Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. My cast is Michael Nevedakis, PhD, Dr. Michael Nevedakis,

who is a one of the regular journalists for the defender. He's coming to us from Athens, Greece,

where he's based. And we're going to talk about his most recent article from the defender,

which I found fascinating, which is the role of the two biggest financial houses in the world

in profiting from the pandemic. They, in fact, have profited enormously in one of the

openings, alphas of your wonderful article. And I urge people to take a look at it. Is your

observation that many of our largest corporations have dropped the COVID mandates as soon as the

Supreme Court denied by the administration's COVID plan, essentially. Among the corporations that

immediately dropped mandates were bullying General Electric and Starbucks, but there were a number

of companies that did not. And I'm going to actually read this list of companies, which is going to

take a maybe one minute, but it's interesting because the thing that they all have in common,

as you point out, is that they are owned in majority or in large part. I've used two big

financial houses, which control a huge part of the world economy, a between them, I think they're

worth $15 trillion, which is about three-quarters of the US gross national product. It's

triple the GDP of Germany. And they are growing and growing. Let's just list these companies,

American Express, Anthem, Ash, Zeneca, AT&T, Capital One, Karl, or Centinche, Evran,

Sigma, Cisco, City Group, Columbia, Sportswear, CVS, Deloitte, Delta Airlines,

George and Ash Eli Lilly, Emergent Bio Solutions, Equinox Group, a Facebook,

fourth-order company, Frontier Airlines, the Gap, Gilead Sciences, Coltman Sacks,

Bougal, Azra, Hawaiian Airlines, Hershey, Hats, MNH, IBM, Intel,

Jeffrey Johnson, Johnson, Grapp Dines, Lyft, McDonald's, MGM, Resorts,

Microsoft, Moderna, Morgan Stanley, NBC, Universal, Netflix,

...