Connor Echols in Responsible Statecraft recently highlighted an article by Foreign Affairs that made the point that Russia and Ukraine had reached a tentative peace deal to end their war in April of 2022. Why was the deal scuttled? Or as their headline framed it “Diplomacy Watch: Why did the West stop a peace deal in Ukraine?” Because the costs of war are born by all involved, are adding to inflation, food, fertilizer, fuel, or other supply chain woes, and because there are potential lessons for manufactured housing industry professionals, those concerns will be examined. It is a sobering look at just how corrupt ‘the system’ can be, as the key takeaways from a range of sources shown are rapidly examined as today’s featured lead-in to the headlines for the week that was in MHVille found further below.
“Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent for Foreign Affairs. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”
The tweet referenced below in stated the following.
Remember it was a Ukrainian pro-Western paper that reported Johnson’s scuttling of the talks. Now, thanks to Hill, we know those talks actually bore fruit. The Western press, btw, continues to simply pretend this reporting doesn’t exist. https://t.co/pe6X7AK8XA
— Branko Marcetic (@BMarchetich) August 30, 2022
That noted, Echols’ narrative continues:
The apparent revelation raises some key questions: Why did Western leaders want to stop Kyiv from signing a seemingly good deal with Moscow? Do they consider the conflict a proxy war with Russia? And, most importantly, what would it take to get back to a deal?
For now, we can only speculate about the answers to the first two questions. The third is perhaps no less challenging, especially given the fact that both Ukraine and Russia have (at least publicly) hardened their negotiating positions significantly in recent months. But there are some clues that could help us answer it. …”
In a thoughtful essay by lifelong Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr, J.D., (RFJ Jr), entitled “A Letter to Liberals,” Kennedy may well have pointed to the obvious motivation. He does so by citing a Republican President.
“In what was arguably one of the most important speeches in American history, President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned our citizenry precisely against this kind of misplaced faith in federal scientific bureaucrats:
The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. . . . We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. In this revolution, research has become central; it also becomes more formalized, complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government. . . . The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded. We must . . . be alert to the . . . danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”
Weeks earlier, the Mercola website – which like RFK Jr. is persona non grata with the Democrat Biden White House – cited numerous sources under a headline that made the case that the war in the Ukraine was a profitable corporate money grab for some, while causing serious harm to millions of others. Stop and think about the possible parallels with manufactured housing, which if properly provided a broad application could benefit millions of more with affordable housing.
Mercola said in July 2022 that “in “Profits of War: Corporate Beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 Pentagon Spending Surge,” a 2021 report by the Watson Institute and Center for International Policy:14
“While the costs and consequences of America’s war policies of the twenty-first century have been well-documented, the question of who has pro ted from this approach has received less attention. …
Corporations…have been…the largest beneficiaries of the post-9/11 surge in military spending. Since the start of the war in Afghanistan, Pentagon spending has totaled over $14 trillion, one-third to one-half of which went to defense contractors.””
Mercola cited an array of sources, one of which was the U.K. Guardian in a report by Angela Giuffrida “who summarized comments made by Pope Francis during an interview with the Jesuit magazine La Civiltà Cattolica.” Millions forget or don’t know that the Pontiff Francis is a head of state. He has his own ‘intelligence’ information, as it were. Said Mercola “While the pontiff condemned the “ferocity and cruelty of the Russian troops,” he added that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was “perhaps somehow either provoked or not prevented,” and we should resist the temptation to think of the con ict in terms of “good versus evil.”
He explained he’d met an unnamed head of state some months earlier, who told him “he was very worried about how NATO was moving.” When Francis asked why, the head of state replied, “They are barking at the gates of Russia. They don’t understand that the Russians are imperial and can’t have any foreign power getting close to them.””
Restated, the pontiff’s remarks referenced by Mercola and others confirmed a point that MHProNews has editorially made some time ago, early on in this Russian-Ukraine conflict. Namely, that this conflict was predictable and avoidable.
Let’s restate that for emphasis. The entire war was avoidable. The loss of life and limbs, as well as the costs of this conflict were predictable and avoidable.
Hold those thoughts. Because the question asked by Echols are arguably answered in that brief outline. Ukraine and Russia have a contemporary history of corruption, per third-party researchers. That noted, that corruption has ties to the Biden family, as the new drama by Breitbart “My Son Hunter” dramatically describes. Recall that the Ukrainian, Russian, and Communist Chinese ties have been documented by Peter Schweizer, the president of the Government Accountability Institute, and his research colleagues. So, the corrupt behavior isn’t just in the Russia or Ukraine, it involves the U.S., the U.K. and several other ‘Western’ and NATO powers too. This too has been the subject of reports on MHProNews and/or MHLivingNews.
The videos above and below were part of a Mercola post in July 2022.
Possible Takeaways for MHVille?
Notice that each of the points in the Ukraine-Russian conflict analysis provided above is supported by published sources that can be verified by objectively minded people. This is corruption on a stunning scale, when the loss of life, limb, costs, and harms to people on various continents are considered. Because Ukraine has long been known as the breadbasket of Europe, it helps feed nations around the world.
Among the possible takeaways for manufactured housing, investors, and most others?
The information being provided by our current U.S. government and that of others is often warped to forge a plausible narrative that seems to justify keeping this conflict going.
As Mercola framed it: “Time and again, the U.S. has entered into intentionally unwinnable conflicts that have but one real purpose: To funnel taxpayer dollars into the private military industrial complex. Almost all of the $40 billion “Ukraine aid” package, for example, went straight to weapons manufacturers.10”
There is an apparent case to be made that there is a parallel to that in the U.S. housing market. After all, a key part of the solution to the affordable housing crisis was identified by the U.S. Congress in the run-up to the bipartisan passage of the Manufactured Housing Improvement Act of 2000 (MHIA).
- Manufactured homes have been proven by various studies and third-party data to be more storm resilient that millions have been led to believe.
- Manufactured homes are appreciating at a similar or sometimes faster rate than conventional, again per third-party research.
- The federal laws needed to make manufactured housing more widely available – more competitive financing and zoning/placement law as set forth in the MHIA – already exist.
Put differently, the current affordable housing crisis is utterly avoidable, just as the Ukrainian-Russian war was avoidable AND could have been ended, per the reports above, fairly early on.
But as an upcoming anniversary of a widely ignored HUD research statement revealed, public officials have known the causes and cures of the affordable housing crisis for decades. They have simply opted to talk about cures rather than act to effect the cures.
That begs the same question that is asked about the Ukrainian-Russian conflict. Who benefits from the current de facto policies that limit manufactured homes? The answer is deeper pocket firms that are busy consolidating manufactured housing. While others are benefiting too, the broader social, political, and economic harms being caused by these patterns of behavior are found in several of the reports for the headlines for the week that was in MHVille.
Don’t miss today’s postscript.
With no further adieu, here are the fact-packed reports with analysis and expert commentary found below in the week that was from 8.28 to 9.4.2022.
What’s New and Recent on MHLivingNews
What’s New and Recent from Washington, D.C. from MHARR
What’s New on the Masthead
What’s New on the Daily Business News on MHProNews
Saturday 9.3.2022
Friday 9.2.2022
Thursday 9.1.2022
Wednesday 8.31.2022
Tuesday 8.30.2022
Monday 8.29.2022
Sunday 8.28.2022
Postscript
“I am an FDR/Kennedy liberal, but my choice to openly question government policies for managing the pandemic—under both Presidents Biden and Trump—has made me pariah, primarily in liberal circles.” So said RFK Jr. in his ebook length essay, “A Letter to Liberals.”
Kennedy continued.
Like Galileo’s colleagues, so many of today’s “Lockdown Liberals” refuse to read or debate the science that they believe supports the government’s COVID countermeasures. Instead, they place their faith in the official orthodoxies of famously corrupt pharmaceutical companies and their notoriously captive federal agencies and expect others to do the same.
This blind obedience is itself a kind of novel virus that now infects the entire upper deck of the Democratic Party.
The core of this ideology is a cult-like fealty to COVID-19 countermeasures that are, in fact, scientifically indefensible. By necessity then, the acolytes of this theology must be ferociously hostile toward debate that might expose errors in government dogma and must, like the Roman Inquisition that extracted Galileo’s recantation under threat of burning at the stake, mercilessly suppress every utterance of heresy or dissent.
Moreover, Lockdown Liberalism’s enthusiastic embrace of censorship—once anathema to liberals—has expanded into a repudiation of almost all the precepts of traditional FDR/Kennedy liberalism.
This letter is a challenge to my fellow liberals to reexamine the scientific assertions upon which rest the oppressive policies that have savaged the presumptions of classical liberalism and the United States Constitution. It is past time that our nation had an open conversation about the strategies supposedly enacted for ending the pandemic, and the best measures for avoiding future crises. …” The entire RFK Jr. ebook was made available to MHProNews at this link here.
RFK Jr. carefully documented his book-length case against Dr. Anthony Fauci and the handling of the pandemic, who is now being moved toward retirement. He used facts, evidence, and reason to do so.
Note that supporters of deposed President Trump have in sizable numbers broken with the 45th President of the United States (POTUS) on the handling of the pandemic. The positions and reports provided by MHProNews and our MHLivingNews sister site over the past two years have often contradicted the official directives of various federal health professionals. But that was done based on research and evidence. When thousands of front-line doctors and medical professionals questioned the wisdom and validity of the lockdown and ‘vax’ mandate plans advanced by ‘the experts’ in the federal government, their logic moved MHProNews to fairly report their evidence-based points of view.
For those who invest the time to look at those items linked above, that evidence and thinking has stood the test of time. What has ironically failed the test of time are the COVID19 vax and the lockdown strategies. That ought to be a shocking reminder of just how badly multi-billion-dollar annual budget federal organizations failed in 2019-2022. For instance. After first assuring the public that the vax would ‘stop the spread’ of COVID19, both Fauci and Warren Buffett ally Bill Gates had to later admit that the ‘treatment’ being called a ‘vaccinee’ in fact did not stop the spread at all. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of cases of adverse reactions to the treatment have been reported officially.
But had U.S. intelligence and medical services reported promptly what they learned to then President Trump and had he in turn promptly sealed the travel with China, much of the pain of the past 2 years could have been avoided. The evidence was there, why did federal officials fail to properly act?
There are a range of takeaways from the medical, geo-political war, other failing policies and affordable/manufactured housing policies. As pro-MHI member Andy Gedo said in his well-known discussion-debate with this writer for MHProNews, there is value to looking at other scenarios and see what possible takeaways might be found for manufactured housing.
Our industry is underperforming. It has been increasingly underperforming since the enactment of the MHIA. It is also no surprise that the rate of home ownership has generally gone down since the MHIA was enacted, not because of the legislation, but rather in part because the legislation has not been properly implemented.
There is no ‘magic’ per se to MHProNews/MHLivingNews having a much better track record on accurate reports that stand the test of time when many in mainstream media have ‘gotten it wrong’ by following the ‘party line’ at the time. In theory, most anyone who devotes the time and effort could do similarly to the type of accurate near-real time analysis of the facts that are in the reports linked above. What is necessary is an inquiring mind that approaches the official accounts with skepticism. History reminds us that in the modern era, there are more reasons to doubt a public official than there are to trust them.
In the U.S. Constitutional system, power is limited and held in check for good reasons. When those constitutional boundaries are broken, the result is a loss of liberty and routinely a transfer of wealth from one class (often the working and middle class) to another class (often members of the upper class).
There are leftists and there are authentic liberals. RFK Jr is more of the later than the former. In his letter to liberals, many of those whom he is trying to persuade are those on the farther left side of the liberal scale.
But some conservatives or those on the right have lessons to learn too. One may agree, for example, with Trump on a range of issues. But that doesn’t mean that one had to agree with the handling of the COVID19 outbreak. The case can be made that Trump was sucker punched and blind-sided by people in the federal government that wanted to undermine his presidency and to prevent his re-election in 2020. Right or wrong, that attempt to depose Trump was so far ‘successful.’
That said, the Almighty works in mysterious ways. The incredible level of corruption in the U.S. government is being revealed. It may not have been so obvious had Trump continued on into a second consecutive term. The failure of Biden’s version of big government demonstrates that throwing money at problems is often just a method of political payoffs, as the Modular Home Builders Association (MHBA) Executive Director Tom Hardiman observed fairly early on in the Biden era. We don’t track Hardiman day by day, but not unlike MHARR, he is willing to push back and call things as they are or appear to be. Why does the larger and better funded MHI fail to do likewise?
It is only by taking an array of facts and laying them out like puzzle pieces that the evidence may be ‘fit’ together to see what the picture it forms emerges. The picture of the USA today is one that has a system so rigged that a limited group of elitists are profiting wildly while the majority of Americans are suffering by what has occurred in the last 19 months.
One article at a time, this platform attempts to provide a factual, evidence-based picture of reality. That will almost of necessity be opposed by those who don’t want the truth to be revealed.
It is the truth that sets people free. So said Jesus. Other faiths share a similar outlook. That means that lies and half-truths ensnare people.
The deceived and their money are often soon separated from one another. Through ‘inflation’ millions are watching their savings being depleted in value or in fact.
There are a range of possible solutions, but they must start with understanding what reality is. That is “Intelligence for you MHLife.” ©
Then, pressing public officials to act in accordance with the constitution and existing laws are useful. Accountability can be pressed at election time. The 2022 midterms are just 2 months off. The time to stop the PINO Biden corporatist agenda is rapidly coming upon us. ##
Again, our thanks to free email subscribers and all readers like you, 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.
Connect on LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/latonykovach
Related References:
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