It came to me like a bolt from the sky. The reason nothing ever changes is because powerful forces want things this way. In chaos and crisis, I mean. It’s been right there in front of us, all along. But it took an interchange in 2018 between Russia’s President Vladimir Putin, and American journalist Megyn Kelly to smack me awake. What’s interesting, is how easy it is to see who these “forces” are, and who is creating the narrative that fuels today’s fearsome reality.
A previous discussion between Kelly and Mr. Putin in St. Petersburg turned into an NBC News American propaganda campaign to put Russia on the hot seat with the American public, and to set the stage for renewed tensions because of alleged Russian interference in US domestic affairs. The series of meetings and interviews between Putin and the American journalist were spun by NBC making it appear as if Kelly were some kind of superhero investigative journalist pitted against some arch-villain. The story ended up with the title “Confronting Putin”, and the network spun the yarn like an old Korean War era newsreel. The special began with Kelly standing in her fur coat outside St. Basils Cathedral in Red Square.
She opens by stating that Putin is the man, “many American officials believe has launched a cyberwar on American democracy.” The veteran journalist even insists that Putin was, at the time, trying to “burnish his tough-guy image”, in the days leading up to his re-election bid. What’s funny for me now, is that no one seemed to take note of the American TV network doing its part to interfere in Russian affairs. Kelly says she returned to confront Putin “armed with new evidence” of the Kremlin’s complicity in a cyberattack on the US system, but she only brings renewed allegations about the Internet Research Agency, a cock and bull yarn the New York Times cooked up in 2015, using a Russian SPAM marketing agency as some kind of James Bond 007 Spectre cyber spoof. I won’t dive off into the so-called “Troll Farm” here, since I’ve debunked that story in my book and many internet reports. It’s more important to focus on western media and their agents.
Kelly’s agenda in the interviews, and NBC’s directed broadcasts, reveal for any PR professional key pages from the propagandist’s toolkit: ad nauseum repetition; appeals to authority, fear, prejudice, patriotism, and a story the common people will identify with and believe. The whole cyberwar fantasy, the story The Agency, and subsequent stories serve to fortify the liberal world order’s agenda. NBC’s final cut made was a chop job to show what the bosses of the conglomerate Comcast, who own NBC, wanted the American public to see. Now allow me to present the powerful people behind our unchanging world in crisis.
Comcast’s board of directors are corporate breadcrumbs that lead to the people who want Putin and Russia as our common enemy. That is until Putin is gone and Russia can once again fall prey to corporate butchers bent on chopping the world’s biggest natural resource bank into manageable bits. Dupont’s still run America, in case you did not know. And, the company’s CEO Edward D. Breen is on the board at Comcast. Before I go on, start thinking about agribusiness, materials science, and bioscience grafted with the world’s 2nd biggest communications network. Also on Comcast’s board, is Kenneth J. Bacon, the former Fannie May VP who probably (in my opinion) helped orchestrate the collapse of Wall Street that led to the creation of almost 2,000 new billionaires between 2008 and the present. Another Comcast board member connects with Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr., the son of a Jewish Russian Empire immigrant who founded Advance Publications. This media conglomerate owns Discovery Channel, Condé Nast, and the digital social media site Reddit, just to name a few. Also on Comcast’s board are Jeffrey Honickman, CEO of Pepsi-Cola Bottling (13 percent market share in Russia); Maritza Montiel, former deputy chairman and CEO of Deloitte; David C. Novak, former chairman and CEO of YUM! Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, Taco Bell in 135 countries). These and many others have a vested interest in Putin NOT being president of Russia.
Digging into each of these companies, I found deals popping up in Russia as a common thread. Take Ramon Laguarta, who is the current PepsiCo CEO, he was instrumental in the buyout of Russian dairy and juice company Wimm-Bill-Dann, a deal valued at $5.4 billion for the American company as the head of PepsiCo Eastern Europe back in 2010. Looking at Comcast board member Gerald Hassell, he was the CEO of The Bank of New York Mellon Corporation, the world’s biggest custodial bank, and one of the oldest banks in the world. I’ll bet few reading my report know that BNY Mellon the bank founded by Alexander Hamilton still exits. Furthermore, few Americans have the time or energy to understand the significance of the US Treasury naming BNY Mellon the master custodian of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) bailout fund during the financial crisis of 2007 to 2010. Are any of you making connections here? Bacon, Fannie Mae, more than 1,600 new billionaires, media, propaganda?
The key is BNY Mellon, in case I have been too circuitous in my reporting. Megyn Kelly, NBC, and why a network would want Putin to be the villain is just the front story. The world’s biggest bank for high net worth individuals is the backstory. This bank is evil banking and investment villains central, in a world full of lesser evil men and women. There is no coincidence involved here, not in my assessment. The Wall Street collapse, ruining Putin and Russia, and BNY Mellon paying $714 million back in 2015 to settle related lawsuits from little investors the bank was cheating to feather the nests of big investors are all part of the bigger scheme. The same year, the rich man’s bank also paid $180 million to make up for cheating on the foreign exchange market Hillary Clinton was playing when Russia was blamed for MH17. See my report here. The list of BNY Mellon infractions is pretty long, but the most significant one for this story is September 2009, BNY Mellon settled a lawsuit by the Russian government in May 2007 for money laundering (see Irving Trust, Natasha Gurfinkel, and Prince Vladimir Galitzine). The original suit claimed $22.5 billion in damages, but BNY Mellon managed to settle for a few million.
From there the rabbit hole goes much deeper. So, to help you readers pressed for time, enter the all too familiar and notorious Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Yes, I know, I am sorry. But, the connection between the world’s top Putin hater and the piggy bank of western elites BNY Mellon is why NBC and all the other networks need Putin to be America’s top enemy. The Yukos Oil mafioso had his assets with the Bank of New York in the 1990s, and Natasha and Prince Vladimir (nicknamed Mikey) were intimate associates of the now exiled (not Novichok nerve agent poisoned, I might add) oligarch. The story of the ruined Yukos boss, Natasha Gurfinkel, and BNY wheeling and dealing ended with the real perpetrators of massive money laundering throwing some others under the bus, of course. The billions being siphoned from Russia to western players also ended about the same time, just about the time Vladimir Putin was named to replace Boris Yeltsin. Yes, another coincidence that’s not by chance. It’s also no coincidence that the Yahoo! News I cited, ends up throwing the man who put a stop to pirates like Khodorkovsky under the truth bus as well. In the report on BNY money laundering, the new President Vladimir Putin is lumped in as some kind of complicit KGB/kleptocrat, when the obvious truth is his saving Russia for Russians.
So, who owns the majority shares of BNY Mellon? This seems like the logical conclusion to why NBC and all the other western media outlets would be out to get Putin. Berkshire Hathaway, or Warren Buffett, owns almost $3 billion worth. Second to Buffett in BNY Mellon shares is Dodge and Cox, which has our friends at Comcast as leading shareholders. Vanguard and BlackRock are third and fourth respectively, of course. But, to once again shorten the read, it’s just easier to say the most bloodthirsty, richest, and most powerful people in the western world call the shots for everybody from pretty Megyn Kelly to the guard in front of the New York Stock Exchange, and the over 50,000 employees of BNY Mellon worldwide. What’s funny for me, is how easily we can see the linkages between Putin foes, dirty money, wars for energy and profit, and even COVID-19 policy and vaccines. But these stories are too deep for today. For now, identifying the “powerful forces” vested in making Vladimir Putin public enemy No. 1 is rewarding.
Oh, and on a final note, it may help the reader to understand how all this ties together if you read this story about Warren Buffett meeting with Mikhail Khodorkovsky when the Yukos boss was stealing Russia’s legacy. Of course, the story of Buffett’s interests in Russia before Putin stabilized the situation is twisted, but the deeper story shows the vested interests in Vladimir falling. Buffett also dumped his massive shares in Exxon when the oil company partnered with Russia. What most people fail to remember is, these “powerful forces” invest and win in war, and peace. And in between the only necessity is friction, to keep the game going. Cyberwars are the peacetime abrasive, bloodletting in real wars the fearsome catalyst otherwise. Study the aforementioned Duponts, before, during, and after World War I.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”
