Mike Ritland
speaker
855 appearances
6 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Feb 2025
Mike Ritland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, it's not technically insider trading in the sense that it's directly at the portfolio company with advanced knowledge of their business line and some 10B5 securities violation. It is the great unstated insider trading reason that there is this blob-to-banker pipeline. Mark Milley, for example, I believe is at J.P. Morgan or another one of those banks.
Another great example of this is the Joe Biden White House blobber-to-banker pipeline. So Joe Biden's closest political... advisor in the White House and has been since was since the 1980s was a guy named Mike Donilon.
Mike Donilon was this sort of shadow advisor figure who, you know, according to media reports, basically, you know, sits over Biden's shoulder with everything he does and and helps advise on, you know, political and other strategy. Well, Mike. So Mike Donilon's brother is a guy named Tom Donilon.
Tom Donilon basically hit the hat trick of everything you can possibly do as an apex predator of the U.S. national security state. National security advisor, State Department, coordinated the military, the intelligence, and the statecraft world for years and years, decades. Apex predator of the national security state at the highest level of military intelligence and statecraft.
What was he doing during the entirety of the Biden White House? He was the chairman of the BlackRock Investment Institute. So this is basically overseeing, administrating the investment arm of BlackRock, which has $10 trillion of assets under management. I know that a lot of those are donor-advised funds and pass-throughs.
But this is, at the end of the day, a $10 trillion juggernaut of portfolio investments. And his brother is the closest advisor to the President of the United States who commands the Pentagon, the CIA, and Macron. the State Department.
So all that would need to be done, I mean, you can imagine why, you know, BlackRock might want to pick up someone like Tom Donilon, who, you know, even if he had zero experience whatsoever as a banker or as a finance mogul, maybe, you know, Who knows if Mark Milley can even read a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet or can even have a conversation with any of the quants who crunch the numbers.
They don't care about that. They want to know whether or not they can be the first mover and capture the entire market, for example, of the potential for lithium to open up in the Golden Triangle. Because what's the Biden administration going to do? Are they going to send in the Marines? Are they going to send in the boys? Are they going to do that in Iran?
What's going to happen with Russia and the $75 trillion worth of natural resources that Russia sits on? What parts of that? What regions? How about Africa? How about all the cobalt and lithium in the Congo? or the copper companies that are their portfolio companies, or the zinc, or the timber, the copper, the aluminum, the gold, the silver, everything.
And so, in theory, all that would need to happen was a conversation from Mike to his brother, Tom, and then suddenly, BlackRock has a first mover advantage of knowing exactly where, you know, the Wayne Gretzky quote, right? How are you so good? You're not even that fast. How are you so good at hockey? And he says, I don't skate to where the puck is. I skate to where the puck is going.
That's how it looks like I'm so fast. Well, speed of investment is everything.
So there's the direct – Now, all of this has moral hazard involved. All of this corrupts the domestic process and in some respect jeopardizes that sort of Smith-Muntz style protecting domestic people from foreign-facing operations type stuff whenever those media outlets pick winners and losers in domestic politics. But there are two variations of this that...
One of them you know is – well, let me explain them. So the first is a lot of people are just now seeing a lot of these very damning-looking USAID outflows to mainstream media outlets like Politico or to Reuters, for example. I mentioned that there's $300 million in –
grants that were given by the Biden administration from various government agencies to Reuters, while Reuters won a Pulitzer for, you know, Reuters was the tip of the spear for all anti-Trump reporting, and they won a Pulitzer in the year 2024 for their series on Elon Musk and malfeasance by Elon Musk and his companies at all of his different portfolio companies, you know.
Tesla, Neuralink, SpaceX, X, at the same time that Biden from the White House had asked the U.S. government, had replied to reporters that regulators should look into Elon Musk and that 11 different U.S. government regulatory agencies, regulatory bodies and agencies were pursuing adverse action against all four of those very agencies that Reuters won its Pulitzer for writing hit pieces about.
This is, by the way, a little bit of a... There's the same sort of moral hazard here that you have with USAID sponsoring the OCCRP. Hit piece journalists... that only have the capacity to do that because their revenues and their profits are being buffered by the American taxpayer. Even though the grants are not explicitly to the U.S. to do that.
There's no grant from a Biden-governed agency of that $300 million that says, write hit pieces on Donald Trump or Trump allies. Just like the money to OCCRP, the corruption reporting probe, is supposed to be for corruption, for politicians and oligarchs and significant cultural figures in Eastern Europe.
But in the process of doing that, OCCRP turned around and dug up dirt on Rudy Giuliani and his work in Ukraine, and that formed part of the basis to impeach Donald Trump as president in the Ukraine impeachment in 2019. So American citizens who voted for Donald Trump effectively funded, through Donald Trump's US aid, the impeachment of Donald Trump.
They also dug up dirt on Paul Manafort and other US citizens, but in that case, It was, you can argue, dirtier than the Reuters case because the grants were to dig up dirt. In the Reuters case, it's complicated. You see this with just a huge quantity of U.S. media. Let me start from the bottom here. Premium subscriptions are part of news agencies' business models. Paywalls.
Almost every major media outlet has paywalls for their news content. And part of the justification for the U.S. government paying U.S. media companies sounds benign on its face. We want our government officials, our hired employees who are representing you, to be as best equipped and to be as knowledgeable as possible about what their line of business representing you as possible.
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