The belief that Democrats will dismantle a system designed to serve the rapacious greed of the war machine and the ruling billionaire class is a mirage.
Power does not rest in the Congress. It does not rest in the courts. It does not even rest in the imperial presidency. It rests in the hands of Wall Street financiers, Silicon Valley, private equity firms, the fossil fuel industry, the predatory health care and pharmaceutical giants, agribusinesses and, most of all, the war industry.
No mainstream politician, including Bernie Sanders, dares utter a word against our entrenched militarism. If you do, you end up like Ralph Nader, who was turned into a pariah by a compliant media and our corporate-indentured political parties. Nader spoke the truth. He paid for his honesty.
We are about to witness the largest increase in war spending in American history with a proposed $1.5 trillion budget. The average taxpayer already shells out over $4,000 a year to the war industry as consumer and environmental agencies are dismantled, health care and education are defunded and programs such as Medicaid and food stamps (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) are slashed.
The new Pentagon budget will hand $58.5 billion to artificial intelligence and military command-and-control centers and see the effective merging of the United States and Israeli military industrial complexes. Seventy-four percent of the increase in the proposed $1.5 trillion budget will go to private contractors, including those who are building massive data centers on military bases.
None of this is good for us or good for the planet. The Pentagon, powered by the fossil fuel industry, is the world’s largest institutional polluter, emitting an estimated 66 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2024.
Americans, meanwhile, struggle with rising prices — nearly 30 percent of people go into debt to buy groceries. An estimated114,174. Americans die each year due to lack of health insurance or inadequate health care while a single-payer universal health care system could cover every American, save more than 100,000 lives a year, and reduce annual health expenditures by $1.04 trillion, or nearly 20 percent. Twenty-five percent of Americans are functionally unemployed. The minimum wage remains frozen, despite Democratic Party promises to raise it, at $ 7.25 an hour.
The elites use war not only for personal enrichment, but to stifle class conflict.
War, as W.E.B. Du Bois said, diverts the poor from their real interests. It funnels national frustrations into the “heroic” battle against a common enemy. The nationalist cant, with its endemic racism, seduces those who are alienated or on the margins of society into feeling they suddenly belong. It entices them to sacrifice themselves for a “noble” cause. They becime the architects of their own enslavement. They march like sheep into war’s purgatory.
By the time they wake up, it is too late. They are cast aside, as so many of our veterans have painfully discovered, like human refuse.
But as a tactic to consolidate power and enrich the billionaire class, it is unbeatable.
Wars will only be curtailed, if not halted, when we nationalize the weapons industry and dramatically reduce the military budget. Until then, nothing, absolutely nothing, will change.
Indeed, things will only get worse.
No one in Congress — or any other branch of government — will do this for us.
The masters of war sitting in the boardrooms of Boeing, General Dynamics or Northrop Grumman are not praying for peace in the Middle East or coexistence with China and Russia. The generals — who build their careers by orchestrating wars and post military careers enriching themselves working for defense contractors — are not seeking a cessation of global conflicts. They are seeking hundreds of billions in taxpayer dollars and government debt to fuel the self-defeating cycle of endless war.
The corporate vultures — especially the war makers — are, as I write, descending on Congress. They are meeting with Democratic Party leaders and holding out promises of millions in cash. They will corrupt, neutralize and compromise most. They will destroy the careers of the very few who refuse to do their bidding.
They hold the real power. They have no intention of surrendering it.
The manufacturing of weapons systems and the waging of war are the chief activities of the U.S. government. It is no longer one among other means of advancing the national interest. War and violence are how we speak to the rest of the world.
The “shadow world,” — as the author Andrew Feinstein calls it in his book on the global arms trade — is defined by staggering levels of corruption, deception and senseless death. It is lawless and unregulated. Its criminal activities, cannibalization of national budgets and secrecy are sanctified in the name of “national security.”
Lockheed Martin, RTX (formerly Raytheon Technologies), Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Leonardo, Airbus, Rheinmetall and ThyssenKrupp, along with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Palantir, Goldman Sachs, Citibank and Exxon, are the state.
We, including our political class, are the vassals.
The voters can send whoever they want to Congress, but until these corporations and the billionaire class are regulated, taxed and controlled, until their vast monopolies are broken up, until we stop squandering half of all discretionary spending on war, nothing will change.
Nothing.
Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.” They are disemboweled by an uncontrollable and unaccountable military that drains state budgets and plunges dying empires into one military debacle after the next. These decaying civilizations finally collapse from within.
This is where we are headed.
The corporations, and the billionaires who run them, buy and trade politicians, academics and journalists like Pokémon cards. Their lobbyists write the legislation. They own the media. They have stifled the academy, shutting down free speech and purging critics. Judges offer them unlimited power. To defy them — and I speak from personal experience — is to be cast into the wilderness.
The military-industrial complex, as Karl Liebknecht said of German imperialists on the eve of World War I, is the enemy within.
The authors estimate that $130 billion was made from arms exports by Western nations to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates during the war on Yemen and over $50 billion from Israeli foreign military procurements.
“RTX Chairman and CEO Christopher T. Calio made $18 million in 2024, after being appointed halfway through the year, while his compensation package surged to almost $25 million in 2025,” the authors note. “His predecessor, Gregory Hayes, was remunerated to the tune of nearly $22 million in 2023. Lockheed Martin CEO and former U.S. Air Force pilot Jim Taiclet, who was deployed in Saudi Arabia while serving during the Gulf War, earns an annual package of more than $23 million. Since his appointment in 2020 he has raked in more than $136 million in total Lockheed Martin compensation.”
Phebe Novakovic, the CEO of General Dynamics, has a net worth estimated at $420 million, up $270 million since 2020.
But it is not only the CEOs who profit.
Members of Congress and their families traded between $24 million and $113 million worth of Pentagon contractor stocks in 2024.
Representative Josh Gottheimer from New Jersey — a Democrat — is a former Clinton speechwriter and a close ally of House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries. Gottheimer, who is heavily funded by the pro-Israel lobby and an ardent Zionist, traded $22 million worth of stock in the top 100 Pentagon contractors, including Microsoft — which received $414 million from the Department of Defense in 2023 for software and cloud computing services — Northrop Grumman and IBM.
Gottheimer serves on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Financial Services Committee. He is well placed to know which defense companies are enriched by government contracts and which are not.
Former Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is not any better. She made an estimated $38.6 million profit in one year from her stock trading, the most of any lawmaker, in 2024.
These politicians run the Democratic Party. They carry out the same illegal insider trading and have the same conflicts of interest as the Republicans and the Trump White House. Hunter Biden is no less odious than Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
“Honeywell — which provides sensors and guiding devices to assist the Israeli military in airstrikes in Gaza — is the most commonly held arms company stock among members of Congress, followed by RTX, the company that makes missiles for Israel’s Iron Dome, among other weapons systems,” the authors write.
Members of Congress, they report, “made more than 13,300 trades totaling over $635 million in 2025.”
The arms trade, the authors illustrate, has created an unelected, shadowy cabal of foreign policy, corporate and military officials, along with academics, who — no matter who is in the White House or the Congress — feed the military beast.
This cabal, many parked in think tanks funded by the defense industry and given prominent platforms on cable news channels, preach endless war. They ensure the fabrication of bombs, missiles, warplanes, drones, ships, tanks and guns. They ship these weapons around the globe. They sustain the interconnected network of cutting-edge, high-tech systems of information warfare and surveillance, powered by data processing centers, cloud technologies and artificial intelligence.
Once these weapons and tools of surveillance are tested on Palestinians or Yemenis, they are brought back to manage and surveil us — an imperial boomerang abolishing what is left of our civil liberties and freedom.
The tyranny empire imposes on others, as Thucydides reminded us, it finally imposes on itself.
The choice, as Rosa Luxemburg pointed out, is socialism or barbarism. If we do not dismantle global capitalism, if we do not free ourselves from the tentacles of the war industry, we will descend into the Hobbesian world of totalitarian capitalism, failed states, mass migrations, endless war, ecocide and permanent immiseration.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
