I apologize, but I am unable to directly access external websites or scan specific URLs. However, if you provide the relevant content or quotes from the document, I’d be happy to summarize the main points based on the information you share! 📚🌟

Note to newer or longer-term readers of MHProNews. We began in May of 2023 doing tests with several AI chat tools and quickly settled on Bing’s AI system since rebranded as Copilot. For about a year, we have done tests that reveal the strengths and weaknesses of this system. Copilot has a disclaimer that says its results should be double checked. Frankly, Google should have a similar disclaimer about their search results in general, because both are left-leaning. Or so one is told per researchers like Dr. Robert Epstein – a self-described Democrat – and his team. What makes Epstein unique is he is willing to expose evidence that runs contrary to the interests of those politicos and their corporate supporters who he claims to have supported.

It would be great if information was not, as Copilot said: “weaponized.” But it has been and can be. It is therefore silly or reckless at best to ignore reality.

13) Because Copilot couldn’t scan the document that had the Q&A above, it was asked instead to sum up those numbers in that Q&A thread.

> Let’s do this then, summarize 9 of 30 through 12 of 30, please.

Certainly! Let’s summarize elements 9 through 12 of the document:

9. The Importance of Historical Truth:
   • History serves as a foundation for informed decisions.
   • Honest historical accounts allow us to learn from past mistakes.
   • Acknowledging historical truths holds individuals and institutions accountable.
10. Manipulation of History:
    • Manipulating history involves emphasizing certain events, downplaying others, or presenting a biased narrative.
    • Political agendas often drive historical manipulation.
    • The erosion of trust occurs when history is distorted.
11. Examples of Manipulation:
    • Totalitarian regimes use propaganda to control historical narratives.
    • Educational materials can be altered to fit political ideologies.
    • The construction or removal of monuments reflects contested historical interpretations.
12. Consequences:
    • Distorted understanding of the past affects decision-making.
    • Competing historical narratives can fuel conflicts.
    • Erasing or altering history leads to a loss of cultural identity.

In summary, history’s integrity matters, and manipulation has far-reaching effects on society, identity, and progress. 📚🌟

 

To be clear, MHProNews are critics of some key elements of what Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, or others we have quoted have said. It would be fair to say that our own understanding of elements of manufactured housing has evolved in the past 14 years, even though we had over 15 years of experience in the industry prior to launching what today is called MHProNews. Not to brag, but as a matter of background often cited after the end of a given report, this author is a multiple award winner in history. There are some things learned as a youth in history that over time has deepened and evolved. We live. We learn. If we retain what we learn and adapt as necessary, it is possible to avoid costly or time-consuming mistakes.

 

14) Manufactured housing has been operating at less than peak efficiency for decades. The affordable housing crisis has been a challenge for millions for essentially all of the 21st century. Some of the reports linked below in our review of the headlines for the week that was will clearly illustrate that Democrats and Republicans have been battling over ‘solutions’ to the affordable housing crisis – as well as other political and policy issues – for decades. Where is the learning process exemplified in that pattern? Each article tends to examine that question in the context of the specific topic.

 

15) It ought to be axiomatic that in order to solve the affordable housing crisis in our U.S. part of North America, millions more HUD Code manufactured homes need to be built.There are businesses willing to invest and build those homes, so long as they can have a reasonable expectation that some artificial roadblock doesn’t keep them from selling what has already been certified by the federal government by agents working under contract with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Meaning, so long as existing federal laws are respected and enforced, the free market could in theory achieve what politicians have been promising and talking about for decades.

 

16) But it is also apparent that this is not what is nor has been occurring. There is a rut, a cycle of self-defeating activities that must be exposed and to the extent possible ended based upon truth, common sense, and historic evidence.

This Sunday, the balance of the headline themes in the headline will be discussed in the Postscript (Part III) of this report and analysis.

With no further adieu, let’s dive into the headlines for the week that was from 4.28 to 5.5.2024

 

Part II Weekly Headlines Review (Recap)

What’s New on MHLivingNews

 

 

 

What’s New from Washington, D.C. from MHARR

3) The New York Times, Yale University, and scores of other sources cite the Pujo Committee report in the 21st century. Clearly, their investigation was not nor is not some piece of trivial information. So, interest in the Pujo report span the left-right divide.

4) From the U.S. National Archives in 2020 is the following.

Congress and the Money Trust

Summary:

Students study key evidence from the Progressive Era Pujo Committee investigation of the Money Trust that led Congress to pass the Clayton Anti-trust Act, the Federal Trade Commission Act, and the Federal Reserve Act.

Rationale:

Students learn about Progressive Era reform by studying critical evidence from an important investigation. They study a diagram created for the congressional Pujo Committee in 1913 showing the interlocking directorships that prompted Congress to pass the Clayton Anti-trust Act, Federal Trade Commission Act, and Federal Reserve Act.

Background:

From 1890 – 1910 investment banks, such as J.P. Morgan and Co. gained a controlling interest in many major corporations. The banks influenced corporate decisions by exercising the authority to appoint members of the corporations’ boards of directors. By creating interlocking directorships and trusts (see the definition below) banks coordinated the activities of many companies to act in concert with the goals of the bank. This network was referred to as the “money trust,” and the public demanded that Congress get to the bottom of it. Were a few bankers running the whole economy?

The House Banking Committee, led by Chairman Arsene Pujo and investigator Samuel Untermyer investigated the Money Trust of investment bankers and exposed their network of economic influence. As a result of the Pujo Committee investigation, Congress passed the Clayton Anti-trust Act to ban interlocking directorships, created the Federal Trade Commission to oversee economic competition, and created the Federal Reserve to lessen the control of the Money Trust over the nation’s money supply. …”

5) Left leaning Wikipedia said that the money trust can be described as follows. “The main belief behind the concept of a money trust is that the majority of the world’s financial wealth and political power could be controlled by a powerful few.”

6) Investopedia says that defining the Money Trust: “The Pujo Committee concluded in 1913 that the U.S. financial system was controlled by a few plutocrats collectively known as the money trust.”

7) Note that the purpose of several new laws and a constitutional amendment purportedly enacted during the time of President Woodrow Wilson’s (D) administration were supposed to address the problems of wealth inequality, and problems with the U.S. financial system. More on that will be provided further below.

8) According to Public Intelligence, is the following introduction and analysis. Bold is added by MHProNews for emphasis, but the text is as in the original quoted.  Keep in mind that $22 billion then, per the Inflation Calculator: “$694.07 in Mar. 2024 equals $22 of buying power in 1913 (Average).” Meaning that $22 billion then would be worth some $694,070,000,000 in today’s depreciated dollars. That is nearly .7 trillion dollars. Here is the download of that Congressional report by the Pujo Committee.

For those who wish to understand the true nature of our current financial system, the Pujo Committee’s 1912-1913 investigation of the “Money Trust” is essential reading.  The Committee identified a concentrated group of Wall Street bankers who operated a sophisticated financial network unified by 341 interlocking directorships held in 112 corporations valued at more than $22 billion in resources and capitalization exerting significant control and influence over the U.S. economy and monetary system.  The companies and individuals comprising this network were primarily agents of the Morgan and Rockefeller banking empires which dominated U.S. finance following the “Industrial Revolution”.  The Committee names a number of prominent banking institutions as participating in this system including J.P. Morgan & Co., First National Bank of New York, Kuhn Loeb & Co. and individuals such as Paul Warburg, Jacob H. Schiff, Felix M. Warburg, Frank E. Peabody, William Rockefeller and Benjamin Strong, Jr.  Understanding this system of overlapping financial networks and how those networks were used to dominate utilities, railroads, banking and the U.S. financial infrastructure throughout much of the twentieth century is key to the proper analysis of our current economic situation and the influence that the “Money Power” wields over global politics.

9) MHProNews has previously introduced our readers to reports on the Gilded Age, the Robber Baron era, and the rise of antitrust law in the U.S. Understanding the past helps us to understand the present, as Copilot and those quoted authors reflected.

10) President Teddy Roosevelt is immortalized on Mount Rushmore due in part to the historic perception of Roosevelt as a “trust-buster.” As Wikipedia explains: “The term “antitrust” came from late 19th-century American industrialists’ practice of using trusts—legal arrangements where someone is given ownership of property to hold solely for another’s benefit—to consolidate separate companies into large conglomerates.”

11) Perception is not always reality, although sometimes perception includes some element of reality, which may be exaggerated. Our industry has been struggling for well over 20 years to recover to the levels that it last achieved in the mid-to-late 199os. It seems almost preposterous to imagine that before MHProNews and MHLivingNews created the following table, that MHI had not done so years before, made and kept it public and updated. Apparently, as Copilot has observed, MHI practices a kind of Orwellian memory hole method of communication (or lack thereof). Paltering is by definition sharing part of a truth, but not all of it.  At some point, it is necessary to look back and carefully examine how our industry – and our nation – got into this current pattern of a few financial giants that control much of the political, economic, media, big tech, and other related institutions when laws were enacted over a century ago that were supposed to disrupt and thwart these very consolidations of financial, information, and political power.

So long as people don’t understand the origins of the problem, it is more difficult to solve them. Some very bright people have said as much. Otherwise, we as professionals are stuck in the rut of doing the same things in the same way and expecting a different result.

12) It took over a century to get the country into this current situation. It will take some time, hopefully not nearly that long, to correct the matters. It is plausible that much could be done in the next 5 to 10 years. But what is certain is that if understanding doesn’t expand and then that understanding isn’t acted upon, then our nation will find itself in the same or worse condition in 5 or 10 years than it is today.

13) As Scripture puts it, “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live…” (Deuteronomy 30:19 RSV, BibleGateway). The NLT translation reads as follows: “Today I have given you the choice between life and death, between blessings and curses. Now I call on heaven and earth to witness the choice you make. Oh, that you would choose life, so that you and your descendants might live!”

If we want and our children are to live better, we have to make better choices, day by day.

14) More on Pujo Committee Findings, per Wikipedia.

Concentration and control of money and credit

The committee discovered that several forces, such as the consolidation of banks and interlocking directorates (small groups of the same men serving as directors on several different boards) had led to increased wealth accumulation of 42.9% of America’s total banking resources held by its twenty largest banks.^[4]Furthermore, and surprisingly to the investigators, it was found that “180 individuals” covering “341 directorships in 112 corporations…[possessed] $22,245,000,000 in aggregate resources of capitalization.”^[5] Finally, it was concluded that a system known counterintuitively as “Banking Ethics” restricted competition among banks and firms.

Despite the fact that lead attorney Samuel Untermyer had predetermined that no money trust would be found as part of the Investigation because “There is no agreement existing among these men that is in violation of the law”,^[6] and despite the refusal of aid by the Comptroller of the Currency, the failure of the Senate to pass the bill to amend section 5241 of the Revised Statutes, and the lack of any authoritative decision by the courts sustaining the committee’s right to access the books of the national banks, the Pujo Committee Report concluded in 1913 that a community of influential financial leaders had gained control of major manufacturing, transportation, mining, telecommunications and financial markets of the United States.^{[clarification needed]} The report revealed that at least eighteen different major financial corporations were under the control of a cartel led by J. P. Morgan, George F. Baker and James Stillman. These three men, through the resources of seven banks and trust companies (Banker’s Trust Co., Guaranty Trust Co., Astor Trust Co., National Bank of Commerce, Liberty National Bank, Chase National Bank, Farmer’s Loan and Trust Co.) controlled an estimated $2.1 billion. The report revealed that a handful of men held manipulative control of the New York Stock Exchange and attempted to evade interstate trade laws.

The Pujo Report singled out individual bankers including Paul Warburg, Jacob H. Schiff, Felix M. Warburg, Frank E. Peabody, William Rockefeller and Benjamin Strong, Jr. The report identified over $22 billion in resources and capitalization controlled through 341 directorships held in 112 corporations by members of the empire headed by J. P. Morgan.^[4]

Although Pujo left Congress in 1913, the findings of the committee inspired public support for ratification of the Sixteenth Amendment in 1913 that authorized a federal income tax, passage of the Federal Reserve Act that same year, and passage of the Clayton Antitrust Act in 1914. The findings were also widely publicized in the Louis Brandeis book, Other People’s Money and How the Bankers Use It.

House of Morgan partners blamed the April 1913 death of Morgan on the stress of testifying in the Pujo hearings, though other health factors were certainly involved.

With that background, and from what follows, the documentary “Shadow Ring” (posted above) will make more sense. It will also help debunk any concerns about the expression YouTube labeled this with, the “New World Order,” because this isn’t based on some far out conspiracy theory, but is rather based on sound history and evidence. While there might be (as in any article, video, production of whatever kind) tweaked or improved, it is a solid presentation of information that is often overlooked or misunderstood. Keep in mind that Presidents Obama (D), Bush 41 (R) and now Joe Biden (D) were among those that had the term “New World Order” were used by them and/or were applied to their respective work.

15) To illustrate that point and build upon it, consider this from left-leaning Copilot.

Who are the U.S. presidents that have used the term New World Order or some phrase that expressed a similar notion?

16) So, with those insights it will be interesting to note how these historic items shed light on the feature movie-length documentary posted below.  For those who have carefully read the above what follows may produce several ‘aha!’ moments.

17) A Look at Woodrow Wilson “Progressive” Plan and Lessons Learned

President Woodrow “Wilson thought that Progressives needed to use the power of government to implement solutions to new social and economic problems,” says the DigitalCommons.Salve.edu.

According to WoodrowWilsonHouse.org: “Wilson’s Presidency both overlapped with and was in many ways definitive of the politics of the Progressive Era (approx. 1890-1920).  The term “Progressive” was broadly defined, encompassing a wide array of policies and ideologies – often in contradiction with one another – which sought to mitigate social and economic inequalities at the turn-of-the-20thcentury.  The era witnessed the rapid expansion and overcrowding of cities, inadequate housing, unregulated labor, poor public health, farmer indebtedness and sharecropping – especially for southern Blacks, child labor, and the emergence of a wealth gap in which 1% of Americans owned nearly 90% of the nation’s wealth. While their solutions differed and often conflicted, Progressives shared the view that a proactive, expanded government was necessary to fix society’s ills.”

The impact of Wilson on the presidency, the federal government, and thus American society was profound, as the next quotes from UVA’s Miller Center explain. When you think about housing, economic policy, and what the federal government should be doing, it may be easy to miss why someone long dead should still matter to Americans today, but covering this history is useful for those who will do like Warren Buffett and take the time to do it, grasp it, and learn from it.

“Woodrow Wilson’s presidency fulfilled much of the progressive reform agenda and laid the foundations of the modern activist presidency.” “…Wilson’s administration fundamentally altered the nature and character of the presidency, despite his immediate successors’ return to the caretaker model of the presidency.”

“Before setting forth his agenda, Wilson consulted extensively with congressional leaders to ensure that his programs would be dealt with sympathetically when Congress considered them. In April 1913, at the opening of a special session of Congress called by the president to consider tariff reform, Wilson appeared personally before a joint session of the House and Senate to explain his program. His speech made headlines because no president had addressed Congress personally since John Adams, and it demonstrated that Wilson intended to play a dominant role in policy making.”

Crusade for Reform: Tariffs, Banking, and Anti-Trust Regulations

Wilson came into the White House like a “priestly visionary,” intent on expanding economic opportunity for people at the bottom of society and eliminating special privileges enjoyed by the nation’s richest and most powerful citizens.

What the above pull quotes fail to mention is that Wilson, a Democrat, was arguably a racist. While he purported to care about the people at the bottom rungs of society, changes that came with his agenda often harmed the very souls that they claimed would be beneficial for the poor and lower income groups. Additionally, while Wilson pitched a new vision for the federal government with expanded powers, new forms of taxation, and a government increasingly run by bureaucrats, even a casual reading of history reveals that much of what Wilson launched failed to attain their lofty goals in his era or since.

18) Back to UVA’s Miller Center account of President Wilson by Saladin Ambar.

Wilson focused first on tariff reform, pushing through Congress the Underwood-Simmons Act, which achieved the most significant reductions in rates since the Civil War. He argued that high tariffs created monopolies and hurt consumers, and his lower tariffs were especially popular in the South and West. The act offset lost revenue by providing for a small, graduated income tax as authorized by the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which was adopted on February 25, 1913, before Wilson took office.

Next, Wilson tackled the currency problem and banking reform. Since the Civil War, Democrats and agrarians had wanted a more flexible money supply and system of banking that would allow adjustments in the amount of money and credit available in times of economic expansion or crisis. By the early twentieth century, bankers and businessmen had also begun to demand reform. After the Panic of 1907 (the third such in many American’s lifetime), a special congressional investigating committee, the Pujo Committee, demonstrated to the American public the extent to which a handful of banks and corporations controlled the nation’s wealth. Reformers wanted a strong federal system that would regulate credit and oversee the nation’s currency.

In response to the demand for reform, Wilson pushed for the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, which established twelve regional reserve banks controlled by the Federal Reserve Board, a new federal agency whose members were appointed by the president. This new federal system could adjust interest rates and the nation’s money supply. Because it was authorized to issue currency based on government securities and “commercial paper” (the loans made to businesses by banks), the amount of money in circulation would expand or contract with the business cycle.

Additionally, the Federal Reserve was empowered to adjust the interest rates, or the discount rate, charged to its member banks for money deposited in the branch reserve banks, which would indirectly control the interest rates that banks charged their borrowers. The new system could also set the amount of money banks would have to hold as an offset against deposits (the reserve requirement), thus establishing a reserve fund for times of economic crisis. This act, won through considerable compromise between agrarian and banking interests, was probably the most important domestic achievement of the Wilson administration, one that still provides the framework for regulating the nation’s banks, credit, and money supply.

Wilson’s support of the Clayton Antitrust Act, which Congress passed in 1914, endeared him to labor and farmers because it excluded their organizations from antitrust prosecution under the Sherman Antitrust Act. It also fulfilled a 1912 campaign promise by prohibiting some anti-competitive business practices, such as price-fixing and interlocking directorates (in which the same people sit on the executive boards of competing companies in one industry). This act complemented the Federal Trade Commission law passed the same year, which created a new government board appointed by the president and empowered to investigate and publicize corrupt, unfair, or anti-competitive business practices. When Congress created a separate cabinet-level Department of Labor on March 4, 1913, Wilson strengthened his support among progressives by appointing a former union official, William Wilson, as secretary of labor.

In 1916, Wilson nominated Louis Brandeis, a staunch progressive who had fought in court against the exploitation of women and children workers, to the Supreme Court. He was the first Jewish justice on the Court. Following Brandeis’s nomination, Wilson supported improved credit for farmers and workers’ compensation for federal employees. He then pushed through a law to eliminate child labor, but the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional in 1918. When American railroad unions threatened to strike in 1916, Wilson supported and signed into law a bill securing an eight-hour workday for railroad employees—the Adamson Act, which paved the way to shortened workdays for all industrial workers.

In one area of reform, Wilson disappointed some of his supporters. In the 1912 election, Wilson appealed to African Americans to support his candidacy, and many did, inspired by the New Freedom platform that touted social justice and opportunity for all Americans. Once in office, however, President Wilson allowed members of his cabinet to introduce segregation into federal departments such as the Post Office and the Treasury Department. Wilson approached equality between whites and blacks in a way that was consistent with his Southern background; he was not an advocate for racial equality and claimed that segregation reduced friction between blacks and whites working together. African Americans protested the separation of blacks from whites in restrooms, cafeterias, and offices in the federal government through letters, petitions, and mass meetings but many African Americans who worked in the federal government were downgraded and discharged during Wilson’s administration. The president also did little to calm racial tensions in the United States that worsened with the migration of African Americans from the South to Northern cities and the end of World War I beyond issuing a proclamation against lynching and mob violence in 1918.

Federal Wartime Authority

Historians describe World War I as the first “total war” because it demanded the mobilization of belligerents’ entire societies and economies. However, because the United States entered the war three years after it began and fought for just over a year, the effects on the United States were less severe than for the other participants. Nevertheless, the war forced Wilson to set aside much of his reform agenda and encouraged at least the temporary centralization of power in Washington.

On the whole, the administration was able to manage mobilization by creating special agencies that were staffed largely by volunteers and functioned only for the duration of the war. For example, Wilson established a War Industries Board in 1917 under the direction of Bernard Baruch, a wealthy New York stock market investor, to coordinate industrial production. Baruch had little legal authority but was so skillful at persuasion that industrial production increased by 20 percent.

Wilson also appointed Herbert Hoover, a prominent mining engineer famous for his success in coordinating a massive relief program for German-occupied Belgium in the early years of the war, as national Food Administrator. Hoover, who later became the thirty-first president of the United States, promoted voluntary conservation of food with “Meatless Mondays,” “Wheatless Wednesdays,” and “war gardens.”; But Hoover’s most important achievement was in persuading farmers to expand production so rapidly that the United States was able not only to feed its own civilian and military populations, but to supply much of the food for the European Allies as well. The Food Administration also included a Fuel Administration, which encouraged fuel conservation by such methods as the introduction of daylight saving time.

Similar special agencies and boards supervised aircraft and ship building, acquired and operated merchant vessels to ship men and supplies to Europe, and ran a massive labor exchange program that matched workers and jobs around the country. The labor system achieved nearly full employment and good wages, and the unions cooperated by promising not to strike during the emergency. Union membership increased from 2.7 million to more than 4 million by 1919.

Not everything went smoothly, of course. Ship and aircraft construction programs never really got going before the end of the war, and both were plagued with inefficiency and minor financial scandals. The antiquated railroad system, upon which the country was almost completely dependent for moving people and goods, broke down completely in the winter of 1917-1918 and had to be nationalized for the duration of the war. The armed services drafted nearly four million men, but the British and French mostly provided weapons, uniforms, and transportation for the two million sent to Europe because American factories were unable to get into full production quickly enough.“

19) As we have routinely said, quoting a source doesn’t mean that we concur with each and every thing that source said or did. In fact, we may disagree with several aspects of what a source has expressed. That said, as we noted in the preface and Part I, to truly understand the present, at least a basic understanding of the past is required. One of the best explanations for that is by a former historian turned Congressional leader, and here is how he said it.

Again, our thanks to free email subscribers and all readers like you, as well as our tipsters/sources, sponsors and God for making and keeping us the runaway number one source for authentic “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 MHProNews.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.

http://latonykovach.com

Connect on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/latonykovach

Related References:

The text/image boxes below are linked to other reports, which can be accessed by clicking on them.’