Exclusive: Hanne Nabintu Herland’s new book looks at consolidation of wealth in the West
By In the West, the ultra-rich own almost everything. Private investment corporations such as Blackrock, Vanguard, Capital World, Berkshire Hathaway and State Street represent capital owners who dominate media companies, Big Tech, Big Pharma, the military complex, real estate and the food industry. Whichever industry you take a look at, you easily find the same top shareholders and decision makers among the leading institutional investors.
They also fund politicians and exert strong influence over government institutions. These mastodonte companies completely dominate our way of life.
In my newly released book, “The Billionaire World. How Marxism serves the Elite,” I examine how these investment firms have become so powerful that they control most of the world capital.
With government support from the political elites, the new billionaire class freely engages in the transferring of wealth from the lower classes unto themselves. Democratic 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. Congress functions as indentured servants to the big corporations. The culture war is an orchestrated dispute that keeps blacks and whites fighting each other. It is a distraction from the real culprits of this, which is the Big Three: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, these huge corporations that now own 88% of the S&P 500 firms. They are now trying to buy every single family home in America. If we stay on the current trajectory, they will own 60% of the single family homes by 2030.”
The classical Western ideal of freedom of the press and critical thinking that seeks to uncover the abuse of power is no longer much on the agenda. It remains active only as a political slogan in public speeches, emptied of real meaning. Since as early as 2012, only six corporations controlled more than 90% of the U.S. media, after consolidating from 50 companies back in 1983. The stiffening political censorship of past years has revealed how easy it is to direct newspaper and social media content to manufacture the desired consent. Ironically, the journalist’s role is to become the mouthpiece of the new billionaire class, regardless of whether he professes to be so-called left-wing. As the newspaper is dependent on revenues from advertisements, few reflect on the fact that the monopolistic owners of the media also own most of the big corporation products that the paper advertises for.