Here’s who owns everything in Big Media today
It probably won’t look like this for long.

Rani MollaApr 3, 2019, 10:44am EDT
The media landscape used to be straightforward: Content companies — studios — made stuff — TV shows and movies — and sold it to pay TV distributors, who sold it to consumers.

Now things are up for grabs: Netflix buys stuff from the studios, but it’s making its own stuff, too, and it’s selling it directly to consumers. That’s one of the reasons older media companies are trying to compete by consolidating. Disney, for example, recently completed its purchase of 21st Century Fox. Distributors like AT&T, which bought Time Warner last year, are becoming media companies, too.

Meanwhile, giant tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple that used to be on the sidelines are getting closer and closer to the action. Apple’s newest TV strategy positions the company as a TV guide, a TV storefront selling services like HBO, and a TV creator that employs the likes of Steven Spielberg and Jennifer Anniston to make exclusive shows for Apple users.

To help sort this all out, we’ve created a diagram that organizes distributors, content companies and internet video companies by market cap — the value investors assign to the companies — and their main lines of business.

Here’s what the Big Media universe currently looks like. We will update it periodically:

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https://www.infowars.com/turning-back-to-god-to-save-us-from-the-war-against-humanity/

Democrats Still Kissing Sharpton’s Ring
Several 2020 Dems showed up at Al’s confab to foment racial division.

Several top Democrats flew into Manhattan over the weekend for the traditional airing of grievances at the “Reverend” Al Sharpton’s National Action Network convention. First, let’s take a moment to remember how Sharpton came to fame.

In 1987, Sharpton created the template for hate-crime hoaxes like Jussie Smollett’s when he stumped for 15-year-old Tawana Brawley in a rape case. She claimed six white men, including some police officers, raped and assaulted her. Sharpton made it into a larger tale about white racism, but a grand jury found “overwhelming evidence” that she fabricated the story. Meanwhile, Sharpton & Co. ended up being ordered to pay $345,000 for defamation of the prosecutor.

Sharpton is a philandering tax cheat and racial con artist who’s made a fortune extorting businesses and individuals over concocted racism, all while hosting radio and TV shows, and even advising Barack Obama in the White House.

In short, he exemplifies the person Booker T. Washington decried, when he wrote in 1911, “There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

Yet 2020 Democrats are still kissing his ring. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro, Andrew Yang, and Pete Buttigieg all showed up for Sharpton’s confab.

Frontrunner Sanders declared, “It gives me no pleasure to tell you that we have a president today who is a racist, who is a sexist, who is a homophobe, who is a xenophobe, and who is a religious bigot. I wish I did not have to say that. But that is the damn truth. … During Donald Trump’s presidency we have seen a sharp rise in hate crimes and that rise comes as this country continues to be plagued by institutional racism and racial inequality.”

Warren peddled another hoax about the supposedly “stolen” gubernatorial election in Georgia and Republican election fraud in general: “Massive voter suppression prevented Stacey Abrams from becoming the rightful governor of Georgia. … They know that if all the votes are counted, we’ll win every time.” Democrats want certain constituents to believe that every Republican victory is due to fraud.

Socialist heartthrob Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez urged Democrats to pursue an “agenda of reparations” to go along with other unearned giveaways to win votes.

All in all, the Democrat remarks were befitting an event put on by a charlatan like Sharpton. They claim to be for unity when all they do is sow division.

https://www.heartlight.org/cgi-shl/quotemeal.cgi?day=20190408

“It Belongs To The People, Not The Bankers” – Italy Moves To Seize Gold From Central Bank
Two weeks ago, somewhat out of the blue, ECB President Mario Draghi issued an odd statement confirming that the European Central Bank needs to approve any operation in the foreign reserves of euro zone countries, including gold and large foreign currency holdings.

“The ECB shall approve both the operations in foreign reserve assets remaining with the NCBs (national central banks)…and Member States’ transactions with their foreign exchange working balances above a certain threshold,”

“The purpose of this competence is to ensure consistency with the exchange rate and monetary policy of the Union.”

Specifically, Draghi made this statement to two Italian members of the European Parliament.

At the time it did not seem notable for any reason other than its peculiar timing, but now things are starting to make more sense as The Wall Street Journal reports that Italy’s ruling populists pushed ahead this week with efforts to seize control of the central bank and its gold reserves.

Complaining that hundreds of thousands of small individual investors lost billions of dollars after several Italian banks failed in recent years, the anti-establishment ‘5 Star Movement’ and the nationalist ‘League’, depict the central bank as a symbol of a technocratic elite aloof from the needs of ordinary Italians.

“We need a change of course at the Bank of Italy if we think about what happened in the last years,” said Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio, leader of the 5 Star Movement.

Five Star and the League have repeatedly attacked the Bank of Italy for not preventing the banking crises, and blamed it for the losses suffered by mom-and-pop savers who had bought bank shares and bonds.

“If you are here with your current account in the red, it’s because the people who were supposed to control things didn’t do so,” League’s leader, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, told a group of former investors in Banca Popolare di Vicenza, which was liquidated in 2017.

And this week saw Italian lawmakers from 5 Star asking Parliament to pass two draft laws:

One law would instruct the central bank’s owners, most of them private banks, to sell their shares to the Italian Treasury at prices from the 1930s.

The other law would declare the Italian people to be the owners of the Bank of Italy’s reserve of 2451.8 metric tons of gold, worth around $102 billion at current prices.

As The Wall Street Journal notes, such a move could in theory widen the scope for selling the gold and reduce the bank’s reserves, which help underpin the financial system…

“The gold belongs to the Italians, not to the bankers,” said Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy, a far-right opposition party that supports both bills. “We are ready to battle everywhere in Italy and to bring Italians to the streets if necessary.”

The establishment sees it differently, warning that their actions are an attempt to undermine the Bank of Italy’s independence, and to spend the nation’s gold reserves on populist policies.

“Gold is part of the assets of the Bank of Italy and can’t be used for monetary financing of the Treasury,” said Bank of Italy Governor Ignazio Visco.

“This looks like revolutionary expropriation,” said Gianluca Garbi, chief executive of Banca Sistema SpA.

But as The Wall Street Journal concludes, the 5 Star Movement and the League support public ownership of the gold reserves, and with backing from parties comprising 60% of lawmakers, the draft law has enough support to pass. Lawmakers from 5 Star also support nationalizing the central bank, while the League hasn’t decided yet, leaving the bill short of a majority with around 40% support.

As of last week they had forced the creation of a parliamentary commission to look into the failure of Italian banks, launching what could be months of tense scrutiny.

Is it any wonder, Russia (and China) have started to horde gold?