A old dude named Larry Fink runs a US asset management corporation called BlackRock that not many people have heard of.
It controls over $10 trillion in assets, which is equivalent to being the world’s third-largest economy, behind China.
BlackRock is connected to other asset managers without much of a public profile either: State Street and Vanguard.
Asset management corporations are hard to untangle.
A web of shelf corporations cloud their operations, but it is generally accepted that they are managing the funds of large weapons corporations, big pharma, big banks, big ag, big media, etc.
According to CNN, the three ‘collectively manage an impressive $15 trillion in assets, which is more than three-quarters the size of the US economy.’
Third-largest economy
And they extend their tentacles into Australia.
They are ‘substantial shareholders’ with voting rights in all of Australia’s four major financial institutions, for example.
There’s also QBE, Suncorp and Insurance Australia Group.
They have also have shares in Woolworths and Coles, who control around 65 per cent of the Australian grocery market.
And then there’s major interests in fossil fuel companies.
According to corporateaccountability.org, ‘BlackRock remains the single largest institutional investor in coal, with around $109 billion invested in the industry. This includes $1.2 billion invested in Adani Group’s coal mine project in Australia’.
Try putting your superannuation into a fund without their influence.
With Fink’s fingerprints everywhere across the Western globe, it’s worth asking how this represents a free market?
The cornerstone of a free market is supposedly competition, not a concentration of power.
Quandary
It leaves those of us who want to pass on a better planet to younger generations in a quandary.
Everything you buy or borrow or loan leads back to one of these corporations, which are not guided by the principles of preserving or improving the planet.
It’s the shallow pursuit of making money for its own sake, and doing it within a framework of weak and inadequate laws.
Enacting much-needed anti-trust laws is perhaps the obvious answer.
Expecting the Fink to have an epiphany and invest in a future less like Mad Max doesn’t seem likely.
His corporation is literally named scorched planet!
Hans Lovejoy, editor
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
