“Oxfam is a global organization working to end the injustice of poverty. We help people build better futures for themselves, hold the powerful accountable, and save lives in disasters,” say the organization about itself in their about us page. In a media release to MHProNews and others, the Oxfam nonprofit said the following.  The release are  their facts and commentary. It will be followed by an MHProNews analysis and commentary.

 

Pharmaceutical and tech companies and wealthy white Americans benefit from dramatic pandemic profits, further exacerbating inequality

While the United States faces the deepest economic downturn since the Great Depression because of COVID-19, a subset of corporations is reaping dramatic profits that are flowing to their already wealthy, mostly white male shareholders, further exacerbating existing inequalities, according to a new analysis released by Oxfam today.

In Pandemic Profiteers Exposed, Oxfam found that 17 of the top 25 most profitable US corporations, including Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Facebook, Pfizer, and Visa, are expected to make almost $85 billion more in 2020 than in previous years. Oxfam is calling for a resurrection of the WWII-era excess profits tax to limit pandemic price-gouging, level the playing field between companies, and raise much needed funds for COVID relief and recovery, such as providing ongoing COVID-19 testing and vaccines for every person on the planet.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deep inequalities and massive failures in our economic system, leaving tens of millions of people in the United States without jobs, devastating public services, and bankrupting countless small businesses,” said Irit Tamir, director of the private sector department at Oxfam America. “Yet at the same time, thanks to a combination of government assistance and pure luck, a handful of corporations are raking it in and making already rich shareholders even richer.”

Companies in S&P 500 Index saw a 12% decline in profits in the first quarter of 2020, with an expectation of a 39% drop in profits in the second quarter. Small US companies are reporting their earnings have halved in the first quarter of 2020, with analysts expecting these small firms to lose as stunning 85% in profits in the second quarter.

But 17 out of America’s top 25 corporations are making extraordinary profits during the pandemic. While these profits could have been invested in protecting workers and in innovation, Oxfam found that in 2020 the top 25 most profitable US corporations are set to distribute 99% of net profits to shareholders—who are overwhelmingly white and predominantly male.

“Profit is not a four-letter word, but when such dramatic and excessive profits are made during a time of global crisis and distributed to the wealthiest, the situation is not just fundamentally unjust, it is also economically inefficient,” said Niko Lusiani, senior advisor on corporate advocacy at Oxfam America, and lead author of the analysis. “Corporations like Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Facebook, Pfizer, and Visa, flush with billions in pandemic profits and disproportionately benefitting from taxpayer-funded economic relief, now have the opportunity to gobble up smaller companies and deepen their market power at the expense of true competition. Taxing these windfall profits is a fair, time-tested way to rebuild better.”

Oxfam also found that more than 9 out of every 10 dollars of excess pandemic profits are likely to end up in the hands of White Americans, with only 32 cents for Black and Latinx communities. Meanwhile, Black deaths from COVID-19 are nearly two times greater than would be expected based on their share of the US population, with Latinx people also making up a greater share of confirmed cases than their share of the population.

“With the COVID-19 crisis disproportionately hitting Black and Latinx families across the nation, pandemic profiteering that almost exclusively benefits white, mostly male shareholders will make existing inequalities worse,” continued Tamir. “With public health infrastructures failing, millions of people out work, and longstanding racial injustices sparking the largest social movement in US history, corporations have made their highest priority to get themselves immunity from COVID-related lawsuits from workers and consumers. This moment demands shared sacrifice, not me-first profiteering.”

To level the playing field and prevent super-profitable corporations from manipulating their position of strength, Oxfam is calling for policy makers to institute a Pandemic Profits Tax on excess corporate profits during this crisis. Such a tax would not affect struggling businesses or small enterprises, only those large corporations earning sums above and beyond what they earned on average before the pandemic. The US put in place a similar tax throughout the 1940s to help mobilize resources, shared sacrifice and trust during our country’s last all-encompassing global test.

“Taxing excess profits during a crisis is an old idea whose time has come again,” said Tamir. “Repurposing a tool used during WWII could raise almost 80 billion dollars from just 17 super-profitable corporations, which could be reinvested in fighting COVID-19 and its economic toll.”

Rather than redistributing profits away from small businesses and taxpayers to the wealthiest, these resources should be more usefully redeployed in the fight against growing COVID-19 inequalities. Oxfam’s estimates that such a tax could fund immediate and ongoing global coronavirus testing needs and deliver a COVID-19 vaccine to everyone on the planet, including necessary R&D, manufacturing, procurement, distribution and delivery.

##

MHProNews, Additional Information, Analysis and Commentary

Oxfam America says the following on their website.

“We hold the powerful accountable

Local to global, Oxfam uses advocacy to tackle the systems, policies, and practices that keep people trapped in poverty. We take on inequality, climate justice, gender justice, and inequities in the food chain, and we advocate for the basic human rights and dignity of survivors of conflicts and disasters. We challenge governments, multinational companies, international organizations, and other actors to use their vast power and influence to improve the lives of poor and vulnerable people.”

Interesting, but really?

Oxfam fits a broader pattern of nonprofits, some of which MHProNews and MHLivingNews – among others noted below – has previously spotlighted.

Part of that pattern is this. Wealthy oligarchs and their corporate interests help fund such groups. They use slick marketing materials. They have slogans that sound appealing and difficult to argue with. Those threads will be demonstrated below.

However, what groups like Oxfam routinely suggest are policies that would fail to achieve the goal that they claim to want, namely, more economic and social justice.

 

 

Rephrased, Oxfam and others like them are ‘informative’ to a degree. But it similar to what Peter Buffett said of his father Warren Buffett’s and other nonprofits. They mouth platitudes that fails to change the underlying problems. “This [Charitable-Industrial Complex} just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place.” Their donations limit people who are “further locked into a system that will not allow the true flourishing of his or her nature and the opportunity to live a joyful and fulfilled life.”  That’s Peter Buffett, Warren Buffett’s son’s words.

 

Peter Buffett, Warren’s Son on Charitable-Industrial Complex and Philanthro-Feudalism – Insiders Look at Nonprofits, Are They Protecting or Harming Supposed Beneficiaries?

 

 

Finger Pointing

It has been noted previously that there is a ploy that is used around the world. One party points a finger and makes often bold allegations and claims.  As an MHProNews reader aptly said, ‘when someone points a finger, three others are pointing back at them.’ This writer happens to be of Hungarian decent. In the Magyar language there is an expression that can be translated as ‘the one making the accusation, that one is the guilty party.’

Nick Hanauer is a billionaire who has talked for years about the pitchforks coming.

 

 

The pitchforks are no longer coming. The proverbial pitchforks are currently on the streets of Portland, Seattle, Chicago, New York, Washington DC and others where riots, violence, looting, death and destruction of property have been occurring for weeks since the grizzly death of George Floyd in a video recorded ‘death by cop.’

But the financial support for these types of activities are often oddly lacking in mainstream media reports. Follow the money trail is a time-tested method used by investigative journalists, law enforcement, and others.

 

 

So why is it that so few are following the money trail to Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, George Soros and others who hold views and follow similar patterns like them?

 

Dark Money-Billionaires Buffett, Gates, Soros Funding Black Lives Matter, Antifa – Named by AG Barr in Riots, Looting – Hijacking Peaceful George Floyd Death Racial Justice Protests

 

 

Many of the facts that Oxfam points to are true enough. But it is their policy proposals that are wrong. MHProNews has spent years on basic concepts that have to be repeated because there is widespread propaganda that repeats the opposite.

Higher taxes and higher regulations routinely benefit the wealthy and large corporate interests.

 

 

More to the point, the system has been so rigged that the largest corporate interests – by accident or design – have established a ‘heads I win, tails you lose’ economy. They buy cover in part by supporting nonprofits such as Oxfam or Inequality that correctly identify that a few are growing wealthy during the pandemic.

 

But it is often those same uber rich that are financially supporting those messages from nonprofits such as Oxfam. One might ask, where is the logic of the oligarchs that are supporting messages that seem to be against their own interests?

That is one of the most telling tales of modern times.

“The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist” said actor Kevin Spacey in the movie The Usual Suspects. More specifically, the U.K. Telegraph said in 2018 “Kevin Spacey won an Oscar for his role as the narrator Verbal Kint in The Usual Suspects – a 1995 mystery thriller about super criminal Keyser Söze – and Spacey had the final line: “The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. And like that – poof – he’s gone!”

The system has been rigged. It was rigged years before Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and President Donald Trump each declared that to be so, as the graphic above reflects.

 

Unrigging the system ought to be the goal. Ironically, Senator Warren and President Trump have both pointed to the need for antitrust law to be enforced. MHLivingNews pointed to a fine analysis by Warren, which for some reason gets mentioned but she herself routinely fails to push that topic at the most opportune times. Why is it that billionaires support Warren? Because her most common policy ‘solution’ mirrors that of Oxfam.

Tax the rich.

But it is the rich that have rigged the tax system so that nonprofits like those supported by the oligarchs are tax sheltered. That wealth is then used to mix in a subtle way. They use accurate facts but then makes policy arguments that won’t change those facts.

Additionally, several of these voices have worked for years – right or wrong – to so vilify Donald Trump that they have made him seem like the devil himself.

These 3 Questions and Answers exchange below are with a reader of MHProNews who is self-proclaimed anti-Trump.

 

Q1) Have you or your wife ever been wrong about something? [I know I have…]

A) Of course.

Q2) Have you or your wife ever been wrong about something you were previously convinced you were correct about? [Millions for centuries believed in a flat earth…they were wrong.]

A) Of course.

Q3) Agree or disagree as it fits you. Donald Trump and/or his supporters is/are responsible for all of the ills and turmoil that have occurred in America since his 2015 announcement that he would run for the presidency.

A) Of course not. Please stop trying to proselytize me.

 

That person isn’t the only one such a off-the-record discussion has been engaged in.

People are reluctant to see that they have been gaslighted into a pattern of behavior. The tendency to be in denial is age-old.

Those realities have been used for centuries by those who see that clever deceptions can be profitable to those who do the deceiving.

 

They then refuse to see that they are one of millions who the system that they say they loathe has deliberately made Donald Trump the boogie man for the nations ills, even though the pattern has occurred long before he ran for president.

It isn’t as if President Trump is the Second Coming. He doesn’t claim to be a saint. But when people in his own party – the ‘party establishment’ – turned on him and stay against him, essentially teaming up with Democrats. That’s a huge clue that President Trump is a threat to their agenda. Millions get that, but millions of others miss it.

“What sorrow for those who say that evil is good and good is evil, that dark is light and light is dark, that bitter is sweet and sweet is bitter.” Isaiah 5:20, English Standard Version.

God himself says that the truth should not be twisted. For the over two billion who believe that Jesus is “the Son of God” – it is telling that Jesus overturned the tables of the money changers. He preached and acted in ways that upset the system in his day.

That battle of truth vs. half-truths, paltering and slippery lies is ongoing.

• Oxfam is partially right. The system is rigged.
• Inequality is partially right. The system is rigged.

But some of the same people that finance those groups are the same ones that have rigged the system. That is what Inequality, Oxfam and others like them arguably don’t readily disclose. 

The ones supporting former Obama-era VP Joe Biden’s ‘tax the rich’ include the rich. If the rich truly wanted to pay more, why don’t they just write the Treasury a check?

Because it is a ruse. It is a ploy to keep them from having the pitchforks come after them. And those same pitchforks – using rocks, bottles, bricks, and other weapons – are attacking the police who are a line of defense against the breakdown of law and order.

The coalition that President Trump is forming is not the standard Republican coalition. It includes more minorities because the policies of the past have hurt them.

The ones calling President Trump a racist are the racists. Joe Biden condemned President Trump as the first racist president, really? What about Democrats Woodrow Wilson or Lyndon Banes Johnson? The finger pointers arguably are the guilty ones.

 

Black Lives Matter-Slavery, Racial History, Economic Inequality, Affordable Home Ownership–White Billionaires Getting Richer

 

Repeating a lie often doesn’t make a lie true.

In the world of affordable housing world, manufactured housing has been weaponized from within, just as other aspects of the economy have been undermined from within.

History, Financial Ties-Black Lives Matter, Antifa, Billionaires Warren Buffett, Bill Gates & George Soros–Economic, Political Upheaval Spotlighted by Mary Walter, Tony Kovach on Brian Kilmeade Show

One of the answers is to enforce the law.

MHARR Rips “De Facto Monopoly,” “Sham Process,” at HUD – Washington – Financing, Zoning, Regulatory Updates

 

That includes antitrust law that has too long been neglected by both major parties.

The Oxfam report is interesting because it makes useful points. Quoting:

“The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed deep inequalities and massive failures in our economic system, leaving tens of millions of people in the United States without jobs, devastating public services, and bankrupting countless small businesses,” said Irit Tamir, director of the private sector department at Oxfam America. “Yet at the same time, thanks to a combination of government assistance and pure luck, a handful of corporations are raking it in and making already rich shareholders even richer.”

They say that profit is not a four-letter word. We agree. Socialism isn’t the answer. So why are capitalists backing socialists?

Trevor Loudon’s “Who’s Who of House Pro-Socialists…Is Your Representative On The List?” Plus, Manufactured Housing Investing, Stock Updates

But neither is crony capitalism that has rigged the system. Violent Black Lives Matter backers in the streets are following self-proclaimed Marxists.

“We are trained Marxists.” – Black Lives Matter (BLM) co-founder Patrisse Cullors, “Deception and Misdirection” – Capital Research Center

And that BLM group has been funded too by the same people types of oligarchs, corporations, and their nonprofit interests that support groups like Oxfam.

It is the Oxfam policy stance that is incorrect, because it will only fuel those who have rigged the system that Oxfam and others like them claim to want to cure.

Influence Watch followed the money trail of Oxfam.

Included among the major funders?

Oxfam America has received grants from large liberal donors that include:

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has given 42 grants worth at least $10.6 million Oxfam America with 42 grants given, including over a half million dollar in 2017.^{[74] [75] [76] [77]}

…

George Soros donated $273,585 to Oxfam America in 2013 to support the group’s climate agenda.^[83]

 

The usual suspects are back. Because Warren Buffett and Bill Gates are all major donors and sit on the board of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  While many on the right point to George Soros, they for too many years failed to mention or emphasize the role of Gates, Buffett and other uber-rich oligarchs have played in rigging the nonprofit system. Influence Watch also noted that an estimated “$100 million in U.S. federal grants.[86]” went to Oxfam international.  Your tax dollars are at work supporting an agenda that Influence Watch says includes these progressive or left-wing agendas, many of which would undermine American workers, smaller American businesses, and American independence from those who push for a globalist agenda.

 

Oxfam per Influence Watch

• Advocacy Agenda
  • Environmentalism
  • Immigration Policy
  • Economic Policy
• Other Controversies
  • Credibility Issues
  • Israel-Palestine Controversy
  • Attacks on President Trump
  • Globalist Agenda
• Lobbying

Several of those issues have been unpacked in prior MHProNews reports. The short version is that each of those agenda undermines small businesses and working people already in America by the millions.

The Capital Research Center has made similar points about Oxfam as Influence Watch.

A phrase used by Capital Research Center to describe the ploys used are: “Deception & Misdirection.”

The system is rigged. A common weapon is twisting or ignoring all of the facts.

 

Warren Buffett Declared “Class Warfare,” Buffett Says Fellow Billionaires – “We’re Winning”

 

The reason so much of the system opposes President Trump is that they see him as the largest threat to upending the system. That’s not to say that the 45^th president is perfect. He’s not. It is to say that he and his supporters are pushing back at the rigged system.

Virtually every major world religion takes a dim view of lying and deception. Christians, Jews, and Muslims are in those groups.

 

 

Of course, the oligarchs and their minions will use every trick including “Deception and Misdirection” to attack and defeat President Trump and unjustly label all of his backers as “racists.” The election which is only about 100 days away.

It is going to get worse before it gets better.

To learn more, see the related reports linked herein or below the byline.

 

 

Your ability to practice your business and profession depend in good measure on safety and security. Peace and protected rights, therefor, are vital. Law and order are essential.

 

 

Don’t forget that it is always about getting to the root cause of problems.  It is all too easy to chase the latest bright and shiny ball. Each issue – properly understood – has a root cause that must be addressed.

A New Governing Majority?

There is a potential for a new governing coalition to emerge. It would be made up of those who desire opportunity, law, and order.  It could attract people of all races, genders, and religious beliefs. Identity politics and the politics of division have certainly had a good run. The argument is being made by some on the political right that the Democratic Party is today operated on behalf of billionaires, big banks, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, Big Media and Hollywood.  They use the disadvantaged for cover. If so, that would give Republicans the opportunity to be the party of small business, seniors, workers, and all those who desire law and order in a just society marked by free speech.

Will that occur?

As noted above, it is often those on the left who are calling out others on the left for manipulation of the news. They are certainly not pro-Trump voices. They point the finger in all directions.

 

 

But the irony is that those voices are saying very similar things to what voices on the right have been saying for some time.  Will these various camps start listening to each other and get beyond sticking points to look at the root issues of the day?

 

 

Millions were taught decades ago the acronym “TANSTAFL.”

“There is no such thing as a free lunch.” Someone always pays. The trick being used by the oligarchs that have so much influence over America is that they pay for nonprofits that claim they want to tax the rich and give all kinds of goodies to the masses. Such promises, promises sound appealing but that can’t and won’t be kept.

There is always more to come, so stay tuned with 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.

Fear & Frustration-Constitutionality of Business, Religious Shutdowns, Other Restrictions Challenged, plus Sunday Headlines Review 6.28 to 7.5.2020

New Data Surfaces on Buffett Family, Foundation Funding Sources Which Attacked Manufactured Housing, plus Manufactured Home Stock, Investing Updates

Complaints to State and Federal Officials, Agencies About Corrupt Practices in Manufactured Housing Industry Growing

 

“Where the hell have you been?” – MH Communities Giant Equity Lifestyle Properties Sees Pandemic Gold, Official Remarks, ELS Moves

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