When none of it makes sense anymore

In the eyes of the world America is now a failed state ruled by a racketeering, extortionist regime, who confuse global scorn for power through strength.

Image - Getty Images

I think for those of us who prefer to consume fact-based news, life is becoming ever more frustrating. It’s nothing new for authoritarian regimes to submerge the truth beneath an ocean of lies and misdirection, but this regime has turned deception into a fine art. It’s done in the hope that most people don’t have time to search for the truth. That’s where I come in, to research the facts and try to make what might seem complicated make sense.

I have to admit, sometimes it’s exhausting trying to make sense of the premeditated cruelty and disdain with which Trump and his acolytes hold the American people. After a few days off to think, it was good yesterday to do some literary stretching in preparation for what remains a long race to liberate common sense, moral decency, and integrity from the clutches of the cancer eating America from the inside out.

What do you do when a government rules rather than governs? When its sole purpose is to serve only the wealthiest in society? Unfortunately, social media has facilitated an environment in which this regime has normalised cruelty, deception, corruption and moral decline. We are forced to live in a world where nothing shocks us anymore, as we witness rampant corruption and imperial ambition going largely unchecked.

I have long spoken of the similarities between Trump’s government and the Third Reich. Anyone who tells you that it’s ridiculous to make the comparison is unfortunately living in a state of denial. The plan all along was to use democratic means to destroy democracy from within, and it’s proved highly successful. The Heritage Foundation’s strategy has proved remarkably effective in paralysing the natural defences of governance. It has exploited every weakness in the system to create a permissive environment that eliminates any impediment to establishing a corporate government that operates as a fiefdom.

America is no longer a democracy; there, I said it. It is now a feudal society in which the corporate Barons and the landed gentry pay homage to a king in the White House. The regime has ushered in the rebirth of feudalism in the 21st century, using the tools of democracy to do so. Take a moment to think about that. US citizens are now living in the Kingdom of America, where citizenship has been revoked and replaced with subjugation.

In many ways, historians of the future will look back on it as a defining moment. A moment in which a chosen few subjugated 90% of a nation. Anyone looking back at the Third Reich and the implementation of ‘The Final Solution’ asks themselves why did the Jews walk so willingly into the gas chambers that erased six million of them from the face of the earth? The truth is, they didn’t; they simply became powerless to resist the tsunami of cruelty, starvation and dehumanisation; they had no choice.

Another important point to raise here is the common misconception that Jews were the sole victims of the systemic erasure of those the Nazis considered ‘inferior’. In total, there were close to 11 million people murdered in custody beyond the battlefield. There is no question that 6 million Jews were murdered by Hitler, but beyond that, there are no annual remembrance days for the 3 million Russian prisoners of war who starved to death, the 1.8 million non-Jewish Poles, the 250,000 gypsies and 200,000 disabled people, along with tens of thousands of political prisoners. There are no special prayers for their passing. There are no leaders of these forgotten victims using victimhood as justification for war crimes in the 21st Century. They are largely erased from history so as not to compete with the concept that there was only one ethnically cleansed race. They remain the unheard, who suffered the same fate, yet whose memory is but a whisper readily dismissed.

Anyone who suggests there is no comparison between Hitler and Trump would do well to understand why the comparison is relevant. It also might explain why Trump kept a copy of Mein Kampf in his bedside drawer. Never has it been more in focus than it is today. In Trump’s own words:

"It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all these individual things."

The breathtaking arrogance of this statement was made at a closed-door meeting and accidentally leaked. I’ve included the clip above for those who find the statement as unbelievable as I did. His argument is that government spending on the welfare of its citizens should instead be directed towards ‘military protection’. Can I respectfully remind you that US soil has not been invaded since 1812?

I would also add that the 2027 budget calls for adding another half-trillion dollars to the ‘War budget’; let’s be sure to call it what it is. It’s the budget of the Department of War. I prefer to call it corporate welfare. Just another wealth transfer to the Military Industrial Complex. For context, most US military spending goes to the 5 leading domestic military contractors: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon Technologies.

To give you an example of the type of compensation leaders of these companies receive largely from taxpayer funds, let’s take a look at the last published compensation package for 2024, for Jim Taiclet, CEO of Lockheed Martin. He received a total compensation package (very tax-efficient) of approximately $23.75 million for the year. Bear in mind that 73% of the company’s revenue comes from the US government. It’s also worth noting that in 2024, the company received a $392 million tax refund, reflecting adjustments related to significant pre-tax losses from classified programs.

Call me old-fashioned, but these companies seem to simply be vehicles for systemic corruption. It won’t surprise you that they spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year on lobbying. The result? 98% of federal legislators received money from the arms industry in recent election cycles. It has long been accepted that arms deals often involve ‘incentives’ for arms exports. No more is this evident than in arms sales to the Gulf States. I could create a multi-piece series on the level of systemic corruption with the US defence industry, and maybe that would be a useful exercise.

Before moving on, I want to take a moment to explore the power of corporate money in politics, because, in light of the remaining points I want to make, we need to better understand how fundamentally broken the systems of public accountability is. I want to wind back the clock 7 years to a House Oversight Committee hearing in which AOC explored the true power of dark money in US politics. The opening line speaks volumes ‘Let’s play a game”

That’s exactly what this is to the wealthy elite that benefit from the obscene amounts of PUBLIC funding that drive the under-declared profits from these and many other recipients of corporate welfare. It’s really important to put this into some context to understand how the extortion of the public purse operates in their ‘free market’ system, because I am beyond sick and tired of listening to the absolute bullshit the public is fed each and every year.

In 2025, the government spent $7.1 trillion, which represents 23% of GDP. When working with numbers and the military its important to get them right, so let’s look at the discretionary spending awarded to private military firms from 2020 to 2024. This amounted to 54% of military spending over the budget period ($2.2 trillion). In 2025 alone, the military spent $954 billion, and the top five military contractors mentioned above received $ 770 billion of that spending. These numbers come from a report from Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and Brown University’s Watson School of International and Public Affairs. The report is entitled:

Profits of War: Top Beneficiaries of Pentagon Spending, 2020 – 2024

The Guardian covered the paper, which largely flew under the radar in 2025, just another information casualty buried under a mountain of daily deceit and misdirection. In a report by Andrew Roth on July 8th 2025, which is well worth your time, he noted:

“High Pentagon budgets are often justified because the funds are ‘for the troops’,” said William D Hartung, senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and an author of the report. “But as this paper shows, the majority of the department’s budget goes to corporations, money that has as much to do with special interest lobbying as it does with any rational defense planning. Much of this funding has been wasted on dysfunctional or overpriced weapons systems and extravagant compensation packages.”

You will note that the same approach has been used in the 2027 budget proposal, which places the emphasis on providing a 5-7% pay rise for military personnel. It’s simply a rinse-and-repeat exercise to top up what is clearly a rich man’s slush fund, subject to little to no oversight. The report goes on:

“These figures represent a continuing and massive transfer of wealth from taxpayers to fund war and weapons manufacturing,” said Stephanie Savell, director of the Costs of War project.

Calculated for inflation, the military spending dwarfs an approximate $356bn that Congress had appropriated for US diplomacy, development and humanitarian aid.

I’d now like to return to AOC and a further hearing just a year on from the one above, which simply scratches the surface of the level of price gouging that goes on, not just with the Pentagon, but across government as a whole.

Setting aside the fact that the US government spends more than it earns every year, the newly proposed ‘budget for war’ for 2027 is 33% larger than in 2026. Despite the end of the war in Afghanistan, NOTHING has changed; there was no peace dividend. The direct threat to the US mainland is largely nonexistent in terms of conventional warfare that the US military is designed to defeat. The new era threat, as demonstrated by 9/11, is far more likely to come from an asymmetric terrorist attack.

I can assure you without fear of contradiction that this is the top 1% attempting a street robbery on US taxpayers, and what makes this utterly sickening is that it is perpetuated by BOTH political parties, regardless of who is in power, because corporate interests now rule America.

I am reminded of a quote from Hollywood actor Morgan Freeman, who said:

"[If society] underpaid politicians and overpaid teachers, there would be smarter people and fewer stupid laws”

I would also hope there would be far fewer wars. Let’s be clear, this regime has abandoned US civil society in a quest for empire and riches. In 2025, the US received $5.23 trillion in tax revenue. Total spending for the same period was $7.01 trillion, producing a deficit of $1.87 trillion. It should also be noted that 35% of the revenue is from payroll taxes.

In part two, we’re going to dig in further to reassure EVERY middle and lower income family that this catastrophic economic wasteland is NOT OF YOUR DOING. The inbound economic collapse is down to out-of-control corporate welfare and gross fiscal malpractice on the part of governments from BOTH sides of the aisle.

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