The Growing Backlash Against BlackRock

• Author: Monica Jackson
• Posted: 2023-11-11

BlackRock is a supposed investment firm that just so happens to own well over 300,000 homes in the United States, making them one of the largest homeowners in the nation. Mainstream media, all of which is owned by large corporations, go out of their way to tell the American public that this is perfectly normal. "BlackRock is not harming the housing market," media personalities claim, as home prices are going through the roof and we're dealing with a shortage of available houses because BlackRock is not selling what they own. No; it's perfectly normal, safe, and the "American way," according to an eerily similar lineup of media stations and papers. BlackRock are the good guys, we're told, but a lot of people do not agree. There is a growing backlash against this investment firm, and we have witnessed quite a few protests against the corporation, most recently by coal miners.

To be clear, the coal miners state that they are not protesting against BlackRock due to their housing practices. Rather, they are protesting for better contracts. It's a long and drawn out story, the gist of it being that coal miners from West Virginia, Kentucky and northern Alabama want better collective bargaining. They're looking at Warrior Met to make this happen. Warrior Met purchases the coal in order to make steel, though the coal miners claim that the firm isn't paying them nearly enough. BlackRock just so happens to be the majority shareholder in Warrior Met, so coal miners made the trip all the way to New York City in an attempt to put pressure on BlackRock to hopefully pressure Warrior Met into giving them more lucrative coal mining contracts.

Unfortunately, nothing much changed after the protests. Because these are southern coal miners, the vast majority of that eerily similar mainstream media mocked and ridiculed these men on live TV, claiming they were uneducated, ignorant, and that they should find new professions, as coal is a "dead industry." It's highly doubtful that CNN and MSNBC will tell you the reason that they are mocking hard-working Americans protesting for change, when since 2020 they have been the two biggest networks claiming that disgruntled Americans deserve the right to protest for change. Everything in America seems to fall along political lines, and one person in that crowd of 120 may be wearing a red hat, so the media instinctively views them all as Trump-supporting enemies of democracy and ridicules them in front of millions of people.

The point here being that BlackRock will never take these protests seriously as long as they have the entire media apparatus running interference. To the average person passing by the protests in New York, or seeing them on TV, they're being told that it's just some angry uneducated rednecks complaining about nothing, well before anyone has a chance to look into it for themselves. Something very underhanded that some media is doing, however, is that they're not even telling the truth about the growing backlash against BlackRock. Media is telling people that these protests are about housing, while making sure to add that BlackRock owning hundreds of thousands of homes is a good thing.

In reality, these particular protests are not about housing, but many more are. Going back to 2004, people have been protesting against BlackRock purchasing housing. The funny thing here is that, only a decade ago, Occupy Wall Street was all the rage, and the everyday person on the left was fully against these sorts of practices by corporations. However, media then crafted a "social justice" narrative, and now no one hardly pays attention to what corporations are doing and instead find new people to blame for all the world's woes.

There is still a whole lot of backlash against BlackRock, though you're just never going to hear about it on media. When you do, it's usually painted entirely inaccurately.

Grass Roots Protests Widely Ignored

American media is an awfully weird thing to observe from the outside looking in. If it's an astro-turfed protesting campaign, supporting by corporations, like Antifa and Black Lives Matter, media spend their time singing its praises and covering it in a very favorable light. However, when it's just some southern coal miners, or normal people who cannot afford housing, media has a habit of making them look foolish in front of everyone.

As of right now, the protests for better coal wages have all died out, due to the fact they could not get any public support and were only mocked and ridiculed.