,075 billionaires in the world as of March 2020. Gielen cites Oxfam data showing that two-thirds of billionaires obtained their fortunes via inheritance, monopoly and/or cronyism.

“This means that Vanguard is in the hands of the richest families on earth,” Gielen says. Among them we find the Rothschilds, the DuPont family, the Rockefellers, the Bush family and the Morgan family, just to name a few.

Many belong to royal bloodlines and are the founders of our central banking system, the United Nations and just about every industry on the planet. Gielen goes even further in his documentary, so I highly recommend watching it in its entirety. I’ve only summarized a small piece of the whole film here.

A Financial Coup D’etat

Speaking of the central bankers, I recently interviewed finance guru Catherine Austin Fitts, and she believes it’s the central bankers that are at the heart of the global takeover we’re currently seeing. She also believes they are the ones pressuring private companies to implement the clearly illegal COVID jab mandates. Their control is so great, few companies have the ability to take a stand against them.

    “I think [the central bankers] are really depending on the smart grid and creepy technology to help them go to the last steps of financial control, which is what I think they’re pushing for,” she said.

    “What we’ve seen is a tremendous effort to bankrupt the population and the governments so that it’s much easier for the central bankers to take control. That’s what I’ve been writing about since 1998, that this is a financial coup d’etat.

    Now the financial coup d’etat is being consolidated, where the central bankers just serve jurisdiction over the treasury and the tax money. And if they can get the [vaccine] passports in with the CBDC [central bank digital currency], then it will be able to take taxes out of our accounts and take our assets. So, this is a real coup d’etat.”

The Spartacus Letter

Again, I urge you to watch the documentary at the top of this article, and keep an eye out for my interview with Austin Fitts, which will be published in the near future. In closing, I want to highlight a mysterious letter posted by an anonymous individual who goes by the name “Spartacus.”

“COVID-19 — The Spartacus Letter” was originally posted on docdroid.net, but has since been deleted. Another copy can be found on mega.nz.1 The Automatic Earth2 and ZeroHedge3 have also published the letter in full. The letter starts out saying, “My name is Spartacus, and I’ve had enough”:

    “We are watching the medical establishment inject literal poison into millions of our fellow Americans without so much as a fight. We have been told that we will be fired and denied our livelihoods if we refuse to vaccinate. This was the last straw.”

What follows is a compilation of data showing the COVID pandemic was a biowarfare attack that has been kept going using sophisticated psychological warfare tactics. It also reviews the dangers of the COVID shots, noting that the virus and the “vaccines” were made by the same entities.

A summary of Spartacus’ findings is as follows. Each summary point is elaborated upon in later sections of the letter, which you can read in any of the three references provided.

    COVID-19 is a blood and blood vessel disease. SARS-CoV-2 infects the lining of human blood vessels, causing them to leak into the lungs.
    Current treatment protocols (e.g. invasive ventilation) are actively harmful to patients, accelerating oxidative stress and causing severe VILI (ventilator-induced lung injuries). The continued use of ventilators in the absence of any proven medical benefit constitutes mass murder.
    Existing countermeasures are inadequate to slow the spread of what is an aerosolized and potentially wastewater-borne virus, and constitute a form of medical theater.
    Various non-vaccine interventions have been suppressed by both the media and the medical establishment in favor of vaccines and expensive patented drugs.
    The authorities have denied the usefulness of natural immunity against COVID-19, despite the fact that natural immunity confers protection against all of the virus’s proteins, and not just one.
    Vaccines will do more harm than good. The antigen that these vaccines are based on, SARS-CoV-2 Spike, is a toxic protein. SARS-CoV-2 may have ADE, or antibody-dependent enhancement; current antibodies may not neutralize future strains, but instead help them infect immune cells. Also, vaccinating during a pandemic with a leaky vaccine removes the evolutionary pressure for a virus to become less lethal.
    There is a vast and appalling criminal conspiracy that directly links both Anthony Fauci and Moderna to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
    COVID-19 vaccine researchers are directly linked to scientists involved in brain-computer interface (‘neural lace’) tech, one of whom was indicted for taking grant money from China.
    Independent researchers have discovered mysterious nanoparticles inside the vaccines that are not supposed to be present.
    The entire pandemic is being used as an excuse for a vast political and economic transformation of Western society that will enrich the already rich and turn the rest of us into serfs and untouchables.

A Criminal Conspiracy

It’s a long letter, so I won’t reproduce the whole thing here. However, the following sections are of particular interest, with regard to a criminal elite that is orchestrating the destruction of life as we know it, in an effort to usher in a technocracy-led system of global governance and control:4

    “In November of 2019, three technicians at the Wuhan Institute of Virology developed symptoms consistent with a flu-like illness. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, and Ralph Baric knew at once what had happened, because back channels exist between this laboratory and our scientists and officials.

    December 12th, 2019, Ralph Baric signed a Material Transfer Agreement (essentially, an NDA) to receive Coronavirus mRNA vaccine-related materials co-owned by Moderna and NIH.

    It wasn’t until a whole month later, on January 11th, 2020, that China allegedly sent us the sequence to what would become known as SARS-CoV-2. Moderna claims, rather absurdly, that they developed a working vaccine from this sequence in under 48 hours.

    Stephane Bancel, the current CEO of Moderna, was formerly the CEO of bioMerieux, a French multinational corporation specializing in medical diagnostic tech, founded by one Alain Merieux. Alain Merieux was one of the individuals who was instrumental in the construction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 lab.

    The sequence given as the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, is not a real virus. It is a forgery. It was made by entering a gene sequence by hand into a database, to create a cover story for the existence of SARS-CoV-2, which is very likely a gain-of-function chimera produced at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was either leaked by accident or intentionally released. The animal reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 has never been found.

    This is not a conspiracy ‘theory.’ It is an actual criminal conspiracy, in which people connected to the development of Moderna’s mRNA-1273 are directly connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and their gain-of-function research by very few degrees of separation, if any. The paper trail is well- established.

    The lab-leak theory has been suppressed because pulling that thread leads one to inevitably conclude that there is enough circumstantial evidence to link Moderna, the NIH, the WIV, and both the vaccine and the virus’s creation together.

    In a sane country, this would have immediately led to the world’s biggest RICO and mass murder case. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Shi Zhengli, and Stephane Bancel, and their accomplices, would have been indicted and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Instead, billions of our tax dollars were awarded to the perpetrators.

    The FBI raided Allure Medical in Shelby Township north of Detroit for billing insurance for ‘fraudulent COVID-19 cures.’ The treatment they were using? Intravenous Vitamin C. An antioxidant. Which, as described above, is an entirely valid treatment for COVID-19-induced sepsis, and indeed, is now part of the MATH+ protocol advanced by Dr. Paul E. Marik.

    The FDA banned ranitidine (Zantac) due to supposed NDMA (N-nitrosodimethylamine) contamination. Ranitidine is not only an H2 blocker used as antacid, but also has a powerful antioxidant effect, scavenging hydroxyl radicals. This gives it utility in treating COVID-19.

    The FDA also attempted to take N-acetylcysteine, a harmless amino acid supplement and antioxidant, off the shelves, compelling Amazon to remove it from their online storefront. This leaves us with a chilling question: did the FDA knowingly suppress antioxidants useful for treating COVID-19 sepsis as part of a criminal conspiracy against the American public?

    The establishment is cooperating with, and facilitating, the worst criminals in human history, and are actively suppressing non-vaccine treatments and therapies in order to compel us to inject these criminals’ products into our bodies …

    Conclusions: The current pandemic was produced and perpetuated by the establishment, through the use of a virus engineered in a PLA-connected Chinese biowarfare laboratory, with the aid of American taxpayer dollars and French expertise …

    Either through a leak or an intentional release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a deadly SARS strain is now endemic across the globe, after the WHO and CDC and public officials first downplayed the risks, and then intentionally incited a panic and lockdowns that jeopardized people’s health and their livelihoods.

    This was then used by the utterly depraved and psychopathic aristocratic class who rule over us as an excuse to coerce people into accepting an injected poison which may be a depopulation agent, a mind control/pacification agent in the form of injectable ‘smart dust,’ or both …

    They believe they can get away with this by weaponizing the social stigma of vaccine refusal. They are incorrect. Their motives are clear and obvious to anyone who has been paying attention.

    These megalomaniacs have raided the pension funds of the free world. Wall Street is insolvent and has had an ongoing liquidity crisis since the end of 2019. The aim now is to exert total, full-spectrum physical, mental, and financial control over humanity before we realize just how badly we’ve been extorted by these maniacs. The pandemic and its response served multiple purposes for the Elite:

    Concealing a depression brought on by the usurious plunder of our economies conducted by rentier-capitalists and absentee owners who produce absolutely nothing of any value to society whatsoever …
    Destroying small businesses and eroding the middle class.
    Transferring trillions of dollars of wealth from the American public and into the pockets of billionaires and special interests.
    Engaging in insider trading, buying stock in biotech companies and shorting brick-and-mortar businesses and travel companies, with the aim of collapsing face-to-face commerce and tourism and replacing it with e-commerce and servitization.
    Creating a casus belli for war with China, encouraging us to attack them, wasting American lives and treasure and driving us to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.
    Establishing technological and biosecurity frameworks for population control and technocratic- socialist ‘smart cities’ where everyone’s movements are despotically tracked, all in anticipation of widespread automation, joblessness, and food shortages, by using the false guise of a vaccine to compel cooperation.

    … The Elites are trying to pull up the ladder, erase upward mobility for large segments of the population, cull political opponents and other ‘undesirables,’ and put the remainder of humanity on a tight leash, rationing our access to certain goods and services that they have deemed ‘high-impact,’ such as automobile use, tourism, meat consumption, and so on.

    Naturally, they will continue to have their own luxuries, as part of a strict caste system akin to feudalism. Why are they doing this? Simple. The Elites are Neo-Malthusians and believe that we are overpopulated and that resource depletion will collapse civilization in a matter of a few short decades.

    They are not necessarily incorrect in this belief. We are overpopulated, and we are consuming too many resources. However, orchestrating such a gruesome and murderous power grab in response to a looming crisis demonstrates that they have nothing but the utmost contempt for their fellow man.

    To those who are participating in this disgusting farce without any understanding of what they are doing, we have one word for you. Stop. You are causing irreparable harm to your country and to your fellow citizens.

    To those who may be reading this warning and have full knowledge and understanding of what they are doing and how it will unjustly harm millions of innocent people, we have a few more words. Damn you to hell. You will not destroy America and the Free World, and you will not have your New World Order. We will make certain of that.”

Sources and References

    1, 4 Mega.nz The Spartacus Letter
    2 The Automatic Earth September 26, 2021
    3 ZeroHedge September 27, 2021

Airlines race to get planes off graveyards!

It’s been a quiet two years for the world’s airlines - but now they’re in a race against time to get their planes back into the sky, and it isn’t an easy task.

Airlines race to get planes left in California desert flying again
Natalie Wolfe
News Ltd, Nov 3, 2021

Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, and the way it brought international travel to a standstill back in March 2020, airlines have had some of their quietest years in history.

But now travel - both international and domestic - is picking up again and people are desperate to fly.

Airlines are now in the thick of the mammoth task of bringing thousands of planes out of what’s called “deep storage” with engineers, mechanics, pilots, cleaners and everyone who is responsible for getting aircraft back in the sky again working overtime.

Massive crews and aircraft certifiers are returning to places like the Mojave Desert in California and the Asia Pacific Aircraft Storage facility at Alice Springs to get these aircraft going again.

But the travel restart isn’t without its hurdles.

Crews have faced snakes on planes, poisonous scorpions, birds nesting in engine covers and insects burrowing in exposed holes.

Airlines have especially struggled with insects making nests in pitot tubes, a tiny tube that helps planes measure airspeed and altitude.

The European Union Aviation Safety Authority discovered this issue when it noticed a surge in incorrect airspeed and altitude readings for planes that were doing their first flight after an extended period in storage.

They’re also grappling with changing tyres, which have gone flat due to the length of time planes have been sitting idle, and oiling up all the necessary parts of the aircraft.

According to figures from aviation analytics company Cirium, obtained by Traveller, more than 16,000 aircraft were taken out of service by April 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic.

That figure equates to more than 60 per cent of the world’s passenger aircrafts.

Cirium estimated more than 30 per cent of the world’s passenger fleet was still out of service by the end of 2020.

But travel is kicking off again - at a rate that will likely surpass pre-pandemic levels.

Now engineers are ramping up their usual inspection checks, including draining fuel tanks of water caused by condensation, checking the tyre pressures, lubricating bearings and inspecting the fuselage and wings for animal nests.

Aviation regulation authorities across the world enforce strict guidelines to ensure planes are sky-worthy.

The Federal Aviation Administration in the US, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority in Australia and the European Union Aviation Safety Authority (EASA), among others, have massive checklists for airlines to follow.

It takes airlines 300 to 1000 hours of reactivation work to get a hibernating plane the regulatory approval to fly again, according to an American Airlines engineer.

And even when that process is finished, the regulatory bodies require the plane to complete a maintenance check flight to ensure it’s safe to carry passengers.

In June, Qantas revealed that engineers taking care of some of the airline’s super jumbos, sitting in the Mojave Desert, had been tasked with using wheel whacker devices to protect planes from rattlesnakes.

Qantas manager for engineering in Los Angeles Tim Heywood said it was important the aircraft were attended to regularly.

“Aircraft like these are highly technical and you can’t just land it at the storage facility, park it and walk away,” Mr Heywood said.

The airline said the engineers tasked with maintaining its fleet of A380 super jumbos stored in California had to come up with the effective system to protect the planes and also themselves from the area’s venomous rattlesnakes.

In addition to snakes, poisonous scorpions are also concerning during the summer season in the desert.

Mr Heywood said having a team of engineers driving the two hours from LA to Victorville for regular inspections is a vital part of keeping the aircraft in top condition during their downtime.

“The area is well known for its feisty ‘rattlers’ who love to curl up around the warm rubber tyres and in the aircraft wheels and brakes,” Mr Heywood said in a statement.

“Every aircraft has its own designated ‘wheel whacker’ (a repurposed broom handle) as part of the engineering kit, complete with each aircraft’s registration written on it.

“The first thing we do before we unwrap and start any ground inspections of the landing gear in particular is to walk around the aircraft stomping our feet and tapping the wheels with a wheel whacker to wake up and scare off the snakes.

That’s about making sure no harm comes to our engineers or the snakes.

“Only then do we carefully approach each wheel and unwrap them before performing our pressure checks and visual inspections.”

Mr Heywood said that the airline’s engineers have “encountered a few rattlesnakes and also some scorpions” on site, but thankfully, the wheel whacker has so far done its job.

“It’s a unique part of looking after these aircraft while they’re in storage and it’s another sign of how strange the past year has been,” he said.

Abdul Sattar Edhi - Humanitarian to a Nation

Abdul Sattar Edhi, the great philanthropist,  left this life on July 8, 2004. He was 88 years old.

Humanitarian to a Nation: Abdul Sattar Edhi
by Richard Covington
Aramco, November/December 2004 issue

In the cool interior of a mental ward in Karachi, a short, powerfully built man with a flowing snow-white beard and penetrating dark-brown eyes is standing at the bedside of a distraught young woman. She has covered her head with a sheet and is pleading for news of the two children her husband took from her.

“I know you are suffering terribly, but this is no way to bring back your children,” says the man with stern compassion. “You have a college degree. You can do many things to help the other patients.”

Outside the room’s windows of latticed stone, several hundred other women stroll and lounge under pipal trees scattered around a courtyard as big as several football fields. All are here because their families cannot—or will not—cope with their mental illnesses.

“Self-help,” says the man as he walks away from the young mother’s bedside. “That’s the best way to get back on your feet.”

For more than half a century, Abdul Sattar Edhi, now 76 years old, has been living proof that a determined individual can mobilize others to alleviate misery and, in so doing, knit together the social fabric of a nation. Firmly refusing financial support from both government and formal religious organizations, this self-effacing man with a primary-school education has almost single-handedly created one of the largest and most successful health and welfare networks in Asia. Whether he is counseling a battered wife, rescuing an accident victim, feeding a poor child, sheltering a homeless family or washing an unidentified and unclaimed corpse before burial, Edhi and Bilquis, his wife of 38 years, help thousands of Pakistanis each day.

Starting in 1951 with a tiny dispensary in Karachi’s poor Mithadar neighborhood, Edhi has steadily built up a nationwide organization of ambulances, clinics, maternity homes, mental asylums, homes for the physically handicapped, blood banks, orphanages, adoption centers, mortuaries, shelters for runaway children and battered women, schools, nursing courses, soup kitchens and a 25-bed cancer hospital. All are run by some 7000 volunteers and a small paid staff of teachers, doctors and nurses. Edhi has also personally delivered medicines, food and clothing to refugees in Bosnia, Ethiopia and Afghanistan. He and the drivers of his ambulances have saved lives in floods, train wrecks, civil conflicts and traffic accidents. After the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, he donated $100,000 to Pakistanis in New York who lost their jobs in the subsequent economic crisis.

Remarkably, the lion’s share of the Edhi Foundation’s $10-million budget comes from private donations from individual Pakistanis inside and outside the country. In the 1980’s, when Pakistan’s then-President Zia ul-Haq sent him a check for 500,000 rupees (then more than $30,000), Edhi sent it back. Last year, the Italian government offered him a million-dollar donation. He refused. “Governments set conditions that I cannot accept,” he says, declining to give any details.

Usually dressed in a simple tunic over gray pajamas, scuffed sandals on his feet and his trademark astrakhan hat on his head, Edhi outlines his philosophy in the Mithadar dispensary where he launched his charity more than five decades ago. “I tell people that, because I am working for you, the money must come from you,” he says. For years, this meant that Edhi would take to the streets to beg on behalf of his growing social programs. Even in his 70’s, he still occasionally begs on the streets, generally for the sake of severely ill individuals in urgent need of expensive medical care that his clinics cannot provide.

Generally, however, donors come in person to one of the 300 centers and clinics across Pakistan. One, who declined to give his name, explained that he gives money regularly to the Edhi Foundation because an Edhi ambulance once rescued his sister from an automobile accident. (The cost of an ambulance call—one of the few services for which the foundation charges—is less than 50 rupees, or around 85 us cents.) “When I give this 1400 rupees to Edhi, I know it goes to people who need it,” says the donor.

Some donors have been very generous. One family donated two villas in the wealthy Karachi suburb of Clifton for use as a residence and school for around 250 girls. A Pakistani expatriate in the UK donated office buildings worth £1.4 million ($2.5 million) that became the British headquarters of the foundation, which organizes local charity services both for expatriates and in support of the foundation’s work in Pakistan. In addition to money and property, contributors donate clothes, appliances, furniture—even goat and chicken meat, sometimes by the ton. The organization uses a portion of these gifts to feed and clothe residents of the homes; the rest is given away to other hospitals, prisons and disaster victims.

For this, Edhi may well be the most widely admired man in Pakistan. In 1986 he received the Ramón Magsaysay Award for Public Service, sometimes referred to as “the Asian Nobel Prize.” In 2000, he was awarded the International Balzan Prize for Humanity, Peace and Brotherhood. In 2002, he joined former us President Bill Clinton, Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel and others as an honorary board member of the newly founded Daniel Pearl Foundation, created in honor of the murdered Wall Street Journal correspondent. Typically, Edhi pays his own way to receive awards and participate in conferences.

What Edhi is doing is nothing short of a miracle,” explains Z. A. Nizami, former director-general of the Karachi Development Authority.

Hemmed in by a labyrinth of fabric shops, food markets and dusty, cart-filled lanes, Edhi’s three-story Mithadar center is a hive of activity. In the crowded front offices, men and women sit behind donated desks taking ambulance calls, ordering medicines and checking the accounts of clinics and centers across the country. In one room, three women are filling out adoption papers. Bilquis Edhi, who oversees adoptions, has placed more than 16,000 children in adopted homes. Outside every Edhi center there is a cradle—shaded from the sun—where unwanted babies can be left anonymously.

Upstairs, a dozen infants and well-fed toddlers, some rattling across the floor in walking strollers, play and doze as Bilquis chats with a woman who has come to adopt a child for her son and daughter-in-law in the United States.

“The baby she’s adopting was starving when it arrived,” Bilquis remarks. “When you nurse a child back to life, it really hurts to see her go, even after you’ve gone through the process thousands of times. Finding her a loving home makes it worth the feeling of loss.”

Bilquis tells of the 32-year-old woman who showed up recently at the Mithadar clinic looking for her. The woman explained that her parents had just revealed that they had adopted her as an infant from the Edhi center. “I’m a doctor now, with four children of my own,” she told Bilquis. “And I wanted to show my gratitude to the woman who nursed me.”

“We both broke down in tears,” Bilquis recalls.

With her head loosely covered by a brightly patterned yellow scarf and eyes that twinkle behind black-framed glasses, Bilquis’s sunny, lighthearted disposition contrasts with her husband’s severe, sometimes impatient manner. The pair met at the clinic when she arrived as an 18-year-old nurse in 1965. A year or so later, they were married.

Their wedding night set the tone for the relationship. Dropping by the dispensary after the ceremony, Edhi found a 12-year-old girl with severe head injuries. The newlyweds rushed her to the hospital and spent the night supervising blood transfusions and calming down distraught relatives.

“I didn’t mind at all,” Bilquis told Reader’s Digest for an article published in 1989. “Today that girl is married with children; that’s what is really important.”

Even so, Bilquis acknowledges in a playful way, life with Edhi can be trying. “Sometimes I wonder how I stayed my whole life with this man who is a mental case,” she says with a smile. “He won’t even attend the weddings of his own children, but if there’s an emergency somewhere he’ll dash out to help in an instant.”

In a room nearby, a teacher is conducting a class in Urdu, Arabic and counting for around a dozen children three to six years old, some of whom have Down’s syndrome. Next door, a female doctor is showing 10 aspiring nurses how to take blood tests; it’s part of a six-month course that will lead to their certification as nurse’s aides.

“I tell destitute women who come to the centers that they can learn nursing here and later earn their own money as nurses and midwives,” Edhi explains back downstairs in his office. So far, around 1500 women have received this training.

Edhi’s own passion for healing dates back to his childhood. At age 11, he was obliged to care for his mother, who was paralyzed with a severe diabetic condition. “I bathed her, changed her and fed her,” he recalls in his 1996 autobiography, A Mirror to the Blind. “Taking care of my mother made me ponder the misery of others who suffered; from that time on, I began to think of how I could help them, and to dream of building hospitals and a village for the handicapped.”

Born in 1928 in Bantva, a small Indian town of 25,000 inhabitants in Gujarat state, he was “not what I would call an obedient child,” he admits with a grin. A natural leader, when he was not prodding other kids to join him in stealing corn and fruit from wealthy farmers, he was organizing impromptu circuses and performing gymnastic feats for the neighbors. Although his father brokered textiles and other goods and provided the family with a middle-class income, both of Edhi’s parents instilled in him the importance of simplicity and frugal living.

“Every day before school, my mother would give me two paisa and say, ‘Spend one paisa on yourself and give the other away,’” Edhi remembers. “When I came home, she would ask me where I had given away my one paisa. It was her way of creating an awareness in me of the need for social welfare.”

At the same time he began caring for his mother, he also developed a habit of saving, putting aside one rupee for every five he earned working at a fabric shop after school. This thriftiness served him well, prompting him to gradually acquire government securities. Even now, Edhi takes no salary, choosing instead to live parsimoniously on the interest from these securities.

In 1951, four years after the family moved to Karachi following the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, the 23-year-old Edhi used some of his savings to buy a tiny shop, less than three meters (10') on a side, inside what is now the clinic building. Together with a doctor who taught him the basics of health care, he set up a free dispensary, and he persuaded several friends to help him add free literacy classes. To be available at all times, he slept on a cement bench outside the dispensary.

In 1957, a virulent flu epidemic swept through Karachi. Edhi reacted with unselfish daring, using his own money to erect tented camps on the city’s outskirts where people received free immunizations. After the epidemic was brought under control, grateful residents chipped in to buy the rest of the Mithadar dispensary building, enabling Edhi to create a free maternity center and nursing school.

Over the years that followed, Edhi realized that Karachi desperately needed an ambulance service. Impressed by his handling of the flu crisis, a local businessman made a large donation, part of which Edhi used to buy a beat-up van that he converted into a free ambulance and drove himself. “I prided myself on being the first to arrive at an accident,” he recalls. Today, Edhi’s ambulance service has grown to a fleet of more than 600 nationwide, all paid for with donations. Dispatched from call centers scattered around the country’s cities and highways, Edhi ambulances are still usually the first to arrive at the scene, and they have helped cut the fatality toll from road accidents by half, he says.

In 1986, during a hijacking attempt at Karachi airport, Edhi marshaled 54 ambulances at the ready. When negotiations between the hijackers and the government broke down and Pakistani commandos stormed the plane, Edhi and other paramedics entered under fire to try to save wounded passengers and crew.

In 1993, during devastating floods in the Punjab, Edhi ambulances rescued 50,000 people. Using donated planes, volunteers also dropped food, water and supplies to isolated families. Edhi’s air ambulance service now numbers three planes and a helicopter, all donated by the US Agency for International Development—“without conditions,” Edhi is quick to point out.

“The 1993 flood was the biggest operation we’d ever done; it satisfied Mr. Edhi that we could handle major disasters,” explains Anwer Kazmi, a longtime friend and aide, who translates Edhi’s Urdu into English.

A stickler for organizational efficiency, Edhi stands up from his desk and goes over to a wall arrayed with stacked drawers of cardboard boxes, each carefully labeled with a year, a location and a subject. “How do you like my computer?” he asks, smiling, as he pulls out a box containing the expense records of the 1993 flood operation. Like his training in health care, Edhi’s expertise in administration is self-taught, his business savvy acquired over decades of running a foundation that now occupies some 7330 staff and volunteers. Back at his desk, he leafs through one of the oversize accounting ledgers that he fills with ruminations, anecdotes, recollections and plans.

“Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and jot down ideas in these ledgers,” he explains. “And in the morning, everyone groans about all the orders I hand down as I try to follow through on my inspirations.”

Recently one of those nighttime brainstorms involved setting up emergency clinics on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan to treat victims of the 2001 war. Edhi’s son Faisal, 26, who works for the foundation, vividly recalls an incident at one of these clinics that encapsulated his father’s demanding nature.

At the new center in Jamun, Faisal explains, local staff members had purchased a dozen chairs for guests and journalists. When Edhi arrived for his own first visit, he blew up. “Why did you waste money on chairs?” he stormed. “Next, you’ll be buying beds and other things for yourselves instead of spending the money on the people we intend to help.” That night, Edhi himself slept with the ambulance drivers on the floor of the center.

As Faisal finishes his anecdote, Edhi rubs a hand across his balding head and nods in agreement. “People respect me because they see how simply we live and that all the donations go to the people who need help,” he volunteers. Only 10 percent of the foundation’s overall budget goes toward administrative overhead, including salaries, he adds.

Edhi and Bilquis still occupy a cramped, two-room apartment next to his office in the midst of the hubbub of the Mithadar clinic. He remains on call for emergencies 24 hours a day—just as he has for the past 52 years. “I am always available to all, rich or poor,” he says. “Anyone can come into this office and talk to me.”

Despite this open-door policy, growing up the children of such a father was not easy. Although Edhi’s children were raised largely by Bilquis’s mother in a house near the dispensary, they were exposed to pain and misery from an early age. At seven, Faisal recalls accompanying his father to recover the corpse of a murder victim. Edhi brought the body back to Mithadar, washed it and gave it a respectful burial. “I got very sick and couldn’t sleep for a week,” Faisal recalls.

By the time he was 10, however, Faisal had grown accustomed to riding with his father on ambulance calls to bring the dead and injured to morgues and hospitals. Now, Faisal is in charge of the ambulance service, whose costs he is trying to cut to make it self-sustaining. He’s also creating a new dispensary and ambulance center for some 50,000 people uprooted from their Karachi homes by a highway project and forcibly moved to a treeless settlement west of the city where there is no running water, sewage or electricity.

Running the Edhi Foundation is very much a family concern. Edhi, Bilquis and their children meet every Sunday at the girls’ home in Clifton to confer over problems at the centers and plan new projects.

“We discuss each girl individually,” says Edhi’s 36-year-old daughter, Kubra, who is as restrained as Faisal is extroverted. “Before the establishment of Edhi homes, young girls who ran away from their families fell into prostitution and other criminal activities. Now they have a place to take shelter.”

Some girls flee to the center to obtain the education their families deny them, while others are sent by parents eager to have their daughters educated, but too poor to pay school fees.

“When girls first come, they generally pass the first few days with great difficulty, often getting depressed and tense,” Kubra continues. “We involve them in work—taking care of children, mixing with other girls and women. Their lives become more normal after three or four days. If a girl continues to be depressed or has difficulty adjusting, we call a doctor to treat her.”

“This is very difficult work, because of fundamentalism,” Edhi interjects. “Our society does not want to give any facilities to females. When political opponents criticize us, we never fight them—we ignore them.

“Still, it’s very hard to survive if you are working for all the people, not just your particular religious or ethnic group,” he acknowledges. “With so much discrimination and growing religious divisions, my children will have a very, very tough time.”

In 1992, tragedy drew the family closer than ever. A mentally unbalanced woman staying at the Clifton home scalded Kubra’s four-year-old son, Bilal, with bathwater so hot that he died two months later. “Revenge will not bring Bilal back,” Edhi advised Kubra at the time. “You must try to forgive the woman.” Kubra decided to transfer her to another Edhi center, but not to punish her. That Kubra and the rest of the family continued their work with the mentally disturbed and destitute is powerful testimony to their commitment.

Early the next morning, Edhi sets out with Faisal and Kazmi to conduct a surprise inspection of Edhi Village, a home for runaway and abandoned boys with a separate asylum for mentally ill and physically handicapped men. Halfway into the 45-minute drive south of Karachi, Edhi stops the ambulance at a one-room cinder block building with a red roof, one of 35 emergency first-aid outposts he’s created along the 1100- kilometer (700-mi) highway from Karachi to Peshawar.

As he chats with the paramedic on call, a pair of policemen pull up to the center. Seeing Edhi, they greet him warmly and join in the conversation.

“Before we set up these emergency centers, the police were stretched too thin and many people died in accidents,” says Faisal. “Now, they rely on us to respond to 75 percent of road accidents.” Nationwide, the Edhi ambulance service receives more than 6000 calls a day.

At the entrance to Edhi Village, the driveway is lined with tamarisk trees covered with yellow blossoms, eucalyptus and palm trees, and beds of purple and white flowers. The courtyard is sprawling and grassy, surrounded by classrooms and dormitories. It contains a playground, a soccer field and volleyball and basketball courts, all of which are used for competitive games with visiting school teams. “Faisal organized the boys to do the landscaping,” Edhi says proudly. “It’s part of our self-help initiative.”

When Edhi purchased the Village’s 26-hectare (65-acre) parcel in 1985, it was barren land. Now there are kitchens, workshops, recreation rooms and housing for 250 children in one complex and 1500 mental patients in another.

In one of the classrooms, Edhi singles out an alert-looking 10-year-old pupil with a congenitally deformed hand. “When he was a newborn, this boy was abandoned in one of our cradles outside a center in Karachi,” Edhi explains. “Bilquis named him Shazab and took care of him in Mithadar until he was old enough to come here. Now he’s one of our smartest students.” When Edhi asks him what he’d like to do when he graduates, Shazab breaks into a shy smile. “I want to be in charge of Edhi Village,” he says.

Further down the open-air hallway are workshops with sewing machines and stacks of electrical equipment. In one of the rooms, a teacher is demonstrating how to repair a refrigerator motor. Edhi pauses to talk with a 13-year-old boy who explains that he’s an Afghan refugee whose parents were killed in the 2001 war. Police picked him up begging on a Karachi street and brought him to an Edhi center. He was later transferred to Edhi Village.

“The boys install all the electrical wiring in the Village and receive enough training to become electricians,” Edhi explains. “We also teach them how to sew so that they can get jobs as tailors or clothes makers when they leave.”

“Sometimes, parents take their children back home and the kids run away again to come back,” adds Kazmi. “The education they receive here is better than the education even middle-class students receive. Also, we provide them with clothes and plenty of food.”

In the walled sanatorium for the mentally handicapped, physically disabled and mentally ill next door, the scene is more sobering. Several hundred residents lie on scattered mattresses or sit on the cement floor in one bare, cavernous ward. Elsewhere, groups of men mill about outside under straggly bougainvillea trees. Despite the spartan facilities, “the patients live under far better conditions than in other mental hospitals in Pakistan,” maintains Ghulam Mustafa, the senior doctor of a staff of five doctors and eight nurses on rotation.

“We organize games and art activities, and the retarded patients do most of the work themselves, keeping the place neat and clean,” he says. “The better-off patients take care of the ones who are more dependent.”

Back in Karachi, Edhi stops by a men’s psychiatric center to meet with Mohammad Ayaz, a soft- spoken, 40-year-old psychiatrist whom Edhi hired after witnessing his success in rehabilitating mentally ill inmates of the city’s central jail. In the front reception room, former patients are busy answering telephone calls and dispatching ambulances.

“Many of our patients can be cured,” Ayaz explains, “but their relatives reject them, leaving them here to languish unnecessarily in long-term care.

“Our biggest problem is that we don’t have enough trained staff,” he continues. “Twelve doctors in rotation have to look after a total of 3500 patients in Edhi Village and six residential centers in Karachi.”

One of the men manning the phones stands up to introduce himself in American-accented English. A self-possessed character with a shock of swept-back black hair flecked with gray, 53-year-old Tariq Ayubi says he perfected his English in Miami, where he went to business school. Moving back to Karachi, he married, went into business and thrived. Gradually, however, he began drinking heavily, and he soon lost his job and his wife. Severely depressed and penniless, he sought refuge at the Edhi center. Volunteering for work here saved him, Ayubi says.

“The Edhi Foundation is the only social welfare organization in the country that works,” he declares.

Afterwards, Edhi expertly maneuvers the ambulance through teeming streets to the women’s sanatorium in north Karachi. As he ambles down the immaculate marble hallways, residents cluster around him, calling out “Abu-ji!” (“Daddy!”). “This adulation makes me nervous,” he says. “I’m not some kind of saint.”

Seeing one woman sitting on concrete steps distractedly waving flies away from an open sore on her foot, Edhi bends close, asking her gently how long it has been infected. “Two days,” she replies, “but it’s much worse this afternoon.” He calls out for a nurse to attend to the sore. When no one comes, he stalks away impatiently. “Don’t worry,” he calls over his shoulder to the suffering woman. “I’ll be back with a bandage before you know it.”

Later on, after Edhi has disinfected and dressed the woman’s wound, he sits on a stone bench and listens to other residents tell him heartrending stories of cruel husbands and family betrayal. Driving back to the Mithadar center, he vents his long-running frustration with the plight of women in Pakistan.

“Society goes against the teachings of the Qur’an in mistreating women and not giving them equality,” he says with indignation. “Only 10 percent of Pakistani women know how to read and write. That’s why we try so hard to give the girls who come to us a good education. Once they get an education, they can start to take control of their lives.”

Back at Mithadar, a businessman in a crisp linen shirt and polished shoes is waiting for Edhi in his office. “Here’s one who has come around,” he says, gripping the man’s shoulders in a friendly embrace. Edhi explains that the waiting businessman has launched a partnership with the foundation to assist the poor in starting fabric shops, food stalls and other small businesses. “He’s helping them stand on their own rather than giving them handouts that only make them more dependent,” says Edhi.

“That’s the humanitarian revolution we need,” he continues with a weary smile. “But still so few understand. Let’s spread the word."

For more information about the Edhi Foundation:

https://edhi.org

MAIN OFFICE
Boulton Market
Mithadar, Karachi 740000
E-mail: edhikarachi@yahoo.com

Edhi International Foundation USA
42-07 National Street
Corona NY 11368
Tel: (718) 639-5120

Edhi International Foundation UK
316 Edgeware Road
London W2 1DY
Tel: +44 (20) 7723-2050

The Political Power of Facebook!

With ever expanding grip & appeal on the netizens worldwide, Facebook is extending its tentacles to exercise its enormous power to spread a certain type of narratives (while suppressing all opposing views) to influence elections home and abroad. And nobody should forget Facebook's own bias towards Democratic Party in the USA and so-called liberal views supported by that party.

The Political Power of Facebook
By Thierry Meyssan
Voltairenet.org
October 14, 2021

In the global imagination, Facebook would be a responsible social network that allows everyone to connect confidentially while censoring messages contrary to local laws. In practice, it is quite different. Facebook collects information about you for the NSA, censors your opinions and mints its own currency. In a few months, this company has become one of the most influential players in world politics.

FACEBOOK AS A SOCIAL NETWORK

The most important political player on the Internet is the social network Facebook. As of January 1st, 2021, it had 2.85 billion monthly active users and 1.88 billion daily active users worldwide. The social network routinely censors posts that include nude photos, sexual activity, harassment, hate speech, forgeries, spam, terrorist propaganda or violence using particularly crude and unfair artificial intelligence. It shuts down accounts that it deems dangerous, either because they have been censored several times or because they are linked to enemies of the United States.

Facebook is a huge company that includes Instagram, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Portal, Novi. It employs over 60,000 people.

FACEBOOK AS A BANK

Facebook now issues its own currency as a state, the Libra. It is backed by a basket of currencies composed of 50% dollars, 14% yen, 11% Serling pounds and 7% Singapore dollars [1].

By becoming a bank whose currency is progressively accepted by Internet sales sites, Facebook is building a parallel economy, both virtual and global, that is larger than the economy of many states.

FACEBOOK AND ITS USERS

Facebook calls on its users to detect accounts that violate its rules. It opens a file on each of its informants and notes them [2].

Facebook, which claims to treat every user equally, has secretly compiled a list of 5.8 million VIPs to whom its rules do not apply. Only they can say and show everything [3].

CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA AND THE NSA

The personal data of at least 87 million users was targeted and siphoned off by the British company Cambridge analytica (of billionaire Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon) and its Canadian subsidiary, AggregateIQ [4]. They were used at least :

for the election of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014 [5],
for 44 local elections in the US in 2014,
for Mauricio Macri in the Argentine presidential election,
for Nigel Farage in the UK Brexit referendum in 2016.
And above all during the US presidential campaign also in 2016, successively for Ben Carson, Ted Cruz [6],
and finally for Donald Trump and his campaign manager… Steve Bannon.

According to The Observer, Cambridge analytica employed many figures from the British military-industrial complex and MI6 propaganda services [7]. Perhaps this is just the tip of the iceberg: Edward Snowden revealed that Facebook had joined the ultra-secret PRISM electronic surveillance network allowing the National Security Agency (NSA) to access the personal data of all its customers. But nothing has leaked out about what use the NSA makes of it.

According to Newton Lee, a former researcher at the Institute for Defense Analyses, the PRISM network is the avatar of the Total Information Awareness (TIA) project that Admiral John Poindexter developed under Donald Rumsfeld at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) [8].

MARK ZUCKERBERG’S PERSONAL COMMITMENT TO ISRAEL

In 2011, Facebook, at the request of Israel, censored accounts calling for an uprising in the Palestinian territories

In 2012, Mark Zuckerberg, personally committed himself to Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Perez. He oversaw the creation and promotion of the Israeli president’s official page, and created a video campaign called “Be my friend for peace”, featuring Nicolas Sarkozy, David Cameron, Recep Tayyip Erdogan or even Queen Elizabeth II of England, among others.

In 2015, Facebook declared Hezbollah and the Syrian Arab Republic “terrorist organisations”. It closed the accounts of several TV channels including Al-Mayadeen (then the most watched news TV in the Arab world), Sama and Dunia (two Syrian public TVs) and Ikhbariya (a Syrian private channel). At the same time, it provided trainers to the jihadists fighting the Syrian Arab Republic.

In this regard, Facebook does not censor all messages of hatred or violence. For example, it encourages the account of opponents of Syria that collects information (name, address, photo) of Syrian nationalists in order to assassinate them.

POLITICAL PROJECT

In 2010, Nature published a study on “An experiment in social influence and political mobilisation on 61 million people” [9]. Researchers from the University of California show that political messages on Facebook during the US mid-term elections had a very large impact not only on the users of the social network, but also on their friends and even on their friends’ friends.

In 2014, Facebook, without the knowledge of its subscribers, conducted a study on “Experimental evidence of large-scale emotional contagion via social networks” [10].

In 2018, Facebook partnered with the Atlantic Council, an influential think tank funded by NATO, to “promote US leadership and engagement in the world with its allies”. The specific aim of the partnership is to ensure “the proper use of Facebook in elections around the world, monitoring misinformation and foreign interference, helping to educate citizens and civil society” [11].

Ultimately, in 2020, Facebook engaged in colonial politics in Africa with its proposed undersea cable encircling the continent, 2Africa. This network would link the main ports, but would not penetrate inland [12]. It is only a question of serving the elites who participate in the plundering of the continent and the shipping of its wealth to the West.

Internationally, Facebook’s director of public relations is the Liberal Democrat Nick Clegg. He was a deputy to British Prime Minister David Cameron. Facebook France is headed by Laurent Solly, former chief of staff to President Sarkozy and then second in command of the private television channel TF1. He is the husband of Caroline Roux, a star journalist for the public television channel France2.

Facebook is neither in the service of the Democrats nor the Republicans. It is a company that defends the interests of the “American Empire” by using both its knowledge of its users and the emotions it spreads among them.

From this point of view, it is particularly interesting that in 2017 Mark Zuckerberg thought of becoming President of the United States without having to run for office. He had put together a campaign team before giving up. His plan was to lean on the Democratic Party to remove President Donald Trump from office, then get close to Vice President Mike Pence so that Pence would hand over the office to him when he automatically became president, and finally lean on the Republicans to get Pence to resign and become president himself. [13].

POLITICAL ACTION

In 2008, candidate Barack Obama relied on former Facebook spokesman Chris Hughes, director of My.BarackObama.com (MyBO) and designer of Obama’s Online Operation (OOO), to reach and mobilise five million voters via Facebook [14].

In 2010, Facebook censored Wikileaks, the association that revealed the Pentagon’s practices and thus undermined the “American Empire”.

In 2010-11, the platform, officially supported by the US State Department, exploded during the ’Arab Spring’ in the ’wider Middle East’.

In 2018, Facebook banned the intergovernmental TV channel TeleSur, which then included Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, Uruguay and Venezuela.

In 2020, Facebook closed accounts linked to the French army in Central Africa and Mali. The latter were running a campaign that did not correspond to that of the Pentagon.

In 2021, Facebook closed the accounts of the incumbent presidents of Uganda, Yoweri Museveni, and the United States, Donald Trump.

FACEBOOK AND THE MEDIA

A British association, Full Fact, has created a coalition between the competent ministries of the United Kingdom and Canada on the one hand, and information giants (Facebook, but also Twitter, Alphabet and Reuters) on the other, in order to fight misinformation on the English-speaking Net.

Facebook does not limit itself to fighting against Fake News. It has just created a programme, “News Innovation”, to support the written press. It has already been deployed in Canada, Argentina and Brazil. It has signed more than $10 million worth of contracts focusing on media that support Justin Trudeau in Canada or are hostile to Alberto Fernandez and Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil.

THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION AND FACEBOOK

The Biden administration worried – before the public – about the rise of Facebook, which it sees as a rival. The company sets its own borders, enforces police and justice on its network, and issues its own currency. It may currently serve the Pentagon, but all it needs is an army to become a state.

This is why the Biden administration introduced whistleblower France Haugen to The Wall Street Journal and then to the Senate. The debates focused on the deleterious influence of Facebook on certain children. This is a way to put the social network in its place without asking the political questions we have just listed.

The only person in the US today who is asking the question of the political influence of digital giants is former President Donal Trump. He has just filed a lawsuit against Twitter for taking his account offline while he was still the sitting president of the United States. Trump is relying on the confidences of Democratic senators who have boasted of having pressured Twitter. This proves, he says, that the censorship is not a business decision, but a political one; that it violates the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution on free speech. His lawyers make it clear that Twitter has never censored violent speech. It hosts an account of the Taliban government of Afghanistan.

Ref:

[1] «Fed’s Brainard: Facebook’s Libra faces ’core set’ of regulatory hurdles», Reuters Staff, Reuters, December 18, 2019.

[2] “Facebook is rating the trustworthiness of its users on a scale from zero to 1”, Elizabeth Dwoskin, The Washington Post, August 21, 2018.

[3] « Facebook Documents Reveal Secret Elite Exempt From Its Rules, Jeff Horwitz », The Wall Street Journal, September 14, 2021.

[4] Mindf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America, Christopher Wylie, Randon House (2019). Targeted: The Cambridge Analytica Whistleblower’s Inside Story of How Big Data, Trump, and Facebook Broke Democracy and How It Can Happen Again, Brittany Kaiser, Harper (2019).

[5] “How Facebook’s Secret Unit Created India’s Troll Armies For Digital Propaganda To Influence Elections”, by Shelley Kasli, Great Game India (India) , Voltaire Network, 23 December 2017.

[6] “Ted Cruz PsyOp”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 8 February 2016.

[7] «The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked», Carole Cadwalladr, The Observer, May 7, 2017.

[8] “The Eye of the Pentagon”, by Thierry Meyssan, Voltaire Network, 18 November 2002.

[9] «A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization», Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss, Jason J. Jones, Adam D. I. Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime E. Settle & James H. Fowler, Nature 489, p. 295–298 (2012). doi:10.1038/nature11421.

[10] “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks”, Adam D. I. Kramer, Jamie E. Guillory & Jeffrey T. Hancock, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNSA), Vol 111, #24, July 17, 2014.

[11] «Announcing New Election Partnership With the Atlantic Council», Katie Harbath, Facebook, May 17, 2018. «U.S. think tank’s tiny lab helps Facebook battle fake social media», Joseph Menn, Reuters, August 7, 2018. «Facebook’s partnership with the Atlantic Council», Kevin Reed, World Socialist Web Site, September 8, 2018

[12] “Facebook surrounds Africa”, by Manlio Dinucci, Il Manifesto (Italy) , Voltaire Network, 17 June 2020.

[13] “Mark Zuckerberg: a US President in the making?”, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 4 August 2017.

[14] «The Reason for the Obama Victory: It’s the Internet, Stupid», Betsy Schiffman, Wired, July 11, 2008. «Obama’s Wide Web», Jose Antonio Varga, The Washington Post, August 20, 2008.

«How Chris Hughes Helped Launch Facebook and the Barack Obama Campaign», Ellen McGirt, Fast Company, April 1, 2009

Metverse and Zuckerberg's Expectations...

We might have to wait to find out if Zuckerberg's ambitious project is picked up by overwhelming number of people and sustained over long run. There is every possibility that mature-age people may not hang onto a make-believe world for too long.

What Is The Metaverse — And Why Does Mark Zuckerberg Care So Much About It?

Abram Brown

Forbes, Nov 3, 2021

In 2007, roughly a million people flocked to Second Life, eager to experience the three-dimensional, web-based alternative reality launched four years earlier. Those users roamed around as customizable, cartoonish versions of themselves called avatars and enjoyed a wide array of activities. They could listen to Kurt Vonnegut give a live talk, dance at popular nightclubs like Hot Licks and Angry Ant, shop for both virtual clothes and real ones at the Armani store, visit reconstructions of famous landmarks like Rockefeller Center, have virtual sex—and, most famously, speculate on digital real estate. After exchanging actual greenbacks for Second Life’s Linden Dollars, users were spending $100 million a year on virtual purchases, much of it on real estate. Early investors like former schoolteacher Ailin Graef—briefly famous under her Second Life handle Anshe Chung—possessed Second Life real estate portfolios putatively worth $1 million or more as property prices spiked.

Riding the boom, Second Life founder Philip Rosedale secured a $100 million-plus valuation for his startup and over $30 million in funding, including money from another man thinking intently about the internet’s potential to change how we live: Jeff Bezos. Bezos liked sitting around with Rosedale in real life, pondering what Second Life could become.

“We were thinking that we were going to be spending half our time online as avatars,” recalls Rosedale. Creating a world like that “turned out to be much harder than I thought,” he says.

For a time, Second Life made it seem like the metaverse—an idea for an immersive, 3D world originally conceived in a 1990s sci-fi novel—had finally arrived in our own world. It hadn’t. 2007 marked Second Life’s peak popularity. After that, its user count plateaued, then ebbed steadily lower, hampered by glitchy graphics, sluggish internet connections and the emergence of a new popular place to congregate online: Facebook. While Second Life still plods on today, reportedly with around 600,000 users, Facebook now has 2.9 billion. Rosedale stepped aside in 2008. As for Bezos, he quickly turned his concentration to dominating the two-dimensional mainstream internet, and Amazon never set up an official presence in Second Life. 

Today another tech billionaire hopes to finally—and more fully—conjure up the metaverse, and ironically, it’s the same person who helped bring about Second Life’s ruin: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Under siege on multiple fronts, Zuckerberg has pinned his trillion-dollar company’s future to creating a metaverse, last week renaming Facebook as “Meta.” (For simplicity, we’ll continue to refer to Zuck’s company as Facebook in this story.) Zuckerberg has said the concept will cost $10 billion this year–then more in future years—and expects the metaverse to lose money for the foreseeable future. The numbers are big, but Facebook can stomach those losses just fine: It netted $29.1 billion in profits on $86 billion in sales last year.

Zuckerberg’s project isn’t earth shatteringly new. Fragments of it have kicked around Silicon Valley for years—as Second Life and Bezos’ interest in the metaverse make clear. But Facebook does have a couple things going for it that others in the past didn’t. One is the ability to deploy more money in the next two or three years than the total of all the dollars spent on the metaverse during the prior 30 years. Another is the simple fact that we’re all a great deal more comfortable with virtual communication now after working from home for much of the past 20 months.

“Our goal is to help the metaverse reach a billion people and billions of dollars in commerce in the next decade,” Zuckerberg said on a conference call with Wall Street analysts last week. Getting there, he noted, “will be a long road.”

What is the metaverse?

A boundless, 3D digital world accessed as easily as the internet, where we do things like hang out in a park, play a game, see a concert or suffer through a work conference.

Where’d the idea come from?

A computer scientist named Jaron Lanier first coined the term “virtual reality” in the 80s, and the first applications for VR were airlines, car makers, NASA and the military. They were the only ones who could afford the technology. Back then, a VR headset might cost as much as $3 million in current dollars, Lanier estimates. “It was expensive and hard to come up with a business model to make enough money from an arcade situation,” he says.

The actual term “metaverse” comes from a best-selling 1992 sci-fi novel, Snow Crash. Its author, Neal Stephenson, imagined a dystopian world where the book’s main character, a hacker/pizza delivery guy named Hiro Protagonist, travels back and forth from his grim reality to a 3D virtual cityscape, the Metaverse, that stretches for over 40,000 miles. Stephenson’s work would later influence The Matrix series and Ready Player One, a 2018 Steven Spielberg film based on a book by Ernest Cline from seven years earlier.

Outside of books and movies, how close have we gotten to a metaverse in our world?

Aside from Second Life, the most realized examples of metaverses have come from video games. The most famous example of these online, persistent game worlds is World of Warcraft, which has been going strong now for 17 years and still has about 5 million paying subscribers. The place is a sword-and-sorcery geekdom with an undeniably large social component: People have met their spouses playing the game. It’s also a financial juggernaut. Activision Blizzard, the company behind World of Warcraft, has earned well over $8 billion in lifetime revenue from the game.

Snap has delved deeply into the space, too, but has focused its efforts on augmented reality, a slightly different concept than VR. Augmented reality revolves around using your smart phone or special eyeglasses to augment the real world with virtual elements. Niantic’s Pokémon Go game is the best-known use of AR. The key difference is AR doesn’t fully block out reality; a VR headset strapped over your head does. Microsoft has jumped into the fray, too, announcing just a day ago that it would develop a work-focused metaverse—where its Teams collaboration software would have VR and digital avatars.

Epic Games’ Fortnite, which debuted in 2017, has probably come closer to a Snow Crash-type metaverse than anything else. Fortnite players see its online battle royale game as a place to socialize; they chat through audio and video features built into desktop computers and gaming consoles or through third-party apps, like Discord. And virtual concerts from artists such as Marshmello, Travis Scott and Arianna Grande have further widened its universe.

What’s different about Zuckerberg’s metaverse vision?

The biggest thing: Zuckerberg seems to hope people will access his virtual world through a VR headset—just as Hiro did in Snow Crash. It is an important distinction. Fortnite, Second Life and most other multiplayer online games are typically displayed on a PC monitor or TV connected to gaming consoles like an Xbox or a PlayStation. The rest of Zuckerberg’s metaverse idea seems very much a work in progress. But he has shared images of a VR office setting called Horizon, which would take advantage of the pandemic’s shift to virtual work.

Zuckerberg began laying the groundwork for this back in 2014 when he purchased Palmer Luckey’s Oculus, a VR headset maker, for $2 billion. Facebook has since acquired more than a half dozen other VR-focused startups—including last week’s purchase of Within, a Los Angeles-based boutique game developer—committing over $1 billion to the on-going shopping spree.  

Shortly after Facebook released its first Oculus headset in 2016, Vanity Fair asked Stephenson what he thought about the prospect of Facebook moving into virtual reality. “There’s no fixed process for predicting the results and controlling what happens,” said Stephenson, who couldn’t be reached for this story. “At some level, it boils down to people’s capacity to act as socially responsible, ethical individuals.”

Why is Zuckerberg so focused on the metaverse?

Facebook, which wouldn’t comment for this story, has lost ground among younger users to YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat. While Instagram remains popular with teens, Facebook’s original app isn’t. Increased attention around anti-trust issues means Facebook likely can’t buy any new competitors. If it wants an app to win back young people, it will need to build it itself, and Zuckerberg seems to feel a VR-centered metaverse will do this. (“We’re retooling our team to make young adults our north star,” he said on last week’s Wall Street conference call.) Moreover, talking about the metaverse provides a timely distraction from a whistle-blower scandal consuming much of the media attention around Facebook.  

What challenges does Facebook face in turning the metaverse into reality?

Newer, more powerful microchips have improved VR graphics, largely eliminating a problem dating back to the earliest consumer headsets in the 1990s: Their lagging images made some people nauseous. But even today’s most sophisticated headsets still only track a limited portion of your body movements. As a result, avatars within VR still look awkward, particularly their faces—the so-called uncanny valley effect. If we’re all going to live in the metaverse, our digital selves likely need to be more appealing.

There’s also what Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab, who has counseled Zuckerberg, describes as his “30 Minute Rule.” That’s the maximum amount of time he thinks someone should spend within virtual reality today. “In my lab, after 30 minutes, everybody has to take the headset off and take a drink of water, touch a wall, talk to a real human—do something to reconnect with the real world,” he says. But half an hour won’t be enough for Facebook. It competes with social media platforms that draw in people for as much as 60 minutes a day. And if he intends the metaverse to replace all our time online today, that’s more like 3 hours and up a day, according to data on internet consumption by Statista, a statistics research firm.

Price is another thing. The second iteration of Facebook’s Oculus VR headset, released in September 2020, retails for $299, half what its initial Oculus cost. But Facebook probably needs to continue lowering that price tag for the metaverse to reach a mass audience. The company hasn’t set any formal goals, but it’s hard to see it being happy with spending $10 billion (and up) a year on something that doesn’t at least reach the scale of Instagram (1 billion users) or WhatsApp (2 billion). A little context: Facebook is poised to spend far more on the metaverse than what it took to buy Instagram ($1 billion in 2012) or WhatsApp ($19 billion in 2014).

And Zuckerberg still needs to give a reason for people to turn on the headset. No one has yet managed to do for VR what Space Invaders did for Atari and Halo did for Xbox: dream up a game or some other type of content popular enough to make a VR headset feel like a necessary purchase. At the same time, Facebook must decide what type of content to allow in the metaverse. Considering this, Jaron Lanier, the computer scientist credited as the father of virtual reality, offers some dark words on the subject. “If you run [the metaverse] on a business model that's similar to the one that Facebook runs on, it'll destroy humanity,” says Lanier, presently a researcher at Microsoft. “I'm not saying that rhetorically. That is a literal and specific prediction that humanity could not survive that.”

Let’s say we avoid the fire and brimstone. Zuckerberg’s journey into the metaverse does nonetheless seem destined to end with a future struggle over content moderation that could make Facebook’s current one seem quaint in comparison.