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https://brownstone.org/articles/tucker-carlson-departure-power-of-big-pharma/

The Tucker Carlson Departure From Fox and the Power of Big Pharma  

Why would Fox News fire its most popular host? On average, one million additional people tuned into Tucker Carlson every night than to the Fox programs before and after his show. He drew four times as many viewers as the 8PM show on CNN, Anderson Cooper 360°. He was the leading draw on Fox’s streaming service, and there is no rising star at the network expected to take his seat. 

It wasn’t a lack of success that pushed out Carlson, so we are left to speculate why Fox fired their lead anchor. It could have been a battle of egos between Carlson and the Murdochs. Carlson may have threatened to run programming that they disfavored regarding the tapes from January 6, the recent settlement with Dominion, or the coverage of Donald Trump. 

Any of these explanations would indicate that ego triumphed over financial sense in the boardroom. Carlson is a revenue driver, and the company’s stock tanked after the announcement on Monday. 

But what if there was a rational economic explanation for his firing? What if the people who own Fox have far more interest in neutering criticism of their other economic holdings than they do in the success of Fox’s television department? 

Last Wednesday, Carlson opened his show with an attack on the pharmaceutical industry’s manipulation of the news media.

“Sometimes you wonder just how filthy and dishonest our news media are,” Carlson started. “Ask yourself, is any news organization you know of so corrupt that it’s willing to hurt you on behalf of its biggest advertisers?”

Carlson then attacked the news media for taking “hundreds of millions of dollars from Big Pharma companies” and promoting “their sketchy products on the air and as they did that, they maligned anyone who was skeptical of those products.” 

Five days later, Carlson was fired. Perhaps, his stardom was not large enough to overcome the issue that he described. 

Beyond MyPillow, Fox News’ largest advertisers include GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), Novartis, and BlackRock. ​​

Vanguard is the largest institutional owner of Fox Corporation, holding a 6.9 percent stake in the company. BlackRock owns an additional 4.7 percent. 

Vanguard and BlackRock are the two largest owners of Pfizer. Combined, they own over 15 percent of the company.

Vanguard and BlackRock are the two largest owners of Johnson & Johnson. Combined, they own over 14 percent of the company. 

Vanguard and BlackRock are the second and third largest owners of Moderna. Combined, they own over 13 percent of the company. 

Perhaps, you may be noticing a trend. 

Vanguard and BlackRock’s holdings in Fox amount to less than $750 million. Their investments in Johnson & Johnson, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and Merck amount to over $225 billion.

When Carlson attacked the pharmaceutical industry, he was attacking the same funds that owned his network. But those investments in Big Pharma were 300 times larger than their equity in Fox. Carlson may have stepped on a landmine, speaking the unspeakable against the intertwined economic interests of the world’s most powerful companies.  

As pharmaceutical companies took over public policy during Covid, they dedicated significantly more money to advertising and marketing than research and development (R&D). 

In 2020, Pfizer spent $12 billion on sales and marketing and $9 billion on R&D. That year, Johnson & Johnson devoted $22 billion to sales and marketing and $12 billion to R&D. 

The industry’s efforts were rewarded. Billions of dollars in advertising resulted in millions of Americans tuning into programming sponsored by Pfizer. The press promoted their products and seldom mentioned Big Pharma’s history of unjust enrichment, fraud, and criminal pleas.

​​Upon the release of Pfizer’s 2022 annual report, CEO Albert Bourla stressed the importance of customers’ “positive perception” of the pharmaceutical giant. 

“2022 was a record-breaking year for Pfizer, not only in terms of revenue and earnings per share, which were the highest in our long history,” Bourla noted. “But more importantly, in terms of the percentage of patients who have a positive perception of Pfizer and the work we do.”

Carlson committed the media sin of attacking that positive perception, and it may have caused his firing. Regardless, the facts demonstrate a chilling indication that legacy media remains beholden to Big Pharma, and their programming requires the approval of the figures that they are supposed to hold accountable.

Here is his broadcast five days before he was fired.  ( Video at article address )

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/04/25/new-defence-review-further-enslaves-australia-to-us-war-agendas/

New Defence Review Further Enslaves Australia To US War Agendas

The Australian government has released the declassified version of its highly anticipated 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR), and the war propagandists are delighted.

Sydney Morning Herald’s Matthew Knott, most well-known for being told by former prime minister Paul Keating to “do the right thing and drum yourself out of Australian journalism” over his role in Nine Entertainment’s despicable Red Alert war-with-China propaganda series, has a new propaganda piece out titled “Defence review pulls no punches: China the biggest threat we face“.

Here are the first few paragraphs to give you a sense of the squealing glee these swamp monsters are experiencing right now:

Angus Houston and Stephen Smith have delivered a blaring wake-up call to any Australians who think they still live in a sanctuary of safety at the southern edge of the Earth: you’re living in the past.

To those inside and outside the Australian Defence Force who think business-as-usual will cut it in the future: you’re delusional.

Their message to anyone confused about the biggest threat to Australia’s national security is similarly blunt: it is our largest trading partner, China.

Like a pair of doctors delivering confronting news to an ill patient, the two men tasked with reshaping Australia’s military for the 21st century have opted for admirable candour in their defence strategic review.

Rejecting vague language about rising tensions in the Indo-Pacific, the former defence chief and defence minister call out just one nation – China – for threatening Australia’s core interests.

“Like a pair of doctors.” That’s the kind of third-rate propaganda we get in the nation with the most consolidated media ownership in the western world.

The “defence” review focuses not on defending the shores of the continent of Australia, but instead over and over again makes mention of the need to protect the “rules-based order” in Australia’s “region” — the so-called “Indo-Pacific” — which includes China. It is for the most part 110 pages of mental contortions explaining why “defending” the nation of Australia is going to have to look a whole lot like preparing to pick a fight with an Asian nation thousands of kilometers away.

The public DSR actually only mentions China by name eight times, though by Knott’s ecstatic revelry you’d assume that was the only word it contains. In contrast, the document mentions the United States no fewer than 38 times, with the United Kingdom getting two mentions, New Zealand getting only one, and Australia’s neighbors like Papua New Guinea and Indonesia not mentioned by name at all.

“Our Alliance with the United States will remain central to Australia’s security and strategy,” the review reads. “The United States will become even more important in the coming decades. Defence should pursue greater advanced scientific, technological and industrial cooperation in the Alliance, as well as increased United States rotational force posture in Australia, including with submarines.”

The overshadowing presence of the United States in a document that is ostensibly about Australian security interests would be confusing to you if you did not know that Australia has for generations served as a US military and intelligence asset, where our nation’s interests are so subordinated to Washington’s that we’re not even allowed to know if the US is bringing nuclear weapons into our country.

In a foreshadowing of the DSR’s pledge to pursue even greater cooperation with the US, last year Australia’s Secretary of Defence Richard Marles said that the Australian Defence Force is moving “beyond interoperability to interchangeability” with the US military so they can “operate seamlessly together, at speed.” Which is a fancy way of saying that any meaningful separation between the Australian military and the American military has been effectively dissolved.

Marles, who is currently facing scrutiny in Australia for being illicitly secretive about the nature of a free golf trip he went on in his last visit to the United States, has said that the DSR “will underpin our Defence policy for decades to come.”

Even some of the implementation of the DSR’s findings will be overseen by an American, not an Australian. ABC reports that “a major component to determine the future shape of Australia’s naval fleet will be decided later this year in a ‘short, sharp’ review to be led by US Navy Vice Admiral William H Hilarides.”

The review itself has been tainted with severe conflicts of interest with regard to US influence. As Mack Williams noted in Pearls And Irritations earlier this month, the senior advisor and principal author behind the review is a man named Peter Dean, a professor and Director of Foreign Policy and Defence at the United States Studies Centre (USSC) at the University of Sydney. The USSC receives funding from the US government, and Dean’s own CV boasts that he “currently leads two US State Department-funded public diplomacy programs on the US-Australia Alliance.”

So to recap, Australia’s foreign policy is being shaped “for decades to come” by an “independent” strategic review that (A) was authored by someone who is compromised by US funding, (B) is being implemented in part by an American former military official, (C) calls for greater and greater cooperation with the United States across the board, and (D) focuses primarily on targeting a nation that just so happens to be the number one geopolitical rival of the United States.

It is hilarious, then, that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced the release of the DSR by proclaiming that “At its core, all of this is making Australia more self-reliant, more prepared and more secure in the years ahead.” It is funnier still that he concluded that same speech with an Anzac Day acknowledgement of Australian troops who who have died in wars “to defend our sovereignty and our freedom.”

It doesn’t get any less self-reliant and sovereign than just handing over your nation’s military to a more powerful nation with a “There ya go mate, use it however you reckon’s fair.” You really could not come up with a more egregious abdication of national sovereignty if you tried. And yet our prime minister babbles about sovereignty and self-reliance while doing exactly that.

Just annex us and make us the 51st state already. At least that way we’d get a pretend vote in America’s fake elections.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/04/25/patrick-lawrence-force-marching-the-europeans/

Force-Marching the Europeans

ZURICH—Am I the only American to travel overseas and feel embarrassed by the conduct of the diplomats Washington sends abroad to speak for our republic? It is pretty strange to find yourself, an ordinary citizen, apologizing for the intrusive, cajoling, bullying, badgering and otherwise crude utterances of this or that ambassador in this or that nation. But such is the state of things as the late-phase imperium fields its elbows-out undiplomats—a term I borrow from the Swiss, who suffer one as we speak.

Scott Miller, the Biden regime’s ambassador to Bern for a little more than a year, is indeed a doozy in this line. In his often-demonstrated view, he is in Switzerland to tell the Swiss what to do. At the moment, Miller is all over this nation for not signing on as a participant in Washington’s proxy war against Russia in Ukraine—pressuring ministers, denigrating those who question the wisdom of the war, offending the Swiss in speeches and newspaper interviews. It is a one-man assault on Switzerland’s long, long tradition of neutrality, waged in the manner of an imperial proconsul disciplining an errant province. Swiss commentators question why the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, the FDFA, has not expelled this tone-deaf ignoramus. 

We should pay attention to people such as Miller and what they get up to, even if they rarely make headlines in our corporate media. It is now nearly lost to history, but Europeans were effectively force-marched—and occasionally bribed at leadership level—into following the Americans as they instigated and waged Cold War I. This is exactly what the State Department is doing once again. It behooves us to watch this process in real time so the realities of Cold War II are not so easily obscured. 

According to the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, in effect since 1961, diplomats are barred from intervening in the internal affairs of host countries. The State Department lately displays as much concern for this U.N.–sponsored accord as it does for international law altogether: Little to none, you find when you watch these men and women at close range. 

I do not know when these breaches of etiquette and indeed law started, but at this point illegal diplomatic interventions into the politics and policies of others are the U.S. Foreign Service’s anti–Convention convention. These coercions are key, let us not miss, to the Biden regime’s concerted campaign to divide the world once again into confrontational blocs and erase all traces of principled neutrality. The Finns have succumbed and just joined NATO. We can put the Swedes in the same file. Now it is the Swiss and their neutrality in international affairs who take the heat. This is the thing about the liberal imperialists: They cannot tolerate deviation from their illiberal orthodoxies. It was George W. Bush who famously told the world “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.” American liberals deployed as diplomats cannot get enough of the thought.  

If you want to talk about the decline of diplomacy into crudely asserted demands that host countries conform to the wishes of other powers, you have to start with Andriy Melnyk, the blunt instrument representing Ukraine in Berlin until mid–2022, when even the Zelensky regime, never short of adolescently offensive behavior, found him too much to take. Melnyk thought nothing of calling German ministers “fucking assholes” if they questioned the wisdom of arming Ukraine, and openly celebrating Stepan Bandera, the Russophobic murderer of Jews, who allied with the Third Reich before and during World War II. 

For sheer vulgarity Melnyk is nonpareil. I miss the guy, honestly. American diplomats effect a more polished veneer, but they are every bit Melnyk’s match if the metric is self-righteous presumption that what Washington wants others to do is what others should do. 

You saw what was coming when Mike Pompeo, Trump’s secretary of state, named Richard Grenell ambassador to Berlin in 2018. Among Grenell’s choicer acts was to threaten German companies with sanctions—publicly, we’re talking about—if they participated in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, which, as Seymour Hersh has thoroughly and persuasively reported, and whose reporting has not been substantively contradicted, the Biden regime destroyed in a covert operation last year. By then he had dressed down Angela Merkel for opening the Federal Republic’s door to Syrian refugees in 2015. His broader mission, Grenell declared, was to encourage rightist European leaders: Sebastian Kurz, the right-wing populist serving as Austria’s chancellor during Grenell’s time, was “a rock star” in the American ambassador’s book.

You can call this many things, but diplomacy is not among them. I call it a measure of Washington’s loss of interest in dialogue, negotiation, compromise—altogether an understanding of other countries and their interests. It is the diplomacy of no diplomacy, as I have remarked elsewhere. Diplomats are effectively the guardians of trust among nations: Proper statecraft requires they should be competent to talk even to, or most of all, adversaries. But the policy cliques in Washington now prove indifferent to trust, even among allies, in favor of supine obeisance. 

The world darkens in many ways. This collapse of traditional statecraft is a certain marker of our not-so-gradual descent into a barbarism that ought to worry all of us. 

 We come to the case of Ambassador Miller, who arrived in Bern as the Biden regime’s appointee in January 2022.

With increasing alacrity in recent months, he has taken it upon himself to cajole Switzerland to drop its policy of neutrality and begin sending Swiss-made arms to Ukraine while lifting a ban on other nations’ re-export of Swiss matériel to the Kyiv regime. 

It is a fool’s errand on the very face of it. I would say trying to persuade the Swiss to abandon their neutrality is the equivalent of telling Americans to put aside the Declaration of Independence, except that the neutrality principle goes much further back in Swiss history. The Congress of Vienna formally guaranteed neutral status for the Confoederatio Helvetica, the nation’s official name, when it fashioned a new European order in 1815. By then the Swiss had considered themselves neutral in international affairs since sometime in the late Middle Ages. 

But who cares about all that? Who cares that the Swiss pride themselves on what they have accomplished by way of their neutral role in world affairs—not least but not only during and after World War II? Who cares that Switzerland, because it is formally neutral, has represented American interests in Cuba since 1961 and in Iran since the 1979 revolution? Who cares that Geneva is a city that survives, apart from the watches, on its dedication to mediation, the site of too many negotiations to count? 

Not Ambassador Miller. 

Surely under orders from the Blinken State Department, Miller has been boisterously hammering the Swiss in speeches and public forums to lift their longstanding stipulation that countries purchasing Swiss-made arms cannot re-export them, along with its determination that it will not sell weaponry to countries at war. It is in part a measure of the Biden regime’s desperation that the Swiss, whose armaments industry’s exports come to all of $900 million yearly, is suddenly essential to saving Ukraine from defeat. 

The Swiss are nothing like essential. The thought is ridiculous. The larger point, in my view, is far more insidious. It is to eliminate all thought of neutrality among nations in the (undeclared but obvious) name of the Biden regime’s intent to get everyone on side for a nice, long, profitable new Cold War.

On his arrival, Miller was quick to berate Swiss officials who questioned the sense of the sanctions regime the U.S. and the European Union have imposed on Russia. The Swiss government, reluctantly and controversially, went along with the sanctions that followed the outbreak of hostilities last year, but Miller has been pressing Bern not merely to sequester more funds deposited by Russian oligarchs, but to confiscate them so that they can be sent to Kyiv to finance the eventual reconstruction of Ukraine. 

Confiscation of this kind is straight-out illegal—something that matters not at all to the U.S. but matters greatly to Switzerland. When two journalists from Neue Zürcher Zeitung, the big Zurich daily, asked him about this in an interview a few weeks ago, Miller retreated into the cotton-wool language Americans routinely get from public figures. “This requires international dialogue,” Miller replied. “We assume we will find a way.”

In other words: We insist you breach international law, and worry not. We do it all the time.

When the Neue Zürcher Zeitung correspondents pointed out that Swiss President Alain Berset had recently defended Swiss neutrality and called for early negotiations to end the war, Miller replied, “Anyone can call for negotiations.”

Nice. American diplomacy at its best. Or at its typical worst these days. 

It is a matter of record that Miller has imposed himself into ministerial deliberations on the sanctions and arms-sales questions, boasting at one point that senior FDFA officials “know what we expect.”  But it was a remark Miller made during the Neue Zürcher Zeitung interview that has landed Miller in seriously bad odor among the Swiss. “In a way, NATO is a donut,” he said with exquisite insensitivity, “and Switzerland is the hole in the middle.”

I loved the outrage that followed. He has called Switzerland “nothing in the middle of a greasy American confection,” Roger Kōppel, a populist member of the National Council, the lower house of the legislature, exclaimed. “Bern should have reprimanded him immediately.”

It should have but it didn’t. The only constituencies sympathetic to Miller’s obnoxious importunings are sectors of the business community who stand to profit were Switzerland to abandon its neutrality to please the Americans and the political factions allied with them. Miller will stay, but there is no way under the sun that the vast majority of Switzerland’s nine million people would accept so fundamental a change in policy—and, indeed, in national identity. 

This leads me to a larger point. Miller can bang on all he likes about his commitment to democracy, but his conduct since arriving in Bern is measure enough that he doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about Swiss democracy–an impressive direct democracy–when it impedes Washington’s imperial pursuits. Do not tell me you are shocked, please: American diplomats no longer represent Americans abroad. They represent American elites to other nations’ elites. 

Miller is 43 and arrived with his partner without one day’s experience in statecraft. Together they were and may remain major donors to the Democratic Party, giving the appearance that they bought the Bern appointment–a common practice since at least the Reagan years. Scott Miller is an example of the cost of such practices to our institutions in terms of competence. 

The war against neutrality—and effectively sovereignty and self-determination—goes on. Last week Le Temps, the leading Geneva daily, reported that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz accosted Berset during the latter’s visit to Berlin with the demand that the Swiss “take uncomfortable but correct decisions” on neutrality, arms sales, and the Ukraine question. “We hope certain things will get done,” Scholz added with all the subtlety of… Scott Miller. 

Certain things will not get done. The Americans are not going to win this one, no matter how many obsequious Olaf Scholzs prevail on the Swiss in their behalf. Berset wasted no time making this clear in Berlin. 

I loved the response of Benedict Neff, a commentator at Neue Zürcher Zeitung, after Miller’s hole-in-the-donut remark. Diplomats such as Miller “take a considerable risk,” he wrote. “When their public rebukes are too high-handed, they trigger irritated reactions. The undiplomats are therefore useful in prompting critical reflections on one’s policies and giving them a clearer direction.”

This is not as it always turns out with the Europeans—Scholz being proof enough of the point—but it is as it should be, and as one hopes it will come to be.