By Toni Bologna

Who do you think runs the world? Girls?!!

No, not even close. Since the 1970s, two corporations have gobbled up most of the earth’s companies, Vanguard and BlackRock. And you might be like, “Toni, that’s ridiculous! I go to stores all the time and I see competing brands everywhere. The market has genuine competition, because I can buy this or that or this or that!”

But, all publicly traded companies have boards where the largest shareholders make the decisions. So when we investigate who are the largest shareholders of all these companies, the same two companies keep coming up: Vanguard and BlackRock. These two mega corporations own all the smaller corporations, so we have a monopoly inside of a monopoly!

Vanguard and BlackRock own Coke and they own Pepsi. They own Apple and they own Android. They own American Airlines, they own Delta. They own oil and they own solar. They own eBay and they own Amazon and they own the car companies and the pharmaceutical companies, and the tobacco companies, the food companies, the clothing companies, the insurance companies, the banks, the banks, the banks, the banks, the banks, the banks, the banks, THE BANKS!

No matter what industry, the top shareholders are the ones making the decisions. Call me a Dingleberry but if you own all the competing companies in the free market, then I don’t think the market is… umm… all that free.

But who are they? The CEO and founder of BlackRock is Larry Fink, but BlackRock has a board, the largest shareholder is Vanguard. And who’s in Vanguard you might wonder?

Nobody knows! Yeah, I guess it’s just private information. Probably the richest families on the planet, like the DuPonts, the Rockefellers, the Rothschilds, the Bushes. Bush. And P.S., if the division of companies is an illusion, then what does that say about the division of nations? Rich people don’t need passports when they travel on their private jets. Borders are meaningless to the elite, except as a tool of nationalism to pit us against each other. And we all know corporate dollars go into politics, and if all those corporations are owned by the same people, that means both political parties are definitely owned by the same people.

Toni Bologna is a comedian who uses comedy to raise awareness of important issues.

This article was first published as a video. You can watch the video this article was transcribed from at tonibologna.com.