How Easy It Is for Billionaires to Fool Almost Everyone

31 May 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Because billionaires ultimately control (by their wealth-generated ability to hire and fire people) not ONLY all of the mainstream ‘news’-media and the professorial chairs in the social ‘sciences’ and other “soft” (i.e., unscientific) ‘scientific’ fields, and their employees in think tanks, and publishing houses (upon which all supposedly ‘non’-fiction writers in those fields depend in order to get their books featured in book stores; billionaires ultimately control the culture, and the popular beliefs, and also the attitudes and beliefs of the ‘intelligentsia’ or ‘intellectuals’ (many if not most of whom are ultimately billionaires’ employees and can be demoted or fired by them) — and, so, the billionaires ultimately control the minds of the electorate (via those agents), and thus control the Government in a ‘democracy’.

If a person has thousands of millions of dollars, then one can place a very heavy thumb upon the scales of ‘justice’, so that it won’t BE justice, or a democracy. The ultimate judges are not the judges, and the ultimate law-makers are not the people who write the laws — all of those people got there because one or more billionaires was willing to spend whatever was necessary to spend in order to get that person s’elected’ (by billionaires) to ‘public’ office. Government officials aren’t really accountable to “the people,” but to the billionaires — the few people who have enough spare cash to be able to spend whatever it takes in order to control one or more of those ‘public’ officials. Virtually all ‘public’ officials are thus actually private officials, in a ‘democracy’.

Click on this 6-minute video, which simply but accurately summarizes the first-ever scientific study that (in 2014) proved this to be true about America’s ‘democracy’. Then, on 31 October 2018, three of the rather rare non-prostituted actual social scientists in the U.S. empire proved that the wealthiest 1% of the wealthiest 1% of Americans — the wealthiest ten-thousandth of Americans — donate 57.16% of all the money that funds U.S. political campaigns. The “Top 400 Donors” (all of whom are multi-billionaires, not merely billionaires) donate 29.86%, or virtually 30%, of all political money, in the U.S. But, actually: only billionaires (and an occasional mere centi-millionaire) who is among the ten largest donors to U.S. politics in a Presidential-election year, have any real impact in determining whom America’s next President will be. So, if you are one of the top 20 megadonors, then you are among the 10 to 20 people who actually get to select the Democratic Party’s or the Republican Party’s Presidential nominee — and thus the ultimate President. “One person one vote” this definitely is not, but instead it’s rule by the aristocracy (basically by the billionaires)

On 10 February 2026, I headlined “How America’s Billionaires Control the Votes of American Voters”, and described the entire system by which this collective dictatorship-by-the-wealthiest is controlled — how the U.S. legal and political system is structured to produce this outcome (rule by only the aristocracy, America’s Deep State):

A political Party such as the DNC or RNC is a private membership corporation, or “club,” which has no legal obligation to its voters but only to the individuals who are the Members of the Democratic National Committee, who control the DNC, or else of the Republican National Committee, who control the RNC. See HERE a law-review article about the 2017 case “Wilding v. DNC Services Corp.” which case concluded that a political Party may, if its Members wish, violate the Committee’s Charter and public promises and even the votes cast by its voters, in order to rig its primaries so as to select ONLY candidates whom its megadonors approve of. That is allowed in the U.S. It’s NOT illegal in America for a political Party to ignore what its voters want. It is the way that the American Government is run. Of course, the Members self-select each other to become Members, and their obsession is to serve their megadonors who provide the majority of the club’s funding. That motivation drives their decisions regardless of what the voters in their primary elections want, or whom they actually voted for. If the club’s Members are dissatisfied with a candidate whom its voters preferred but whom the club’s megadonors refuse to accept, then the club’s members will select a nominee whom its megadonors DO accept. Our primary elections are a total political charade — political theater. Once RFK Jr. knew this, he quit running against Biden.

The article that I linked-to there, is a lengthy analysis of the legal case that was brought against the DNC for its having violated the Party’s charter and the DNC’s public promises, by rigging its primaries so that Bernie Sanders would lose to Hillary Clinton in the allocationing of delegates to the National Convention, REGARDLESS of how voters in those primaries had actually voted, and that author rejects the outcome in the Judge’s ruling which said that the owners of the DNC, its Members, have no obligation whatsoever to the club’s voters. The author said on page 25 that “the law should impose on party committee members the fiduciary duties of loyalty and care so that they act in the interest of the entire party.” He thought that the voters for the Party ought to be considered as being members of the club and therefore represented in and by the club, but no basis for that exists in American law. The author was stating just his sentiment, not U.S. law. (On 7 November 2025, I presented my own recommendation of how the problem can be solved, which would require a new Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.) So, American political contests are actually just contests between two political Parties, each of which actually represents ONLY its megadonors — it is just one group of billionaires competing against another group of billionaires. The Government represents them — not the American public. This is the ideal neoliberal, or (as Americans call the ideology) libertarian, political situation, because it guarantees that the Government will represent property (wealth) — not persons — like a corporation represents only its owners, on the basis of one-share-one-vote, except that this is instead one-dollar-one-vote, and those dollars come predominantly from the megadonors, not from the mere voters. A donor who contributes below $200 is competing against the Party’s megadonors who each donate (directly and indirectly) in the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, or even hundreds of millions, of dollars. The super-rich will spend whatever, and however much, they need to spend, in order to get their nominees appointed by the club, to run the country. That is how the system works.

This development toward corruptness became supercharged by U.S. Supreme Court opinions starting with Buckely v. Valeo (1976) and climaxing with Citizens United v. FEC (2010). The basic theory behind these rulings was that political money is “speech” and that America’s First Amendment therefore allows no Governmental limitation upon it. (Consequently, for example, a billionaire has a thousand times as much of this “right” to “free” “speech” as a mere millionaire does — and the Government must not restrict anyone’s “right” to “free” “speech.”) In 2011, the U.S. legal theorist Zephyr Teachout headlined “The Historical Roots of Citizens United v. FEC” and documented that the jurists who did this had a striking lack of personal political experience and had overwhelmingly been academics instead. She also documented that the Constitution’s authors would be shocked at this ‘interpretation’ of their Constitution. “At the time the Constitution was drafted, fighting corruption was at the core of the drafters’ vision for the constitutive principles of the country,” and none of them had any idea that the First Amendment could some day become used as an excuse to ‘justify’ corrupting the country. It would indeed be ironic if the nation’s law professors have a more false understanding of the U.S. Constitution than ordinary Americans do, but maybe this is the case. Could academia actually be partly responsible for “manufacturing consent” in this fake democracy? How could it not be?

Walter Lippmann, on pages 4 and 5 in his brief (120-page) 1920 book Liberty and the News, was the first person to introduce to the public the concept of the “manufacture of [the voting public’s] consent” for ‘their’ ‘democratic’ Government’s policies, the “manufacturing” that he said was already starting to be done by the press, but he refused to blame billionaires (the people who, and whose corporations, control and advertise in the major ‘news’-media and the academic endowments and professorial chairs and think tanks) for doing this “manufacturing” (warping the public’s political understandings in the ways that serve the interests of those owners), in order for such a behind-the-scenes actual dictatorship by the billionaires to be able to call itself a “democracy” and to be believed by its own population to be such — and ESPECIALLY to be believed so by the populations in foreign countries so that the U.S. Government can then use as an excuse for sanctioning and invading and replacing the governments in ‘authoritarian’ countries, that this is being done BY a ‘democracy’, against a supposedly ‘authoritarian’ foreign Government, and is therefore (supposedly) morally okay. Consequently (since Lippmann DIDN’T blame the billionaires), the then rising 31-year-old employee of The Atlantic magazine was able subsequently to become one of America’s biggest stars as a journalist and as a historian during the 20th Century — BECAUSE he never revealed to the public WHOM their actual rulers were, the individuals who were not on the political stage, but who actually funded the careers of the individuals who ARE on that stage and who are presented by the club to the public as the nominees for the public to choose amongst to become the nation’s Governmental leaders (on behalf actually of the billionaires who had bought them — not of the electorate).

That basically is the system, which rules not only in America but throughout its empire — the American empire, which is the only surviving empire today, and which is constantly trying to become even larger than it already is. (This makes it imperialistic.) The American ideology for global control is called “neoconservatism,” and it became instituted on 25 July 1945, which was when American democracy (or what then remained of it) died, and the hegemonic American empire was born. It was the day when Harry Truman picked up and carried now for America the torch of global empire that had just been dropped by Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

As an example of how the billionaires — or their equivalents in wealth — controlled Governments in earlier times, the world’s wealthiest family in 1877, the Rothschild family, may be considered. In today’s dollars, their roughly $500-to-$1,000 million would be equivalent to roughly $500 billion to $1 trillion today.

In 1871, one of the Rothschilds’ major investments was in the young Englishman and champion of British imperialism, Cecil Rhodes, whose plan to buy up South African diamond mines to monopolize that industry led to enormous profits. In 1871, Rhodes drew up the first draft of his will, by which, upon his death (which occurred in 1902) a trust would be established to eventually restore the U.S. to the control by England’s aristocracy, by means of what Rhodes’s young protégé Winston Churchill ultimately called a “Special Relationship” between the two countries (and which special relationship Rhodes had advocated for). Churchill, at a special event in 1946 with the naive U.S. President Truman, finally established what Rhodes had envisioned in 1877, a type of re-unification of England with America as the henceforth English-and-American empire, to take over the entire world. In addition to Truman’s having created, on 25 July 1945, the start of the U.S. hegemonic empire, upon the advices from both Churchill and Truman’s personal hero (then General) Eisenhower, Truman also created, on 14 May 1948, the new nation of Israel, by providing the crucial U.S. vote at the U.N. to legally authorize the new nation. Earlier, on 2 November 1917, the British Government’s Foreign Office had sent to Lord Lionel Rothschild a “Balfour Declaration” to assure him that “His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.” However, the crucial decision toward that objective turned out to be made by America’s Truman, not by England. Imperialism is a personal network, and its life’s-blood is concentrated wealth, which gives its owners a unique, and the decisive type of, power, that can corrupt ANY electoral democracy, into an aristocracy — an imperialistic aristocracy (because billionaires are intensely imperialistic).

Karl Marx died in 1883, and, ever since the 1840s had been developing communism, and would not have been able to succeed with it unless he (they) had had the backing of at least one wealthy person. Marx had two: Friedrich Engels, whose fortune at his death was worth about £30,000 in 1895, equivalent today to roughly £4–5 million by inflation, and perhaps to £30–60 million (or $35 million) today when measured by relative economic status. Furthermore, Marx’s main employer was the New York Daily Tribune, which became the highest-circulating newspaper in the U.S. through weekly editions sent by mail. Founded in 1841 by editor and publisher Horace Greeley, it became a leading voice for reform movements and a major political force, particularly among Whigs and later Republicans. At its peak, it was the largest daily newspaper in New York City, and one of the most widely read papers in the United States. Greeley’s wealth at his death in 1872 was roughly $500,000 to $1 million, worth $15 to $30 million today, and a reasonable estimate is that Horace Greeley died with wealth equivalent to roughly $100–300 million today in terms of economic status.

Neither of those backers was what would today be billionaire-status, but they were much higher than middle-class, and without their backing, would the name “Karl Marx” be publicly known today? In other words, even the founder of communism needed the approval of at least SOME very wealthy individuals.

Marx and Engels falsely blamed for social problems “the bourgeoisie” INSTEAD OF “the aristocracy” (who were actually to blame for what Marx was condemning, far more to blame that the middle class were) and this lie allowed Marx’s writings to have enough upper-class appeal so that Marx could succeed, because ultimately success required some aristocratic acceptability. And this (his blaming of the “bourgeoisie” instead of “the aristocracy”) was an enormous lie, because imperialism and wars always have profited overwhelmingly the aristocracy, at the expense of the middle (or “bourgeois”) and the lower (or “proletariat”) classes.

Furthermore, academicians generally equate “The Left” with Marxism (communism), which is another lie, because the left has always existed; Marx did not create it. Moreover, the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia — which blacklists, blocks from linking to, sites that aren’t CIA-approved — says of “Socialism” (not all of which is communist), “Socialism is an economic and political philosophy encompassing diverse economic and social systems[1] characterized by social ownership of the means of production,[2] as opposed to private ownership.[3][4][5]” — as-if socialism were communism. Then its third paragraph opens: “The socialist political movement includes political philosophies that originated in the revolutionary movements of the mid-to-late 18th century and out of concern for the social problems that socialists associated with capitalism.[28] By the late 19th century, after the work of Karl Marx and his collaborator Friedrich Engels, socialism had come to signify anti-capitalism and advocacy for a post-capitalist system based on some form of social ownership of the means of production.[29][30]” This too could as well have been written by Joseph R. McCarthy, Donald Trump, or even the many neocon (pro-imperialist) Democrats. Is it just more of Cold War propaganda, to keep the aristocracy’s furnaces of political hate burning bright?

The political left actually has no need for Marx, but is so suckered by the billionaires’ determination that “The Left” should bear the blame for the sins, crimes, and stupidities, of Marxists, that this propaganda equating “The Left” with communism (Marxism) is all around us, deluding generation after generation against The Left, and keeping the world safe for the billionaires.

But here is the reality of Marx and his Marxism:

            It’s important to remember why Marxist economies fail. That failure comes from the falsities in his theory. Among those are:

           1. The labor theory of value cripples any Marxist economy because it is false. Marx believed it because he wanted it to be true, but it is not true. Consequently, the naturally existing feedback information that authentically free-market prices would communicate to corporate executives regarding consumer-demand, is absent in Marxist systems, so that there is rampant over-production of some goods and under-production of other goods. Per-capita GDP thus is inevitably low in any Marxist economy.

           2. The class-war has never been the middle class (“the bourgeoisie”) versus everybody else; it has always been the aristocracy versus everybody else (the public). Some people say that Marx blamed the “bourgeoisie” instead of the aristocrats because otherwise he’d get no aristocratic backers and supporters and so his writings wouldn’t be published and distributed. But for whatever reason, his system made no distinction between the aristocracy and everybody else, but instead was an intrinsic conflict between the middle class (which in his system merely included the aristocracy but was overwhelmingly predominantly not aristocrats but millions of small merchants and farmers) versus everybody else. In other words: his system targeted the wrong enemy, and this is why it rose to become famous. It distracted the public from its actual enemy. The public’s actual enemy is concentrated wealth, and that’s the super-rich themselves, and the entire one-dollar-one-vote, instead of one-person-one-vote, system that they buy and (via their corruption) impose upon the Government. Concentration of wealth is the evil, and was not targeted by Marx (perhaps because he was financially dependent upon the system that existed, and he thus declined to “rock the boat” by telling all of the truth, even if he had possessed any accurate understanding of what it was).

           3. Marxism is dictatorship by “the proletariat” against “the bourgeoisie,” but progressivism (actual leftism) instead supports no dictatorship at all, but only democracy, which is the opposite of any dictatorship. Democracy is one-person-one-vote and every resident upon the land being encouraged and allowed to vote, and news-media being entirely separate from the economy and from the government and controlled by neither but instead controlled in the way that a co-op is controlled — by their members — and all of which news-media are funded equally per member, by the federal Treasury, so that there is no discrimination favoring one news-medium over another news-medium. They are not dependent upon the billionaires. Though such a system is possible, it’s impossible under Marxism, because Marx endorsed a type of dictatorship. Therefore, even the very ideal of democracy is outright excluded in any Marxist system.

           4. Marx was not committed to basing all theory on, and deriving and establishing all theory only upon, the existing body of relevant empirical findings. He instead based his theorizing upon philosophers, none of whom understood (much less respected) science. Science isn’t a methodology, but is instead a meta-methodology. Every scientific methodology adheres to it. Marx’s views were instead shaped by various philosophers’ opinions.

            5. Marx wasn’t even clear about whether his theory was based on class, at all. For example, critical race theory was supposedly created by Marxists, though critical race theory is obsessed with race and ethnicity, instead of being class-based. Marxists are confused because Marx was confused; and Marx wouldn’t have become a ‘classic’ if he hadn’t been so confused that he’d be able to win backing even from some aristocrats (the people who had most of the money). And if critical race theory isn’t Marxist, then why aren’t people who claim to be Marxists condemning it, and saying it’s not, and documenting that it’s not? Marx was a philosopher, and philosophy has always been garbage, but only some garbage has won backing from aristocrats. Marx made the compromises he had to make in order to “succeed,” in a world that would remain controlled by the aristocracy. If his work had been any good, he’d have failed in his own time. His work had to be bad in order for him to have been able to succeed at what he was doing (social philosophy). He did what he had to do to succeed.

            So: just because an economic theory happens to be different from existing economic theory doesn’t indicate that it’s any better than the existing theory. It can be just as bad – or maybe even worse (such as Marxism probably is, on balance).

Leftists are hellishly stupid for continuing with Karl Marx even after both the Soviet Union (fully) and China (largely) abandoned him; such ’leftists’ hoist their mast to a corrupt and failed philosophy that condoned massive atrocities. Is this forgivable?

Furthermore, Marx also had psychological problems. He was born to a Jewish family in a deeply anti-Semitic Christian culture, and was himself a racist anti-Semite who believed that Judaism is not basically a religion but a “race” (which he was too stupid to recognize meant that he thought that he was a Jew no matter whether he agreed with Judaism’s beliefs —  the Torah or first five books of the Christian Bible). Here is how Marx expressed this racist hatred of Jews:

An article by Michael Ezra was posted at hurryupharry.org on 12 May 2009, “Karl Marx: Radical Antisemitism”, which quoted from Marx’s 1844 essay, “On the Jewish Question”, and, near the end of that essay by Marx, Marx said:

Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.

What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.

Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.

An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.

We recognize in Judaism, therefore, a general anti-social element of the present time, an element which through historical development – to which in this harmful respect the Jews have zealously contributed – has been brought to its present high level, at which it must necessarily begin to disintegrate.

In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.

  

Ezra’s article also quotes from Marx’s 4 January 1856 New York Daily Tribune article, “The Russian Loan” (“Image 4 of New-York daily tribune (New-York [N.Y.]), January 4, 1856” — headlined there on column 4), and here is what Ezra quoted from it:

Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.

… the real work is done by the Jews, and can only be done by them, as they monopolize the machinery of the loanmongering mysteries by concentrating their energies upon the barter trade in securities… Here and there and everywhere that a little capital courts investment, there is ever one of these little Jews ready to make a little suggestion or place a little bit of a loan. The smartest highwayman in the Abruzzi is not better posted up about the locale of the hard cash in a traveler’s valise or pocket than those Jews about any loose capital in the hands of a trader… The language spoken smells strongly of Babel, and the perfume which otherwise pervades the place is by no means of a choice kind.

… Thus do these loans, which are a curse to the people, a ruin to the holders, and a danger to the governments, become a blessing to the houses of the children of Judah. This Jew organization of loan-mongers is as dangerous to the people as the aristocratic organization of landowners… The fortunes amassed by these loan-mongers are immense, but the wrongs and sufferings thus entailed on the people and the encouragement thus afforded to their oppressors still remain to be told.

… The fact that 1855 years ago Christ drove the Jewish moneychangers out of the temple, and that the moneychangers of our age enlisted on the side of tyranny happen again chiefly to be Jews, is perhaps no more than a historical coincidence. The loan-mongering Jews of Europe do only on a larger and more obnoxious scale what many others do on one smaller and less significant. But it is only because the Jews are so strong that it is timely and expedient to expose and stigmatize their organization.

Ezra’s article also points out that,

When on holiday in Ramsgate in 1879, Marx reported to Engels that the resort contained “many Jews and fleas.” In an earlier letter to Engels, Marx referred to Ferdinand Lassalle as a “Jewish nigger.” Professor Fine has not discussed this but I do not see such comments as “witty” or “ironic,” they are simply racist.

If they are not ignoring such expressions, apologists for Marx will even try and whitewash them. In a 1942 Soviet English language publication of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Selected Correspondence, 1846-1895, such terminology could not be ignored and the following note (cited by Diane Paul, “‘In the Interests of Civilization’: Marxist Views of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 1981) was included:

“With reference to the use of the word ‘nigger’ which occurs in this book: Marx used the word while living in England, in the last century. The word does not have the same connotation as it has now in the U.S. and should be read as ‘Negro’ whenever it occurs in the text.”

The excuse seems to be along the lines of: “Yes, a racist term is used, but pretend that a non racist term was used instead.” It is a simply ludicrous excuse and it exposes the depths to which apologists of Marx will sink.

In other words: masses who follow the Parties of liberal billionaires try to find excuses for Marx’s bigotries, whereas masses who follow the Parties of conservative billionaires try to smear leftists as being followers of Marx. Thus, both liberal and conservative masses hate each other and believe falsehoods about history, instead of document the truth about history and hate the billionaires (who exploit them both) — the aristocracy that Marx let off his hook — who control the minds of both (the liberal and the conservative) masses. And this is the way that the billionaires-controlled ‘democracies’ (actually imperialistic fascisms) function.

It’s easy for billionaires to fool almost everyone, because any billionaire is rich enough to hire the best experts at fooling the public enough so that the only candidates who can win will be ones that are backed by at least enough billionaires to spend however much is necessary to spend in order to defeat any candidate that all of the billionaires oppose. Wealth can almost invariably drown out truth whenever the truth poses a threat to the very wealthiest. And how likely is it that the very wealthiest will want the public to know this? So, the public doesn’t know it; and, instead, Republican voters blame Democratic voters, and Democratic voters blame Republican voters. The basic aristocratic strategy has always been: Divide and rule. I have elsewhere stated my proposed way to fix this problem, and it would (as I said) require adding an Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.