The year the White House turned into the headquarters of an international crime syndicate

2025 will go down in history as the year when Trump and his criminal gang moved into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to extort the American people and run an international protection racket

Welcome to another weekend in Trump’s year zero. We face another day when we have no idea what Mad King Don will chose to do.

We are not born racist, homophobic, misogynistic, greedy and void of a moral compass. We are taught it by those around us. There is absolutely no case for having more money than we can spend in a lifetime, yet here we are. The insatiable appetites of the rich and powerful will never be satisfied until they have extracted every grain of wealth from every strata of society.

To be very clear, NOBODY and I mean NOBODY needs to be living in poverty in America in 2025. Homelessness does NOT need to exist. Always the clarion cry of the rich is, ‘Those that live in poverty are just not working hard enough to succeed. They just need to work harder and poverty will be in the rear view mirror’. It is estimated that around half of the top 5% either inherit their wealth or come from an affluent background.

According to the Fed Reserve survey at the end of 2022, to be in the top 5% you need to have a net worth of around $3,795,000. Below breaks this down into age groups.

Table provided by nasdaq.com

The figures quoted in this piece are from 2021 and 2022, so rest assured the numbers are likely to be bigger now. To break this down further, the average wages of top earners look like this

I’m just providing these broad brush numbers for the sake of context, because it’s always easier to have a baseline from which to build out the argument. The key to free market capitalism is, left unregulated it delivers what we are seeing today, from an ever widening wealth gap. Truth is, it’s no longer a gap, it’s a chasm. It’s important to recognise, Democrats despite tinkering at the edges of this fiscal abuse by the wealthy, have nowhere near done enough to curb their fiscal crimes against American workers and families. All too often we see charts and numbers, but poverty is not a number to those enduring it, it’s like being economically waterboarded. You feel like you are drowning in despair unable to breath or see an exit ramp.

I have said many times, Joe Biden stood on the precipice of a transformative era in which so much could have been done to change the lives of so many. It saddens me, his hubris smothered what could have delivered so much to so many. I make no excuses for my liberal values and I refuse not to wear them as a badge of honor. What we have allowed MAGA to do, is trash the very values we stand for, to a point where we are fearful of mentioning the basic tenets of equality and fairness. Republicans have been allowed to take the American flag hostage along with the term ‘patriot’. The day I have to abandon my values, is the day I am no longer of any value to society.

I made this short film at the time of the ‘Build Back Better Plan’ and it is representative of how I felt in that moment. I felt true change was coming, little did I know, the plans the Heritage Foundation had lined up for America.

There are some who would call me a bleeding heart liberal, but I believe even now in the darkest of times, hope can triumph over fear and repression. Republicans have capitalized on the power of selling fear and lies, because it appeals to our worst base instincts.

The wealth gap is like a malignant cancer on society, it eats away at the very fabric of which holds communities together. It leaves children in poverty, and 53 million American workers earning less than $20,000 a year, not to mention the millions of seniors approaching retirement, unsure how or if they will survive. To these people there’s nothing great about America and that’s what Democrats failed to take account of last November.

In 2023 the estimated collective personal annual income in the US was $23 trillion. This includes wages and investments. To put that into context, if everyone donated their income for a year, America would be nowhere near being able to pay off it’s national debt. I think you can safely assume the US has a debt problem, but that won’t stop Republicans attempting to pass a budget which will add a further $7 trillion to the tab, in order to fund tax cuts for the rich. This will shift yet more money from the bottom and the middle to the top. It is an act of fiscal and societal lunacy.

Just for a laugh, let’s go all communist for a moment. There are 163.51 million workers in the US in 2025. Let’s take the total US collective earned income from 2 years ago of $23 trillion and distribute it evenly across the workforce. It would give each worker $140,664, so a 2 income family would receive $281,328. Now imagine what this would do for the US economy. The consumer sentiment index would explode as low income workers poured money back into the economy on goods and services. OK, OK, inflation would sky rocket ironically, because the low and middle income workers would be price gouged by the rich, as their wealth grew again to soak up that consumer spending. This is how totally f*cked up the system is. Even if the rich gave a one year share of their income to fund every worker in America equally, they would instantly see that money come flooding back into their bank, NOT from fellow rich folk who have better things to do than boost the US economy, but from hard pressed low and middle income workers who would put the money back into the economy.

I am minded of this 12 year old infographic by a Harvard business professor, which is as relevant today as it was when it was created.

It’s hard to imagine what it would actually look like today. The one thing we have learned from unregulated capitalism, is there is no low bar when it comes to profit. Ship jobs to China, no problem. Buy politicians? absolutely. Participate in corporate welfare in times of global economic stress? But of course. Their whole philosophy is ‘carpe momentum’ (seize the moment).

When the recession of 2008 hit as a result of Banks embarking on a criminal ponzi scheme. They knew it would destroy the lives of many poor Americans, people who they had conned into taking out unaffordable mortgages. The perpetrators, along with their corporate drinking partners were the first in line with their hands out for help from a government they dreamed of dismantling. They were ‘seizing the moment’ and there was not one thought given to those at the bottom who were facing eviction and sending their kids to bed hungry. It was an act of societal barbarity that destroyed the lives of millions. Guess who profited from the misery of the victims of this criminal act? The rich did of course.

Their banker friends had done them a solid and just ONE Credit Suisse executive, Kareem Serageldin went to jail for a mere 30 months. It was the same mentality that deemed Trumps incessant tax evasion and persistent false accounting were mere misdemeanors. There were of course other Patsy’s in the lower ranks who took the bullet too for the sake of optics. Just as many of the guards and officers from Auschwitz escaped justice for crimes against humanity, so did many from the banking industry who commited fiscal genocide against millions of poor Americans.

In 2017, Trump handed Corporate America a further $1.7 trillion in tax cuts to companies that didn’t need the money, but they didn’t care, they just went out and had stock buyback parties to increase the value of their shareholdings. It returned little to no growth and reduced corporate tax revenue under the guise of a promise it would turbocharge the economy. It was a TOTAL LIE.

In the pandemic, the story was exactly the same. Trump handed out Corporate welfare like candy to a child. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming to the table to issue relief checks to everyday Americans, who were financially broken. The Republicans then went on to obstruct every action Joe Biden took to bring back America from the economic carnage Trump left behind. They limited and objected to the the Build Back Better Act reducing the cost to $2 trillion. Think about that for a moment, the legislation to bring America back from the edge of the economic abyss, was limited to just above the value of the 2017 tax cuts for Corporate America which they pissed up the wall. If you judge those tax cuts as a business investment, it returned around a 50% loss. In Corporate America that would result in the sacking the whole board of directors, which unwittingly America did in November 2020.

Republicans also chipped away at the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was finally passed for a further $1 trillion in August 2021. It should be noted, many Republicans who voted against it celebrated projects delivered in their constituencies. Oh the familiar stench of Republican hypocrisy. Never has there been a better example of a Monty Python ‘What have the Romans done for us’ moment. It would be farcical were it not so tragic. If you want an extra laugh, compare the 2.3% GDP share of US investment in infrastructure to that of China at around 6.5%.

When the constant drumbeat of the Republican false narrative invades every part of our lives, it’s easy to become disconnected from the truth. The fact is, Trump’s catastrophic management of the economy in his first term, added $8.3 trillion to the national debt. At the time of him leaving office that represented almost 25% of the total in a single presidential term. It’s safe to say, he has learned absolutely nothing given he now wants to add a further $7 trillion for the sole purpose of delivering further tax cuts to the very corporations that priced gouged the American people after the pandemic.

His budget places the bill for this fiscally irresponsible abomination, fairly and squarely at the feet of hard working Americans, for whom he has just gutted every agency in government that delivers vital services to the vulnerable, vets and the disabled. The White House is unequivocally an active crime scene of a robbery in progress on the American people. Government spending despite the DOGE debacle, has increased and Not reduced as touted. That’s before the impact of welfare spending from federal job losses and other downstream employment impacts. NOTHING, and really do mean nothing Trump has done since entering The White House, has in any way shape or form helped the average American.

I hate to tell you this, but you’ve been living in a political Truman Show for decades. Remember when you were told universal healthcare is communism? Remember the marches with boards showing Obama as the devil because he wanted to give people affordable healthcare? Ask some of the idiots holding up those banners today if they want to give up Obama care. It was all Republican psyops.

The cost of American healthcare per person in 2023 was $13,432 in comparison to the next expensive developed economy Germany, where the cost was $9,688. In the UK it drops further to $6,023.

It would be absolutely possible to have universal healthcare and I’ll explore that in more detail in a separate more focused post, dealing with affordability of health, social and childcare. The American government has for generations expressed outrage at political indoctrination in ‘communist’ countries, when they themselves have been a prime exponents of the very same practice. The suggestion that AOC is a communist for aspiring to a living wage, universal healthcare and affordable childcare is simply preposterous and you should consider it an insult to your intelligence if anyone attempts to tell you otherwise.

Nobody expects a free lunch, but the inability to pay exorbitant out of cover costs, as a result of poor health or job loss should never be a death sentence in ANY society. Medical insurance companies and healthcare providers are a politically protected species. Politicians are put on the dark money payroll to protect them from ever having to deliver a mandatory compassionate and dignified level of care.

I made the following short film in 2022 to share how I saw America in the moment following the insurrection incited by the criminal now residing in the White House. As with most of the content I have created over the last almost six years, these films could have been made yesterday and that is sadly emblematic of the lack of progress.

I cannot stress enough the fiscal harm coming down the track for ordinary Americans in the coming weeks and months, 70 million of who voted for Trump. While I think those that did this, have done irreparable damage both at home and on the global stage, that’s how the system works and all we can do as victims of their lack of judgement, is seek to minimize the hurt and pain as much as we can. I’m not here to tell you there’s no way back, but what I am here to tell you is, there is no quick fix.

If Trump was ejected from office tomorrow, Democrats have their own problems that prevent them from truly representing the American people in this moment. Until this is addressed, America is cast adrift on an ocean of pain and uncertainty until they dig deep and conjure up the courage to be bold and choose a leadership team that represents the people and not their own corporate donors. Anyone thinking Republican lite will get the job done is woefully mistaken.

I won’t be writing tomorrow as I have a full day of video production mapped out, but I will be back on Monday with a piece on the Ukraine extortion plan Trump cooked up. I want to be able to do a deep dive into all the geopolitical implications and I need to do some more bedtime reading to get to the point where I can speak with some authority on the matter.