A Supremely Corrupt Country

28 June 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Today, I received, from a friend, the report of a doctor who hasn’t yet been killed in Gaza — killed by American bombs and bullets donated to Israel by Biden and now Trump and launched by Israeli soldiers — and the report said, “I do not heal. How can one heal in hell? I merely bind what bleeds and pray it holds. They call this place a clinic. But what it truly is… is a final whisper before the silence.” What more can be said about that? What more should be said, about that? I can’t think of anything to say about it, except about what has caused it. And that’s the topic here:

Yesterday, Yahoo News and the AP headlined “Senate rejects effort to restrain Trump on Iran as GOP backs his strikes on nuclear sites”, and reported:

Democratic efforts in the Senate to prevent President Donald Trump from further escalating with Iran fell short Friday, with Republicans blocking a resolution that marked Congress’ first attempt to reassert its war powers following U.S. strikes on Iranian nuclear sites. …

The measure was defeated in a 53-47 vote in the Republican-held Senate. One Democrat, Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, joined Republicans in opposition, while Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky was the only Republican to vote in favor.

Most Republicans have said Iran posed an imminent threat that required decisive action from Trump. …

Democrats cast doubt on that justification, arguing the president should have come to Congress first. …

Democrats' argument for backing the resolution centered on the War Powers Resolution, passed in the early 1970s, which requires the president “in every possible instance” to “consult with Congress before introducing United States Armed Forces.” …

Here were the two most up-voted of the “4.8k Comments” at the time I read that Yahoo article:

Vegas

14 hours ago

Why does the Supreme Court and Congress continue to expand the power of the executive branch without hesitation? Is the fix in? If they swear an oath to the Constitution and truly either represent the people or the law, expanding executive power while limiting or giving up their own makes no sense. Loyalty to Donald Trump is not Patriotic or American. Something Project 2025 is going on here.

Reply

393

110
Susan
10 hours ago
I'd say, the fix IS in. The current crop of elected GOP "officials", in whatever capacity, prefer to capture and retain as much power as they can over all opposition, never mind the Constitution or what America once stood for. In order to do so, they HAVE to back one major front-man --who happens to have a dependable bloc of voters at his beck-and-call--- which is why the system is being used to hand him more and more power.

Those comments appear to be Democrats blaming Republicans. However, with the exception of the Republican Senator Rand Paul, who voted with the Democratic Senators on this matter, and of the Democratic Senator John Fetterman, who voted with the Republicans on it, all 100 Senators were simply Party-line voting. The other 98 Senators were voting the way they were voting, not on the basis of serving the public’s welfare, but on the basis of their serving their respective megadonors’ desires. Republican billionaires want to defeat Democratic billionaires, and Democratic billionaires want to defeat Republican billionaires, but BOTH billionaires want regime-change in Iran, after in 1979 their brutal stooge-leader of Iran, the Shah whom their U.S. CIA had installed after their coup overthrowing Iran’s democratically elected leader Mohammed Mossadegh, which thus made Iran one of the U.S. Government’s colonies. Both groups of American billionaires want to take back their Iranian colony. They differ from one-another ONLY on the ‘right’ way to do it.

Both of America’s Parties are owned by representatives of the two mutually opposed groups of American billionaires, but BOTH of those groups of billionaires want “regime-change” in Iran and victory by Israel against the Gazans and the other Palestinians. Maybe most American voters don’t care much about Israel-versus-Iran, but America’s billionaires care overwhelmingly about it and crave “regime-change” in Iran.

So: the dominant response of the readers of that article is to side with one group of billionaires against another group of billionaires, instead of to side with themselves and the rest of the public, against all billionaires — the remarkably few individuals who actually control the U.S. Government. Those respondents think that their votes aren’t shaped by the billionaires’ politicians and ‘news’-media, etc., but all of the relevant data show that they definitely ARE, and this applies both in national U.S. politics and in state U.S. politics, so that the billionaires have veto-power to prevent ANY candidate they don’t control from even getting their Party’s nomination (much less winning the final campaign).

There is a myth in America that a political Party represents its voters, but (as I just documented at the prior paragraph’s links) this common belief is definitely not true; it is blatantly false.

This is why reader-comments (and viewer-comments such as at youtube) tend overwhelmingly to be based on false assumptions (that America is some kind of “democracy” or “democratic republic”) such as the readerr-comments quoted above were).

The U.S. Government is vastly more corrupt than the public understands. And THIS is the reason why, ever since the end of WW2 in 1945, NONE of America’s numerous foreign invasions has complied with the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that ONLY CONGRESS can declare war, and that the U.S. President’s Constitutional power to invade another country is NIL unless and until that Declaration of war has passed in BOTH houses of Congress and then been signed into law BY the President. Ever since 1945, America has been an unConstitutional dictatorship by its billionaires. That is just a fact.

So: that floor vote in the U.S. Senate on June 27th, to determine whether Trump had illegally bombed Iran on the night of June 22nd, was pure political theater, nothing more. On June 23rd, the Washington Post reported that “In Trump’s words, he was bombing for peace.” Hitler (and most U.S. Presidents since) had claimed the same.

And when can the public stop voting for crooks? When they’ve stripped the billionaires of all their political power.

—————

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.