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
You can't even make a pencil in this country unless you have a mechanism to be able to influence foreign governments if they nationalize their graphite mines or the export of their gum trees in Malaysia or the ability to potentially make inroads or liaise with or change the minds of unions that go on strike, that impact US national interest.
This is the reason that our corporations are so powerful. They rely on the battering ram of the blob. In the early 1970s, in Chile, when there was an attempt to nationalize the bottling industry, Before we ran that coup, that coup was jointly coordinated, not just between the head of the CIA, but between the chairman of the Pepsi-Cola company.
Pepsi met with the head of the CIA, Don Kendall, met with Helms, and this is all declassified. You can read a great Guardian report, read right up on this, or any of the major national security think tanks. Basically, Pepsi's bottling operations in South America were being threatened.
The chairman of Pepsi, Don Kendall, arranged a meeting with Henry Kissinger and said, hey, we need to stop this from happening. Kissinger then put him in touch with the head of the CIA. Pepsi, the head of the CIA, and the State Department's media mogul in Chile all met to jointly coordinate the best way to take down the government and take it down. Indeed, we did.
You see this happen time and again. How many governments have been overthrown in the interest of ExxonMobil and Chevron and other Western major oil companies? But hey, that's how we have cheap oil. You can make an argument that this is how we have energy dominance. And you can make the same argument about media, right?
Many people just this week are finding out that 90% of media outlets in Ukraine are funded by the US government. And if you're totally new to this space and you are rightly and righteously livid at finding out the extent of your own media ecosystem and diet has been puppeteered, co-opted, and financially sponsored by the government that is supposed to stay out of that domestically.
You see these statistics and you go, burn it down, salt the earth. We've been told from elementary school to our own media outlets here that we have a free and independent press and that there's no role for the government in the media. The media is independent from government. That's the difference between us and the Soviet Union and China is we have free and independent media.
They have state-run media. You know, that's what distinguishes a democracy from an autocracy. And I totally understand the impulse, and I believe as much as possible, reforms need to be implemented, criminal penalties need to be attached for violating it, treble damages for civil suits, even be able to sue the agencies if they don't do oversight of the NGOs who operate domestically.
But people who have not gone through their five stages of depression about the true extent of the USAID Truman Show... Before you proceed to the final evolution of these reforms, imagine a world where there's zero of that. Imagine a world where zero percent of media outlets or soft power hearts and minds work is sponsored by the U.S. government.
in Latin America, South America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, North Africa, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Far East Asia, Eurasia. Imagine a world where there is zero influence whatsoever and other countries are not going to stop that, stop doing that work. We won elections doing this. And in doing so, we won favors for U.S.
corporations, who in turn had skyrocketing and ever-expanding corporate profits, which in turn created the ability to hire Americans for jobs and to buy houses and to be able to buy health insurance and to be able to have a 401k of savings and to be able to pass down inherited wealth.
But another problem is the MAGA movement, again, has not really had to deal with this dirty work abroad because the primary concern has been what's six inches in front of your face. My schools have this woke curricula. My infrastructure is crumbling. My kids can't afford to buy a home until they're 45 years old.
But the other part is that this mission statement of the blob to do this got corrupted as globalization destroyed the predicate for doing this dirty work in the first place. Okay, we overthrow the government of Chile for Pepsi. We overthrow the government of Iran for oil and gas. We overthrow the government of some Central African country to get the lithium in the cobalt.
Nominally, this is all supposed to help American corporations and American citizens. But what happens when those corporations outsource all their jobs to foreigners? What happens when they're not hiring American labor? What happens when they're not even building their manufacturing plants here?
Who are we doing these favors for when you have globalist corporations and you have globalist corporate boards and they've got no skin in the game? These are not... These are multinational corporations, and most of their export markets are to foreign customers. At this point, most of their labor pools are foreign citizens.
Most of their infrastructure, the facilities that they're building, this is how we had the heartland turn into the Rust Belt. It's because when you have these steel companies and you have these manufacturing places build their facilities somewhere else, it's not just the citizens, it's the entire regional development that goes away.
So this whole concept of Reaganite trickle-down economics, that's what's good for the private sector, is good for the private citizen, has become completely divorced. And this is how you have this rogue blob that is stealing U.S. taxpayer money, citing a sort of Reaganite economic principle for doing this, trickle-down to the American citizens. But when you have this globalist conceit,
There's no trickle down. All you're doing is helping the Wall Street and London private equity firms and financial firms and equity holders and huge salaries for the C-suite, the directors and officers and shareholders of this college of corporations that don't even represent the citizens anymore. And there's ways to put firewalls, by the way.
And this is what I'm trying to educate the American people about. For example, You shouldn't even be able to... We're going to make the reforms, let's assume, to the worst of this dirty work, right? Just like we did in the 70s. We used to assassinate people, the CIA did. The CIA had whole assassination guides. Scandals in the 60s and 70s come out, we said, okay, okay, no more assassinations, okay?
We can still do regime change work, but we can't authorize the killing of people of a political figure outside terrorism into covert action. Okay, well... you can do these for these other rogue activities. But in addition to that, Any stakeholder in a State Department operation or a USAID or that's assisted by U.S.
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