When ideas and policies fail, when a political movement is in decline, and when officials face potential legal punishment in the event of their ousting by the opposition–there’s always the old-fashioned bribe, blood money for your vote.
$5,000 worth of blood money…. oh, and $90 more to add insult to injury.
While US citizens and families see their real income deteriorate because of a new phase of inflation, almost unanimously agreed by credentialed economists to be caused by the Iran War, with many of the masses struggling to pay for the essentials–housing, healthcare, nutrition, childcare, transportation–this so-called president has personally profited in the billions from his office. If you are a Trump, or one of his cronies, well then life couldn’t be better. Meanwhile, the common man, the average mother, the aging senior, struggle to conserve, to make ends meet. Millions are turning to debt as a solution. While the 1% further solidify their spot at the top of the socioeconomic and political hierarchies through wars of conquest, and the subjugation of entire peoples and sovereign nations by way of the Imperial War Machine.
Whether we are talking about profiting from crypto, including his own brands of crypto currency, which totals at least $1.4 Billion according to what is publicly disclosed. Or whether we are talking about the billions he’s made from Truth Social. Or his Billions of dollars in real estate acquisitions due to foreign connections in places like the Arabian Peninsula, Eastern Europe, and Asia; the Trump Plaza project in Jeddah Saudi Arabia, for example, is a $1 Billion project on its own. And then there’s Jared Kushner’s private investment firm “Affinity Partners”, which in a typical example of nepotism and corruption, received over $2 Billion in its infancy from the Saudi Royal Family, via the Donald J. Trump connection.
While the typical US citizen and family deals in dollars and cents, the Trumps, and the entire Power Elite at the helm of Empire, well they deal in the billions and trillions.
Billions of dollars in KNOWN profits for the Trumps, which they never could have made without the office of the presidency. And of course, the real number may never be known. For, in the world of the corporate lobbying, and of backdoor deals, a world where offshore accounts, and any other number of “gifts” can and are easily exchanged for wink and a nod, a favor for a favor, only so much gets accounted for.
Within this system of bribery, it is befitting that the gesture should be extended to the MAGA base. A whopping $5,000 if you’re a taxpayer! And if you are a senior citizen on Medicare, $90 towards a monthly premium!
Meanwhile, he boasts of pirating billions of barrels of oil from Venezuela every month, while we’re told at the pump that there is scarcity, based on price increases of 30%+ since January. And of course, when the price of fuel is up, especially diesel–consumer goods dependent on shipping rise in price across the board. And of course, the stocks of the major global petroleum firms are also up, coincidentally at the same proportion as the rise in consumer prices: 30%-45%.
At the same time, at the request of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Congress is debating the details of how much to write the check for the Imperial War Machine: Should it be $1.1 Trillion? Or more like $1.5 Trillion. Perhaps it is best to rename the Defense Department. Certainly, it is more befitting. After all, Department of War is much more accurate in fact than Department of Defense, based on history and the present day. And then, there is the almost $4 Billion of US Taxpayer dollars given to Israel this year, with another $4 Billion on the way for 2027. Those are the official numbers.
Well over a Trillion dollars, again officially, to build and deploy weapons that are deployed against Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians by way of its Zionist proxy in its pursuit of a “Greater Israel”. And to deploy against a sovereign nation of Iran, including against Iranian civilians, including children in schools and families at weddings. To kidnap a Head of State in his residence in the middle of the night, and to be holding him in a US prison. To suffocate the island nation of Cuba by denying them fuel, resulting in near 24 hour blackouts for months on end, to the point that Cubans aren’t even able to sleep due to lack of even a fan to provide relief from the tropical heat and the chronic hunger. All of these examples, and dozens of others in other parts of the world today, have been condemned by the International Governing Authorities (the UN, the International Criminal Court) as well as by human rights organizations, and the majority of the global population.
And then we can talk about the legacy of US foreign policy in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and really throughout the entire Middle East (more recently we are seeing increased participation of the Saudis, under Wahabi leadership, in wars of aggression such as in Yemen, and in proxy wars such as in Sudan). Of course, also in places across Africa, Latin America, and Asia, Eastern Europe–even Greenland is in Trumps scopes.
In the current phase of World Dis/Order, Empire and its leaders stand defiantly against any possibility for accountability. In fact, it is a primary objective to achieve impunity for its actions. And, intoxicated with the lust for power and wealth, coupled with the objectification of the “others”, Empire and its leadership can only be satisfied, albeit very briefly, with conquest. Conquest of those peoples and their homelands, and exploiting those “other” peoples and those “other” lands for their economic potential, based on a narrow logic of monopoly capitalism and global domination of Empires Center over its peripheries. Of course, from Empires’ perspective, any barriers to that agenda are but an inconvenience requiring removal, or else elimination. This is the philosophy at the heart of U.S. foreign policy today. And it is materialized in foreign interventions, both publicly known and covert, both direct engagements and proxy wars.
Faced with the contradiction of Empires hyper-expansionist mode (a characteristic of fascism) on one hand, and the tendency of the present reality of hyperinflation to provoke political backlash, one can understand why at this very moment Trump and the Republican Party by extension are bribing the masses with this $5000….although if one considers all of the personal gains as well as all of the national gains that this administration claims from his foreign policy, then we would expect at least 10X that much if it were to be of any significance in truly helping the average median-income earning household. Of course, it would still be blood money, and a bribe. As for the $90 for seniors on Medicare, I will let you be the judge of what words should be used to respond to such a mockery.
Just as US citizens never saw a single cent of the $2000 Trump promised us after supposedly saving taxpayers billions of dollars from his and Elon Musk’s’ DOGE program– I would argue that not a single commoner will receive $5, much less $5000. Even if the senior did get a $90 check, that’s less than one spoonful of the caviar that is devoured in a luncheon between a Trump staffer and, say, a Lockheed Martin lobbyist, much less the feast prepared for Trump by the Saudi Royal Family on the trip where he was gifted a multi-billion-dollar jet.
The real and most important question, in my opinion, is how long We The People, with every Constitutional and God-Given right that we have, rights that are absolutely under assault by this Administration, and I would argue the old Democratic Party as well–how long will we stand by while corruption, abuse of power, and consolidation of total global control, including control over the U.S. citizenry, threatens and opposes humanity, human life, and liberty and justice for all. When will we achieve good government? And what are we willing to commit, and to sacrifice, in order to achieve good government?