I want to thank my friend Bill for bringing up a topic that I feel very strongly about: Big-money funds (July 26 letter: “Fred’s take on insanity.” )

First, let me say that Bill seems to be able to find only Democratic officials involved in BlackRock. Maybe it was just an oversight on Bill’s part so let me say that a quick search of Google will show there are as many politicians on the right involved with Blackrock as there are on the left.

From Business Insider I found this: “More than 20 state treasurers and trustees of public pension funds have demanded BlackRock disclose its political activity. During the election cycle, the asset manager paid $85,000 to 15 Republicans who later denied the results, per a Bloomberg report.”

The truth is that no money fund will give up an opportunity to gain influence with politicians because it would be financial suicide to do so. But we can’t crucify Blackrock when we consider that Bill’s pension, mine pension and millions of Americans’ pensions are likely invested with Blackrock and a slew of other huge money funds.

Would it surprise Americans if they learned that many of the biggest and wealthiest corporations in America are partly or mostly owned by Blackrock and 100 other huge pots of money consisting of trillions of dollars?

So what, you say? Well, here is the rub: When those funds buy control over a commodity like oil or natural gas or water rights or farmland or land for homes, they buy those for one reason only–to make a profit.

And the more the better. That is the nature and purpose of capitalism. The question we must ask is this: In the end, who benefits and who loses? I’ll let you decide who benefits, and I’ll tell you who loses. When those money funds sell their commodities, they often mark them up not 2 or 3 or 5%.

No, they go for 25% or 50% and even 100%.

The person at the bottom of the economic ladder can easily be destroyed by that kind of increase. One perfect example of this is the cost to own or rent a home. Twenty million Americans live in mobile home parks. Many of those parks are being bought up by the big money funds, and what do they do? They raise the rent by three or five or 10% every year.

Now there is a major contributor to inflation (ignored by the media I might add), and who does it harm the most? The people at the bottom of the economic ladder. When the price of gasoline goes up 50 cents a gallon, who is hurt the most? Again, people at the bottom.

The person at the middle and the top of the ladder will complain bitterly about it, but it does not devastate their budget as it does to those at the bottom. Republicans tell us repeatedly that inflation is caused by passing out too much money.

And there is an element of truth in that. But when a huge money fund buys a million acres of farmland and then sells it for a 20 or 30% profit, that ends up inflating the cost of food by sometimes more than 20 or 30%. And who suffers the most from that increase? The person at the bottom, as always.

The big money funds are creating another form of monopoly and the politicians look the other way because they are getting millions of dollars in donations from those funds to run their campaigns (which hinge on broadcasting vicious campaign propaganda that costs millions of dollars to produce–and makes the owners of the media very rich. And most of the media is owned by guess who–money funds).

That is a major contributor to inflation completely ignored by the “news media.” And many blindly believe, like Bill, that unregulated capitalism is not only harmless, but manna from heaven. In fact, for Bill to say that the “American economy is being destroyed” by Biden is to imply that Biden has more power and influence than the hundred hedge funds that basically control the economy of this country with their trillions of dollars under management. Bill’s statement is pure fantasy.

Bill and many suffer from that disease called “seeing what you believe.” P.S. The 50 biggest U.S. donors in gave or pledged nearly $28 billion to political campaigns in 2021. And the 100 largest hedge funds in the U.S. have $3.2 trillion in assets under management.

Money is power, folks, more power than any politician would ever dream of having. There are 15 billionaires who own the majority of the media in the U.S.

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