Who Really Owns America? The Banks, The Billionaires, & The Deep State

Authored by John and Nisha Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls. They got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear… They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying. Lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else... It’s called the American Dream, ‘cause you have to be asleep to believe it.”

- George Carlin

As President Trump floats the idea of 50-year mortgages, Americans are being sold a new version of the American Dream—one that can never truly be owned, only leased from the banks, billionaires, and private equity landlords who profit from our permanent state of debt.

Which begs the question: who owns America?

Is it the government? The politicians? The corporations? The foreign investors? The American people?

While the Deep State keeps the nation divided and distracted by circus politics—the bread and circuses of empire—the police state’s stranglehold on power ensures the continuation of endless wars, runaway spending, and disregard for the rule of law.

Meanwhile, America is literally being bought and sold right out from under us.

Consider the facts.

Homeownership—the cornerstone of middle-class stability—is being transformed into a lifetime rental agreement. Cars, homes, and even college degrees have become indentured commodities in a debt-driven economy where the average American family serves as collateral for Wall Street’s profits.

This is not accidental.

It’s the natural evolution of an economy built to enrich the few at the expense of the many.

The American Dream has been repackaged as a subscription service—an illusion of ownership propped up by 0% down payments, predatory interest rates, and fine print that lasts a lifetime.

What used to be called “buying” is now simply renting from the future.

We’re losing more and more of our land every year to corporations and foreign interests. As individual Americans struggle just to make rent, corporations and foreign investors are quietly buying the country piece by piece. Foreign ownership of U.S. agricultural land has surged to more than 43 million acres—millions added in just the last few years. Meanwhile, large institutional landlords and single-family rental operators have amassed hundreds of thousands of houses across the country. Corporations now hold vast portfolios, converting would-be first-time buyers into permanent tenants. The result is a nation where more of our soil and shelter are controlled by entities whose primary allegiance is to shareholders—not communities.

The same dynamic plays out across industries.

We’re losing more and more of our businesses every year to foreign corporations and interests. Brands that once defined American enterprise—U.S. Steel, Budweiser, Jeep and Chrysler, Burger King, 7-Eleven—now fly international flags. Chinese companies and investors are also buying up major food companies, commercial and residential real estate, and other businesses. Global conglomerates have bought up the names we grew up with: U.S. Steel (now Japanese-owned); General Electric (Chinese-owned); Budweiser (Belgium); Burger King (Canada); 7-Eleven (Japan); Jeep, Chrysler, and Dodge (Netherlands); and IBM (China). The American economy has become a franchise of the world’s oligarchs.

We’re digging ourselves deeper and deeper into debt, both as a nation and as a populace. Debt has become America’s most profitable export. Washington borrows trillions it cannot repay; Wall Street packages our futures into products it can sell; and households shoulder record balances. The national debt (the amount the federal government has borrowed over the years and must pay back) has surged to more than $38 trillion under President Trump, “the fastest accumulation of a trillion dollars in debt outside of the COVID-19 pandemic.” In a nutshell, the U.S. government is funding its existence with a credit card, spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford. In this economy, debt has replaced freedom as our national currency.

The Fourth Estate—the supposed watchdog of power—has largely merged with the corporate state. Independent news agencies, which were supposed to act as bulwarks against government propaganda, have been subsumed by a global corporate takeover of newspapers, television and radio. A handful of corporations now control most of the media industry and, thus, the information dished out to the public. Likewise, with Facebook and Google having appointed themselves the arbiters of disinformation, we now find ourselves grappling with new levels of corporate censorship by entities with a history of colluding with the government to keep the citizenry mindless, muzzled and in the dark.

Most critically of all, however, the U.S. government, long ago sold to the highest bidders, now operates as a shell company for corporate interests. Nowhere is this state of affairs more evident than in the manufactured spectacle that is politics. Elections change the faces, not the system. Members of Congress do far more listening to donors than to citizens, so much so that they spend two-thirds of their time in office raising money. As Reuters reports, “It also means that lawmakers often spend more time listening to the concerns of the wealthy than anyone else.”

In the oligarchy that is the American police state, it clearly doesn’t matter who wins the White House, if they all answer to the same corporate shareholders.

So much for living the American dream.

“We the people” have become the new, permanent underclass in America.

We’re being forced to shell out money for endless wars that are bleeding us dry; money for surveillance systems to track our movements; money to further militarize our already militarized police; money to allow the government to raid our homes and bank accounts; money to fund schools where our kids learn nothing about freedom and everything about how to comply; and on and on.

This is no way of life.

It’s tempting to say that there’s little we can do about it, except that’s not quite accurate.

There are a few things we can do—demand transparency, reject cronyism and graft, insist on fair pricing and honest accounting methods, call a halt to incentive-driven government programs that prioritize profits over people—but it will require that “we the people” stop playing politics and stand united against the politicians and corporate interests who have turned our government and economy into a pay-to-play exercise in fascism.

Unfortunately, we’ve become so invested in identity politics that label us based on our political leanings that we’ve lost sight of the one label that unites us: we’re all Americans.

The powers-that-be want us to adopt an “us versus them” mindset that keeps us powerless and divided. Yet as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the only “us versus them” that matters is “we the people” against the Deep State.

The American Dream was meant to promise opportunity, not indentured servitude.

Yet in the American Police State, freedom itself is on loan—with interest.

We can keep renting our lives from the powerful few who profit from our compliance, or we can reclaim true ownership—of our persons, our labor, our government, and our future.

For as long as we still have one, the choice is ours.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Thu, 11/13/2025 - 16:20

First Casualty Of Power Bill Crisis? Pennsylvania Abandons Regional Carbon-Trading Market

The worsening power bill crisis across the Mid-Atlantic region, a combination of nation-killing climate change policies colliding with surging load growth from data centers, has forced Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro to sign legislation allowing the state to abandon the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI).

The Pennsylvania legislature ended the state's RGGI participation in the new state budget, which also cut funding tied to the climate initiative, effectively reversing the state's 2019 entry under former Governor Tom Wolf.

Senate Republicans have opposed RGGI for years, which, through its carbon-pricing structure, effectively penalizes the state's energy sector, increasing costs for the very plants that anchor the state's power grid and industrial economy. In return, power plants pay for CO₂ allowances that only send wholesale electricity prices higher, and result in higher power bills for businesses and families.

It's straightforward: climate taxes = higher power bills. 

Independent reports (from grid operator PJM and state regulators) have warned RGGI would:

• pressure to close gas and coal plants early

• loss of grid resilience

• higher risk of capacity shortages

Given surging load growth from data centers, RGGI was a disaster waiting to happen that would've stripped the grid of spare capacity, destabilized regional power supply, and effectively paralyzed the state into a power crisis, as its neighbors just south, in Maryland, have done through failed globalist climate crisis policies.

"For years, the Republicans who've led the Senate have used RGGI as an excuse to stall substantive conversations about energy production; today that excuse is gone," Shapiro told reporters during a press conference minutes before signing the budget.

Shapiro noted, "I am looking forward to aggressively pushing for policies that create more jobs in the energy sector, bring more clean energy onto our grid and reduce the cost of energy for all Pennsylvanians."

The question becomes whether other surrounding states, many of which are experiencing power bill crises, thanks to horrible green policies that strip stable spare capacity from grids and replace it with unreliable solar and wind, which collide with expanding load growth from data centers, quietly exit RGGI.

It's time to bring common sense back to Mid-Atlantic politics after decades of failed Democratic policies that have sparked a cost-of-living crisis. And for those leftist-controlled states still pushing the climate-crisis narrative, remember this: even Bill Gates has acknowledged that many of the extreme claims around climate policy have been overstated.

By the way, the whole climate crisis hoax delayed America's ability to add new reliable spare capacity on the grid - now it must play catch up (all detailed in this epic report).

Tyler Durden Thu, 11/13/2025 - 15:40

ChatGPT's Use Of Song Lyrics Violates Copyright, Munich Court Finds

Authored by Vince Dioquino via Decrypt.co,

• Judges found GEMA’s claims valid, ordering OpenAI to cease reproduction and provide damages and disclosure.

• The court said GPT-4 and GPT-4o “memorized” lyrics, amounting to reproduction under EU copyright rules.

• The decision, not yet final, could set a major European precedent on AI training data.

Germany’s national music rights organization secured a partial but decisive win against OpenAI after a Munich court ruled that ChatGPT’s underlying models unlawfully reproduced copyrighted German song lyrics.

The ruling orders OpenAI to cease reproduction, disclose relevant training details, and compensate rights holders.

It is not yet final, and OpenAI may appeal.

If upheld, the decision could reshape how AI companies source and license creative material in Europe, as regulators weigh broader obligations for model transparency and training-data provenance.

The case marks the first time a European court has found that a large language model violated copyright by memorizing protected works.

In its decision, the 42nd Civil Chamber of the Munich I Regional Court said that GPT-4 and GPT-4o contained “reproducible” lyrics from nine well-known songs, including Kristina Bach’s “Atemlos” and Rolf Zuckowski’s “Wie schön, dass du geboren bist.”

The court held that such memorization constitutes a “fixation” of the original works in the model’s parameters, satisfying the legal definition of reproduction under Article 2 of the EU InfoSoc Directive and Germany’s Copyright Act.

“At least in individual cases, when prompted accordingly, the model produces an output whose content is at least partially identical to content from the earlier training dataset,” a translated copy of the written judgement provided by the Munich court to Decrypt reads.

The model “generates a sequence of tokens that appears statistically plausible because, for example, it was contained in the training process in a particularly stable or frequently recurring form,” the court wrote, adding that because this “token sequence appeared on a large number of publicly accessible websites“ it meant that it was “included in the training dataset more than once."

In the pleadings, GEMA argued that the model's output lyrics were almost verbatim when prompted, proving that OpenAI’s systems had retained and reproduced the works.

OpenAI countered that its models do not store training data directly and that any output results from user prompts, not from deliberate copying.

The company also invoked text-and-data-mining exceptions, which allow temporary reproductions for analytical use.

“We disagree with the ruling and are considering next steps,” a spokesperson for OpenAI told Decrypt. “The decision is for a limited set of lyrics and does not impact the millions of people, businesses, and developers in Germany that use our technology every day.” 

OpenAI claims systems like theirs do not store or contain training data and thus do not hold copies of lyrics or other texts. Instead, these models learn patterns and generate new outputs based on patterns, OpenAI said.

The company told Decrypt that treating a model as if it contains stored works reflects a misunderstanding of how the technology works.

The court rejected those defenses, ruling that full reproductions embedded in a model’s structure fall outside the scope of data-mining exemptions.

“Training the models is not to be regarded as a usual and expected form of use that the rights holder must anticipate,” the court wrote. “This applies all the more when—as in the present case—the works are reproduced in the model, something that even the defendants themselves consider undesirable and against which countermeasures are taken.”

Decrypt reached out separately to GEMA for comment but has yet to receive a response by press time.

Tyler Durden Thu, 11/13/2025 - 15:20