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The Mises Institute Chairman Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. recently said: “we now have a fake kind of capitalism in which a few greedy billionaires use the state to gain power and privileges for themselves.” Democrat turned independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently pointed out that: “The working class is now systematically being stripped of their wealth by the corporate elite.” According to a previous Pew Research survey, some 70 percent of the population believes that the system is rigged in favor of the wealthy, and other research before and since confirmed that finding. So, from the right (Rockwell), left (Kennedy) and according to several public surveys, there is a growing body of thinkers plus the vast majority of the public who believe that the system in the U.S. is rigged and the American Dream for the working and middle classes is becoming harder to achieve.
Whatever you may have thought before you started this article, strive to keep an open mind to the evidence.
To illustrate the points above, consider this inquiry to Bing AI on 12.8.2023 and the response.
> “Did Pew Research say that some 70 percent of Americans believe that the system is rigged in favor of the wealthy?”
Yes, according to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center in September 2019, 70% of Americans believe that the economic system in their country unfairly favors powerful interests 1. The same survey also found that wide majorities of Americans believe that politicians, large corporations, and people who are wealthy have too much power and influence in today’s economy 1.
It is worth noting that this is not the only survey that has found such results. A poll conducted by Marketplace and Edison Research in 2016 found that 71% of Americans believed that the U.S. economic system was “rigged in favor of certain groups” 2. Another survey conducted by Marketplace and Edison Research in 2020 found that a majority of Americans believed that the economy was rigged 3.
Part I
COMMENTARY WND NEWS CENTER
A BILLIONAIRE’S WORLD
The killing of the Western middle class
Exclusive: Hanne Nabintu Herland on how small-business owners have suffered since COVID
By Hanne Nabintu Herland
Published December 6, 2023 at 6:54pm
Read Hanne’s The Herland Report.
The ultra-rich profited immensely on the COVID-19 lockdowns. The world’s billionaires saw their wealth increase by $12.7 trillion, or 42%. The richest 10 now possess more wealth than the poorest 40% of humanity combined, reports Oxfam.
Yet, what is the situation post-COVID for those who are not billionaires, who do not own the media, who are not private donors to the leading politicians and largest NGOs? What are the consequences for the middle class and the poorest among us?
I pose these questions in my latest book, “The Billionaire World. How Marxism serves the Elite,” as I explain how we ended up with an economic system where the ultra-rich elite takes it all. Or as chairman of the Mises Institute, Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr., says in his review of the book, we now have a fake kind of capitalism “in which a few greedy billionaires use the state to gain power and privileges for themselves. These billionaires are willing to enslave humanity to gain their nefarious ends. … [Their] domination leads to a totalitarian control over people.”
As millions lost their jobs, much due to the lockdown strategy that totally crippled the economy for a long period of time, few critical questions were posed in the mainstream media about the economic effects on the lower classes. It is now estimated that 1 billion globally could descend into extreme poverty as a direct result of the COVID-19 economic disruption. Researchers from King’s College London, Australian National University and United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) have published a paper that show horrible figures for the voiceless poor.
A recent Federal Reserve study finds that the bottom 80% are suffering the most compared to their 2020 status. “We should all be deeply alarmed that the median wage earner brought home just $40,847.18 last year. That breaks down to about $3,400 a month before taxes. Needless to say, you cannot live a middle-class lifestyle in America today on that,” writes author of “Lost Prophecies of the Future of America,” Michael Snyder.
The UNU-WIDER paper further noted that the cost of the crisis in lost income could reach $500 million per day for the poorest, with the severity of poverty likely to grow dramatically.
While small businesses are experiencing unimaginable hardships – close to 50% of U.S. small-business owners expected to be shut down permanently – multinational corporations benefit. When smaller bookshops and retail stores go bankrupt, Amazon is set to gain. When traditional coffee shops go broke, Starbucks takes over. When local farmers give up, Bill Gates buys up their land.
“If we stay on the current trajectory, private investment companies will own 60% of the single family homes by 2030,” says presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He recently pointed out that: “The working class is now systematically being stripped of their wealth by the corporate elite.”
The U.S. lockdown may have hurt African-American businesses the most. Bloomberg reported a 41% decline in black American small-business owners from February to April 2020. Donations to BLM were reportedly channeled into Act Blue, a Democratic fundraiser that has given hundreds of millions to white, rich politicians. The BLM end game is portrayed by American social pundit Candace Owens, in the documentary “The greatest lie ever told: George Floyd and the rise of BLM,” telling the sad story of how millions of BLM dollars simply evaporated and never benefited the poor.
“We were all basically required to donate to Black Lives Matter or make some statement online about how black people are suffering. But nobody asked the question, where’s all the money going?” Owens said in an interview with Tucker Carlson.
While the ultra-rich have lavish access to the mainstream media loud speakers – which they own – the small-business owners and the working class are the losers in the COVID-19 economic assault.
The way the system now works only benefits the rich, admitted the founder of World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, recently. Workers’ rights and economic security is evaporating, and ruinous tax competitions have enabled massive new global monopolies, he pointed out.
“Not even during the Great Depression of the 1930s did we see anything like this. The big corporate giants with extremely deep pockets will be able to easily weather another round of lockdowns,” writes Snyder.
“There seems to be a direct correlation between how much poorer the average man gets and how much richer the billionaires get,” as author Raymond Ibrahim puts it in his book review of “The Billionaire World” at WND. Sadly so, the billionaire elite are able to manipulate the world. ##
Part II – Additional Information with More MHLivingNews Analysis and Commentary
The thoughtful Herland is hardly the first one to raise these concerns, nor will she likely be the last. The Mises Institute Chairman Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. recently wrote the following.
Wealth concentration brings information control.”
- People usually think of Marxism as the enemy of the super-rich, but in fact the billionaires and the Marxists are allied to overthrow Western civilization…”
- Huge “…companies completely dominate our way of life, what we eat, drink, watch on TV, what we wear, and who we vote for. They are the rulers of social media, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and most of the entertainment business.”
Rockwell stated about those huge corporations: “Here is what Herland says about them:
“In the West, the ultra-rich own almost everything. Private investment corporations such as Blackrock, Vanguard, Capital World, Fidelity Management, Berkshire Hathaway and State Street represent capital owners who own media companies, Big Tech, Big Pharma, the military complex, and the food industry. They also fund politicians and exert strong influence over political decision makers as well as government funds and assets.”
MHLivingNews previously raised several of these issues in reports like the one linked below.
Note that Kotkin is a former left-leaning Washington Post journalist and a self-declared former Democrat. MHProNews and MHLivingNews has reported for some time that the financial elites and their corporate interests have largely captured the Democratic Party. Who says? Oddly, in several cases, left-leaning (meaning, pro-Democratic) media outlets. It is difficult to deny this reality.
That said, that’s not to say that Republicans are immune. Republicans can be ‘bought’ by the ‘donor class’ too. Indeed, at the recent Republican debate, one of the charges leveled against former ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (R) is that she has been captured by the wealthy corporate and donor class. Similar charges have been leveled at former Governor Chris Christe (R). What that means is that in discerning who a politician is beholding to is perhaps as important as what they are saying. Voters must pay attention to what candidates do, and who their big donors are.
Back to the concerns raised by Herland, Rockwell, Kotkin and Kennedy (among others). Warren Buffett, the Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway (BRK), made similar points. Notice who is giving the “Medal of Freedom” award to Buffett? President Barack Obama (D), who Buffett and others like him helped to get and keep him in office.
MHLivingNews previously noted the following, which was first published by WND on May 11, 2021 at 7:16pm but is adapted and updated here below by and for Manufactured Home Living News.
The Solution to Big Tech and the Oligarchs
Anyone who thinks Big Tech will be reined in by regulations has not been paying close attention. The following cases exposed years of documented corporate, regulatory and accounting failures. They spotlight massive corruption and mainstream media misses.
- Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) and FTX
- Bernard “Bernie” Madoff
- Theranos
- Enron
- WorldCom
- VW “Diesel-Gate”
- WeWork
- Solyndra
- Lehman Brothers (financial-housing crisis)
- Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac (Government Sponsored Enterprises/GSEs – financial-housing crisis).
Collectively, that list involved hundreds of billions of dollars in losses by investors. Various types of fraud, corruption and deception occurred. While the details of the purported scams may differ, because taxpayers and the broader economy were impacted in the cases involving Lehman Brothers and GSEs housing-finance scandals, the ripple effects of those resulted in the so-called Great Recession (circa 2008). The economic impact of the Great Recession on real estate and other parts of the economy collectively cost Americans trillions of dollars.
Among the questions that thinking people should wonder is this. What happened to the regulators in those cases? Why where they routinely late to act? Isn’t the job of regulators and law enforcement agencies to protect the public interest, sometimes specifically the economy or housing?
John Kenneth Galbraith said: “Regulatory bodies, like the people who comprise them … become, with some exceptions, either an arm of the industry they are regulating or senile.” Bingo.
Modern robber barons are dominating information and capital. Cold Fusion’s documentary about the Theranos’ scandal observed: “It’s the illusionary effect where if you repeat a lie enough times people start to believe it, especially if you have credible names surrounding the product.”
Problematic products or services can emerge from corrupt companies.
Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes is shown with then Vice President Joe Biden (D) and President Barack Obama (D). In the massive Enron scandal, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling are shown with then President George W. Bush (R). Those establishment politicians from both major parties are sufficient to make the point that the “illusionary effect” of “repeating a big lie enough times” when “credible names” are involved can and does work.
Harry Markopolos and his colleagues spent years trying to get public officials and mainstream media to expose the massive Bernie Madoff fraud that they knew existed. It took years before Markopolos was taken seriously and officials finally acted. Forbes says Madoff losses may have exceeded $50 billion.
Other regulatory failures are hiding in plain sight. The New York Times quoted Warren Buffett: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Buffett’s “class” profited wildly in the 2008 and 2020 economic upheavals. How? CNBC quoted billionaire Bill Gates: “I didn’t even want to meet Warren [Buffett] because I thought, ‘Hey this guy buys and sells things, and so he found imperfections in terms of markets, that’s not value added to society, that’s a zero-sum game that is almost parasitic.’”
The CDC defines parasitic: “A parasite is an organism that lives on or in a host organism and gets its food from or at the expense of its host.”
Buffett said, “The most important thing for me is figuring out how big a moat there is around a business. What I would love, of course, is a big castle and a big moat with piranhas and crocodiles.”
When carefully examined, several of the oligarchs and their businesses employ “parasitic” “moat” and “sabotage monopoly” methods. They create a slow-motion monopolization of various markets. Experts like James Schmitz Jr. say monopolies “inflict great harm on low- and middle-income Americans.” Schmitz and some of his economic colleagues at the Minneapolis Federal Reserve specifically mentioned the impact on these issues on affordable manufactured housing.
The solution to this problematic 21st century pattern? Vigorously enforce existing laws. That includes the need to seriously enforce antitrust laws to break pernicious giants up. They can obviously cause social, economic, and moral harm. Once broken up, watch the economy and America soar.
L. A. “Tony” Kovach ##
The political and judicial systems can work. Madoff went to prison. Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was convicted.
An example that in politics the rigged system can be thwarted is Donald J. Trump. While Trump is imperfect, so is every other human and politician. Trump is so hated by the “Establishment” in both major parties that a range of personalities across the left-right divide hate the man and tried hard in 2016 to stop him. In 2020, right or wrong, they succeeded. Herland, from afar, plugged Trump in a prior book. He was honest enough to admit that he used the rigged system to become wealthy himself, and then demonstrably was willing to fight the ‘swamp’ that he found in Washington, D.C. and beyond.
Per the plug on Amazon for Herland’s prior book “
Donald Trump may be the most demonized president in US history. Why? Because he challenges the globalist elite, who also own the media. With his “America First” slogan, he has launched a battle on the globalist leaders who, for decades, have benefitted from outsourcing jobs and wealth to China. Amid the now-infamous Corona scandal, Black Lives Matter riots, and Marxist revolution, Trump seeks to reinstate law, order, and national sovereignty in the United States. He hopes to rekindle the respect for the Constitution and the historic, traditional values that founded the nation. Will he succeed?
Hanne Nabintu Herland is a Scandinavian historian of comparative religions, bestselling author, and columnist at World Net Daily. She is the founder of The Herland Report news and opinion website, which provides independent analysis from leading Western intellectuals as well as ground-breaking YouTube interviews, cutting through the mainstream media rhetoric. www.hannenabintuherland.com“
Trump and the Rigged System
- “It’s not just the political system that’s rigged, it’s the whole economy,” Trump said in a speech in 2016. “The middle class can’t get ahead,’ Trump argued, ‘because the system is controlled by big donors, big businesses and big bureaucrats who all want to keep wages down while enriching themselves” 1.
- In a speech in December 2017, Trump said, “The system is rigged. Just remember that. And I’m afraid we’re going to have to build a much stronger movement because that’s what it’s going to take”
Flashback…
When those speeches in the two videos above were made, Trump supporters hoped and prayed he would do the types of things that he was promising. But 2023 is different.
One can now compare the Trump presidency to that of Joe Biden’s time in the White House. We can see the 21st century wars during the Bush and Obama presidencies. Under Trump, there is noticeably more peace.
There are reasons why most Americans say that the country is on the wrong track now, and that the people were better off during the Trump years.
- There was a much more secure border.
- The economy was better.
- Inflation was low.
- Food prices were lower.
- Doing business was often easier.
- Housing – conventional and manufactured homes – were more affordable.
- Interest rates, gas, utilities, travel, cars — most things were more affordable under Trump than since he left the White House.
Let’s note that we have not been asked nor paid to plug her books or Trump. Herland is bringing important information to an international audience, which is why we are willing to feature her thoughts and that of others too. It is 4.3 stars on Amazon.
In the West, the ultra-rich control almost everything. They fund politicians and exert strong influence on government spending. Mastodont private companies completely dominate our way of life, what we eat, drink, watch on TV, what we wear and who we vote for. They are the owners of social media, the mainstream media and the entertainment business.
Yet, it would be impossible for the billionaire class to amass this wealth into their own hands, without the active use of socialist repression. The Marxist attack on historic Western values has weakened the very core of our culture, destroyed social stability, quenched free speech and silenced the people – and thereby removed the obstacles for the billionaire class to gain centralized control.
Marxism has been the perfect tool to destroy the traditional system of trust, personal responsibility and equality regardless of race, class, or gender. Read the story of how Marxism was used to curb freedom.
“Hanne Nabintu Herland has written another important book in which she explains the consequences of the control exercised over the entire Western World by a handful of giant American investment companies who have no commitment to freedom and morality.” Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, leading American political economist.
“A keen observer of current trends, Herland connects the many global dots to expose the war of subversion the Marxist Left is waging against civilization in her latest must-read book.” Best-selling author, Middle East expert, Raymond Ibrahim.”
Problem Solving
The first step to problem solving is understanding the problem said the late positive-thinker and Christian Zig Ziglar.
To protect and preserve the American Dream, to revitalize the American Dream, we must understand who it is that is undermining it. For years, MHProNews and MHLivingNews have reported that those who are undermining the American Dream are often the ultra-capitalists who made vast fortunes because of how they learned how to manipulate the system in their favor.
“I am very grateful for what The Herland Report does, for its global reach, genuine substance, and ability to speak the truth.”— VA State Senator Richard Black.
Rockwell wrote: “People usually think of Marxism as the enemy of the super-rich, but in fact the billionaires and the Marxists are allied to overthrow Western civilization…” It would seem crazy to think that mega capitalists and communists would be allies. But the recent reports in mainstream media, featured on MHProNews, revealed the wealthy in the U.S. paying big bucks to applaud Communist China’s leader Xi.
There is an increasingly apparent nexus of a rising neo-feudalism, fascist, Marxist, crony-capitalist, socialist and communist power.
To illustrate, this question was put to Bing AI on 12.8.2023.
> “Hanne Herland recently wrote a book on the Billionaire’s World. The Mises Institute’s Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. wrote a book in 2013 entitled Fascism Versus Capitalism. Some have made the case that communist China is more fascist than people may realize. It is said that Mussolini defined fascism as the mixture of state and corporate power, and that Mussolini was a former socialist. Can you elaborate on those notions and how they may relate to the notion of a rising modern feudalism?”
Certainly! Hanne Nabintu Herland’s book, The Billionaire World: How Marxism serves the Elite, is a recent publication that discusses the relationship between capitalism and Marxism 12. Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.’s book, Fascism versus Capitalism, published in 2013, compares and contrasts the two economic systems 1.
Regarding the notion that communist China is more fascist than people may realize, it is true that some scholars have made this argument. For example, in his book The China Mirage, James Bradley argues that the Chinese Communist Party has adopted many of the same tactics as the fascist regimes of the 20th century 3.
Mussolini did indeed define fascism as the mixture of state and corporate power, and he was a former socialist 4. This definition is often cited in discussions of modern-day politics and economics, particularly in relation to the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few .
As for the notion of a rising modern feudalism, this is a complex topic that has been discussed by many scholars and commentators. Some argue that the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few is leading to a new form of feudalism, in which a small elite controls the majority of resources and the rest of society is left to struggle . Others argue that this is an oversimplification and that the situation is more nuanced .
I hope this helps!
Learn more:
Concerns raised by those across the left-right spectrum about the increasing concentration of wealth and power have the potential to bring millions together to revive and protect the American Dream while potentially holding to account those who have undermined it for their own gain.
The recent guilty verdict of Sam Bankman Fried (SBF) is the most recent example that the system can work.
Informed citizens are needed to stop the powerful from further establishing a system that is so corrupted in their own favor that it could be difficult to recover.
Buffett led Berkshire Hathaway is just one of the major brands that have enormous influence over manufactured housing, and conventional housing too.
Rockwell said in praising Herland’s newest book that “we now have a fake kind of capitalism “in which a few greedy billionaires use the state to gain power and privileges for themselves.” We pray to God, and work day-by-day informing our fellow citizens about the factual, evidence-based concerns found in reports like this one. If we all our part to inform our fellow citizens and then vote like our future depends on it, we can recapture and renew the positive aspects of the American Dream. ###
That’s a wrap on this installment of “News through the lens of manufactured homes and factory-built housing” © where “We Provide, You Decide.” © ### (Affordable housing, manufactured homes, reports, fact-checks, analysis, and commentary. Third-party images or content are provided under fair use guidelines for media.) (See Related Reports, further below. Text/image boxes often are hot-linked to other reports that can be access by clicking on them.)
By L.A. “Tony” Kovach – for MHLivingNews.com.
Tony earned a journalism scholarship and earned numerous awards in history and in manufactured housing. For example, he earned the prestigious Lottinville Award in history from the University of Oklahoma, where he studied history and business management. He’s a managing member and co-founder of LifeStyle Factory Homes, LLC, the parent company to MHProNews, and MHLivingNews.com. This article reflects the LLC’s and/or the writer’s position, and may or may not reflect the views of sponsors or supporters.
Connect on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/latonykovach
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