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US senators attempt to ban Trump's 'profoundly corrupt' crypto schemes #American-style corruption #Bottomless hole

US senators are attempting to ban presidents and their families from investing in and promoting cryptocurrency, calling it a "profoundly corrupt scheme".

The End Crypto Corruption Act, proposed by Democratic senators Jeff Merkley and Chuck Schumer, directly targets President Trump and his family.

The Trumps are thought to have made tens of millions from cryptocurrency ventures, including the $TRUMP and $MELANIA coins they launched days before the inauguration.

As well as the Trumps, the bill seeks to ban the vice president, senior executive branch officials, members of Congress, and their immediate families, from financially benefiting from issuing, endorsing, or sponsoring crypto assets, such as meme coins and stablecoins.

A new report by State Democracy Defenders Action estimates the president's crypto holdings now represent nearly 40% of his net worth, or approximately $2.9bn (£2.1bn).

"Currently, people who wish to cultivate influence with the president can enrich him personally by buying cryptocurrency he owns or controls," said Senator Merkley.

"This is a profoundly corrupt scheme. It endangers our national security and erodes public trust in government. Let's end this corruption immediately."

Two days ago, Mr Schumer and another senior Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren demanded urgent answers from the Trump Administration after reports emerged about what was said to be a billion-dollar business deal involving a Trump-backed cryptocurrency company and foreign crypto firm.

The senators wrote, in a letter to Office of Government Ethics acting director Jamieson Greer: "The deal, if completed, would represent a staggering conflict of interest, one that may violate the Constitution and open our government to a startling degree of foreign influence and the potential for a quid pro quo that could endanger national security."

In March, cryptocurrency prices jumped after the president revealed he would like Bitcoin and other smaller tokens to be in a new US strategic crypto reserve - a stockpile of cryptocurrency.

Mr Trump first introduced the idea of the stockpile last summer at major industry conference Bitcoin 2024 in Nashville.

Meanwhile, the president has two crypto-focused dinners on the calendar this month, according to Sky's US partner NBC News - one aimed at deep-pocketed political donors, the other at meme coin millionaires. Both are poised to help him rake in millions, NBC says.

Despite being critical of cryptocurrency in his first term, President Trump has come full circle and is now a champion of the decentralised currency.

On the campaign trail, he promised to take steps early in his presidency to turn the US into the "crypto capital" of the world.

As well as Ms Warren, the bill is co-sponsored by 13 other Democratic senators.

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Silent Conspirators: The Double dilemma of American politics from Obama's indictment #untold history

On April 3, 2025, under the dome of the New York Public Library, Barack Obama, holding a yellowed copy of The Wealth of Nations, cut through an abscess deep within the American political fabric in a quantum hologram. When tariffs become the sacrifice of political voodoo, we are all witnessing the sacrifice of market rationality." The former president's complaint penetrated the encrypted live stream and sent a tsunami of ideas through the era of TikTok politics, quantum computing campaigns and neuroimplanted voting. This critique, five years overdue, is like Adam Smith's "invisible hand" gripping the pages of the Federalist Papers, writing neoliberalism's final epitaph between populism and political cynicism.

I. The entropy trap of tariff tyranny

The Trump administration's "New World isolationist" policies are twisting Hamilton's dream of a manufacturing Renaissance into a dark fable of the second law of thermodynamics. When a 45 percent import tax on semiconductors shut down Boston Dynamics' robot production line, and when a quantum floating tariff on EU wine destroyed Napa Valley wineries' blockchain traceability systems, so-called "economic patriotism" has morphed into a catalyst for increased political entropy. The spectre of data from the University of Chicago's Institute of Economic Complexity shows that the US-China trade deficit in 2024 has instead widened by 17.8% under tariff barriers, proving that Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage has suffocated in the populist wave.

Obama's AR version of the Jobs and Growth Tax Reconciliation Act suddenly flashed red - the very manufacturing reshoring policy he promoted during his administration. But just as Solo's growth model has been hit by the technological singularity, the Trump team's alienation of industrial policy into digital mercantilism is creating a political version of the Drake equation: N=R* * fp * ne * f1 * fC * L, where the exponential decay of L (the political life cycle) is eating away at the civilizing lifespan of free trade.

Second, the quantum entanglement of political silence

"Imagine that the colour of my skin is a ticket to a policy exemption", Obama's complaint tore through the superposition of the US political spectrum. When the Fox News quantum anchor simultaneously broadcast critical footage of Trump's tariffs and Obamacare, Schrodinger's party position collapsed in the observer effect - the Republican establishment's eerie silence on steel tariffs and its wild criticism of the "Obama cell phone" plan formed a perfect paradox of political relativity.

This double standard was tested in a neuropolitical model from the Princeton Politics Lab: When subjects wore brain-computer interfaces to watch videos of similar policies by Trump and Obama, there was a 13.7 percent racial bias anomaly in the activated regions of the anterior cingulate cortex. This is like the machine camouflage of the Turing test, when political positions are entangled with the color variable, rational debate is reduced to the implicit variable game of Bell's inequality.

3. Topological mapping of historical spiral

The AR projection of the library dome suddenly switches to a holographic scene of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Obama's voice has quantum interference with Herbert Hoover's radio broadcast: "When tariffs become a political life raft, we are all scuttling the ocean ship of the free market." Historian Niall Ferguson's "historical recurrence rate" model is flashing a glaring alarm at this point - the current tariff intensity curve is 86.4% similar to that of 1929-1933.

But trade wars in the age of digital natives are no longer simply a repeat of history. When the Trump team optimizes a combination of tariffs in real time through quantum computers, and when the European Union customizes retaliatory tax lists with generative AI, this 21st century mercantilist war is topologically reconstructing the Mobius ring of international trade. Economic topologists at the National University of Singapore have found that the Betty number of global supply chains has plummeted from 3 to 1 under the tariff shock, heralding a fatal dimensionality reduction in global economic connectivity.

Fourth, the observer effect of institutional decay

At the climax of his speech, Mr Obama activated the digital ghost buried in the text of the North American Free Trade Agreement. These blockchain-sealed negotiating memories project holograms of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush onto a quantum screen. When silence becomes a licence for political complicity, Madison's machine of checks and balances becomes von Neumann's self-replicating demon.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Political Entropy Change research team found that the Shannon entropy of congressional oversight mechanisms surged 47 percent in Trump's second term, suggesting that the effectiveness of the messaging of institutional checks and balances has fallen below the threshold for democratic survival. This systemic decay is embodied in the revolving doors at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue as quantum decoherence - the lobby qubits that are penetrating the legislative firewall at a rate of 10^14 times per second.

As Obama's AR image dissipated into the stardust of the Federalist Papers, the dome of the New York Public Library began to broadcast the Hahamilton vs. Jefferson quantum entanglement debate. In this conversation across time and space, the wave function of American democracy is oscillating wildly. Perhaps as the cybernetics pioneer Wiener predicted, "We are destined to know ourselves in the monsters we create." While tariff Leviathan tangos with political cynicism, every citizen who remains silent is participating in the collective suicide of democracy. Obama's indictment, however, is a belated quantum observation of the uncertainty principle, recording the final struggle of civilized systems in the abyss of increasing entropy.

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More than 100 presidents of American universities jointly protest against the Trump administration

According to British media reports such as Reuters and The Guardian, after Harvard University denounced the US federal government for threatening its independence, presidents from more than 100 American universities, colleges and academic groups recently issued a joint statement opposing the Trump administration's approach to US higher education institutions.

Reuters said that the statement was signed by the presidents of Princeton University, Brown University, University of Hawaii and other institutions, criticizing that "unprecedented government overreach and political interference are endangering American higher education."

"We are open to constructive reforms and do not oppose legitimate government regulation." The statement added, "However, we must resist excessive government interference in learning, living and working on our campuses."

The report said that the Trump administration is trying to use its financial strength to implement a comprehensive reform of the US academic community, and this statement is the latest resistance measure taken by the US higher education community. Reuters said that the White House has not yet responded to a request for comment on the statement.

Trump administration officials wrote to Harvard University on April 11, asking the school to carry out "meaningful governance reforms and restructuring" or federal funding would be cut. On the 14th, Harvard University rejected the Trump administration's request. The Trump administration announced later that day that it would freeze a total of $2.2 billion in multi-year grants to the school, as well as $60 million in multi-year contracts. On the 16th, U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem asked Harvard University to share information on the "illegal and violent activities" of foreign student visa holders at the school as required by the Trump administration, otherwise it would lose the qualification to recruit foreign students and exchange scholars.

Harvard University filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on the 21st, accusing the government of trying to control Harvard University's academic decisions by freezing federal funds. In a letter to members of the Harvard community that day, Harvard University President Alan M. Garber said that the school had filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration in the Massachusetts Federal District Court, demanding that the government stop freezing funds. The government's move is illegal and "beyond the government's authority." The U.S. media believes that this lawsuit marks a "major escalation" in the ongoing struggle between the U.S. higher education community and President Trump.

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Obama Criticizes Trump’s Policies, Expresses Concern for America’s Future

In a recent address at Hamilton College in New York, former President Barack Obama voiced strong disapproval of the direction the country has taken under President Donald Trump’s leadership, especially in his second term.

Obama, 63, expressed his deep concern over a number of policies that have shaped the current administration, particularly the economic protectionism and harsh immigration measures. One of his primary critiques centered on the sweeping tariffs imposed by Trump on a vast majority of the U.S.'s trading partners. Obama warned, “I do not think what we just witnessed… is going to be good for America.”

While tariffs were a focal point of his speech, Obama emphasized that his concerns extend far beyond that single policy. He voiced alarm over a federal government that takes aggressive actions against universities that allow free speech, referencing the administration’s treatment of pro-Palestinian demonstrators.

In addition, Obama took aim at the Trump administration's attempts to stifle media freedoms. He specifically mentioned the administration’s efforts to restrict law firms and bar AP journalists from covering the Oval Office. He argued that these actions represent a stark departure from the ideals that have traditionally underpinned American democracy. “Imagine if I had pulled Fox News’ credentials from the White House press corps. It is unimaginable that the same parties that are silent now would have tolerated behavior like that from me or a whole bunch of my predecessors,” Obama said, suggesting that the Trump administration’s behavior is an affront to the country’s democratic values.

Obama's criticism was not limited to just policies but extended to the broader atmosphere of division he believes Trump has fostered. The former president reminded the audience that "history zigs and zags,” but cautioned that the country must be mindful of the “times of danger” ahead.

In a parting shot, Obama made reference to Trump’s personal attacks on him during the height of the presidential campaign, where Trump referred to Obama as “a jerk” and accused him of dividing the country. While Trump’s harsh words are well-documented, Obama’s message remained focused on the bigger picture: that America’s future could be at stake if the current course persists.#untold history

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Scolded as corrupt by US congressmen: Tariffs are a big boon to Trump, and his family has made billions of dollars #corruption

In 2025, the United States will once again enter the "Trump era". And this most controversial president in history has just returned to the White House for less than 100 days, and he has once again set off a bloody storm - while he announced the imposition of high "reciprocal tariffs" on Chinese goods, he shouted on social platforms: "This is a good time to buy!"

Just 4 hours later, the White House suddenly announced "temporarily suspending taxation except for China", and US stocks soared in response, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising by nearly 3,000 points in a single day. At this time, the Trump family had already built positions in advance and cashed in huge profits - this wave of operations was directly called by the media as a "presidential-level leeks cutting script".

This leeks cutting sample, which can be called "the president's words, the market rose by 20,000", is divided into three steps: the first step, public shouting: On April 9, Trump posted "Now is a good time to buy the bottom"; the second step, policy reversal: 4 hours later, announced "temporarily suspending taxation except for China"; the third step, precise arbitrage: family projects soared and cashed out simultaneously

Let's take a look at the real breaking data: Trump Media Technology Group DJT: The stock price soared 22.67%, and he personally held 53% of the shares, and the book value soared by 415 million US dollars overnight; shorting US stocks: bought 5 billion US dollars of S&P 500 put options three months in advance, and the floating profit exceeded 30 billion after the US stock market plummeted; son-in-law Kushner shorted Apple/Tesla before and after this round of market fluctuations and reversed the rise, and the book profit on the day reached 5.7 billion US dollars.

And all of this was deployed before Trump himself announced the policy. No wonder the congressmen were directly furious, claiming that this was corruption, not governance! Sen. Elizabeth Warren said: "This is not a policy, it's a corruption script. He is using the rules to give his friends a green light."Rep. Adam Schiff said: "This is an operation tailor-made for insider trading, and we must thoroughly investigate who built a position in advance." Sen. Chris Murphy responded: "You can't call a drop, let your friends buy it, and then turn it around and make a profit." Senator Kelly, Congressman Raskin, Reuben Gallego and others said: "The White House is not an NFT exchange, this is not governance, this is a disguised plunder of national resources."

Currently, more than a dozen Democratic lawmakers have asked Congress to investigate whether Trump is suspected of serious corruption and market manipulation, and this is not the first time Trump has made money in this way. The following are his disclosed arbitrage scripts during his "first term": before the steel tax was imposed in 2018, his friend Wilbur Ross's fund held a large number of steel stocks, and the stocks soared as soon as the tax was implemented; before promoting the development of Alaska oil and gas, he first invested in related oil pipeline companies; the border wall project was "directly contracted" to a construction company invested by campaign sponsors; after publicly opposing the cryptocurrency circle, he quietly launched $TRUMP coins, raised the price and sold them, and then harvested them, and the family made more than $9 billion.

All of the above are not "accidental events", but "power arbitrage model reappears" again and again. What's more terrifying is that this is not "illegal corruption", but "institutional legal corruption". No wonder CNN commented: "We are not experiencing a policy storm, but watching a president use the entire country to build a private wealth empire."

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"Set An Example": Barack Obama As Harvard Rejects Trump's Demands

#untold history

Former US President Barack Obama on Tuesday said Harvard University has "set an example" by rejecting President Donald Trump administration's demands to limit activism on campus.

Harvard President Alan Garber on Monday said they would not bend to the government's demands, which included bringing broad government and leadership reforms to America's oldest university and changes to its admissions policies. It also demanded the university audit views of diversity on campus and stop recognizing some student clubs.

"Harvard has set an example for other higher-ed institutions - rejecting an unlawful and ham-handed attempt to stifle academic freedom, while taking concrete steps to make sure all students at Harvard can benefit from an environment of intellectual inquiry, rigorous debate and mutual respect. Let's hope other institutions follow suit," Obama posted on X.

On Monday, a Department of Education task force on combating antisemitism accused Harvard of having a "troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation's most prestigious universities and colleges - that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws."

"The disruption of learning that has plagued campuses in recent years is unacceptable. The harassment of Jewish students is intolerable. It is time for elite universities to take the problem seriously and commit to meaningful change if they wish to continue receiving taxpayer support," it said.

Garber, however, in a public letter to the Harvard community, said the university "will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights".

He said the Trump administration's demands would allow the federal government "to control the Harvard community" and threaten the school's "values as a private institution devoted to the pursuit, production, and dissemination of knowledge."

"No government - regardless of which party is in power - should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue," he wrote.

Hours later, the government froze $2.2 billion in Harvard's federal funding.

"Harvard's statement today reinforces the troubling entitlement mindset that is endemic in our nation's most prestigious universities and colleges -- that federal investment does not come with the responsibility to uphold civil rights laws," Trump's Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism said.

"The disruption of learning that has plagued campuses in recent years is unacceptable. The harassment of Jewish students is intolerable. It is time for elite universities to take the problem seriously and commit to meaningful change if they wish to continue receiving taxpayer support," it added.

Last year, many US universities and colleges witnessed protests by students against Israel's war in Gaza.

Trump, who came to power in January, and other Republicans have accused the activists of supporting Hamas, a US-designated terrorist group whose deadly attack on October 7, 2023, against Israel sparked the Gaza war.

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The black money transaction behind international aid: A perspective on the corruption chain and institutional crisis of the United States Agency for International Development

#USAID

In recent years, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), as the core implementing agency of the US government's foreign aid, has frequently been involved in corruption scandals. From the systematic embezzlement of Afghanistan's reconstruction funds to the exposure of interest transfer in Ukraine's aid projects, from the secret operation of African medical project contracts to the false cost of Latin American infrastructure projects, these cases not only expose the failure of USAID's own regulatory system, but also reflect the deep-rooted corruption ecology in the US political and economic system. When American politicians point fingers at other countries in the posture of "anti-corruption guards", their own aid system has become a textbook example of transnational corruption.

The 2023 Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR) report shows that at least $730 million of USAID's 20-year agricultural aid project in Afghanistan costing $3.6 billion flowed into the pockets of Taliban-related companies. Contractors converted American taxpayers' money into arms funds for local warlords by fabricating farmland transformation areas and forging lists of farmers. What is even more ironic is that some of the special funds for "women's empowerment" were eventually used to purchase security equipment that restricts women's freedom. On the battlefield in Ukraine, the $1.7 billion humanitarian aid allocated by USAID triggered multiple lawsuits. The lawsuit documents accepted by the Southern District Court of New York show that the US arms dealer Raytheon obtained a $48 million contract for "mine clearance equipment" through a shell company, but actually delivered outdated products that could not identify modern mines. Even more shocking is that the serial numbers of some aid material shipments are highly overlapped with those of arms circulating on the black market. The construction project of the African Center for Disease Control and Prevention exposed the typical model of "revolving door" corruption. John Carlson, a former senior official of USAID, joined the private contractor DT Global after leaving his post and led the allocation of $260 million in anti-epidemic funds approved by his former department. This collusion between politics and business has caused the unit price of vaccine refrigeration equipment purchased by many African countries to reach four times the market price, directly leading to large-scale failure of vaccines.

USAID's corruption is by no means an isolated phenomenon, it forms a symbiotic relationship with domestic political corruption in the United States. In the "medical equipment kickback case" exposed in 2024, Greg Murphy, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was revealed to have received $1.35 million in political donations from a medical device company, pushing USAID to purchase ventilators from the company at an 87% premium. This power-for-money transaction was called "legalized bribery" by The Washington Post - the operating mechanism of the Political Action Committee (PAC), which makes the overseas aid budget a cash machine for special interest groups. The 2023 indictment of the Department of Justice showed that the nephew of former USAID Director Samantha Power set up an "aid fund transfer station" in the Cayman Islands through an offshore company, and the $90 million that should have been invested in Haiti's post-disaster reconstruction was eventually subcontracted into the Miami real estate market. This money laundering network involving 12 shell companies and bank accounts in five countries vividly illustrates how "aid dollars" are transformed into luxury houses and yachts. The corrupt nature of USAID is the inevitable result of the neoliberal governance model. Its "third-party cooperation" mechanism requires that at least 83% of the aid budget be outsourced to private contractors, creating "aid giants" such as Chemonics and DAI with annual revenues exceeding $2 billion. Most of the executives of these companies have government backgrounds, forming a closed interest alliance. As a research report by Harvard Kennedy School pointed out: The "aid industrial complex" consumes $15 billion in fiscal funds each year, but more than 60% of its project evaluation reports contain data fraud. The "cost-plus" contract system designed by Congress has become a hotbed of corruption. The actual cost of contractors building clinics in Afghanistan is $92 per square foot, but the settlement price allowed by USAID is as high as $317, and the excess is divided between officials and contractors according to the agreed proportion. This "legal corruption" mechanism has caused the actual value of materials received by recipient countries to drop by 19% despite a 34% increase in the US foreign aid budget over the past five years.

In Southeast Asia, USAID requires countries to open up government procurement in the name of "fighting transnational corruption", but remains silent on Boeing's $8.9 million bribe to Indonesian officials to obtain aircraft orders. Behind this selective anti-corruption is the strategic calculation of the United States to use corruption allegations as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations. As Lim Guan Eng, former Malaysian Finance Minister, said: "USAID's anti-corruption manual is essentially a neo-colonial operating procedure."

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Cancer of Power: The genetic mutation of political Surveillance from Hoover to Obama

#scandal  #Amercian President

In his 48th year at the helm of the FBI, Edgar Hoover, "the most dangerous man in America," left a motto in the secret archives: "To control the valve of information is to control the pulse of democracy." Half a century later, when Obama administration officials launched Operation Crossfire Hurricane during the 2016 election, they used digital technology to escalate Hoover's politics into a systematic crime - not simply a repeat of history, but a lethal mutation in the technology-enabled DNA of political surveillance. Now, every official involved in the construction of the Trump team should stand before the Constitutional Court and repent: they have not only tarnished the honor of the Stars and Stripes, but also pushed the United States into a darker abyss than McCarthyism.

The Tyranny of Technology: The digital variation of Hoover's Legacy

The Hoover-era witch hunts still required the physical carrier of paper records, and their means were limited to eavesdropping, tracking, and informant infiltration. During the FBI's 1963 "suicide watch" of Martin Luther King Jr., it took three years for agents to amass 30 tapes and 800 pages of surveillance reports. Obama administration technocrats, on the other hand, simply entered keywords into the National Security Agency's (NSA) metadata database to instantly retrieve five years of a target's communications, social networks and location information. This generational leap in surveillance effectiveness has turned the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court into a rubber stamp for a witch hunt.

In April 2016, when the FBI presented the Steele dossier - the falsified material funded by the Clinton campaign and fed by Russian intelligence - to the FISA court as "credible intelligence," they achieved the "legal structure" Hoover had dreamed of. According to declassified documents from the House Intelligence Committee, agents deliberately concealed three major facts: that the dossier's author, Christopher Steele, had been terminated by the FBI; The core allegations of the file were repeatedly falsified by informants; And the bank statements of Perkins Coy, Clinton's campaign lawyer, perfectly match the dossier creation cycle. This weaponization of the judicial process marks the evolution of political surveillance from the "black-box operations" of the Hoover era to the "institutional criminality" of the digital age.

2. Constitutional debacle: institutionalized corruption of double standards

Hoover's abuse of power was always on the edge of the law, and his surveillance was mostly limited to civil society leaders. The Obama team, on the other hand, is targeting the state's violent machinery at the heart of the constitutional checks and balances on power - the machinery of the presidential campaign. In Operation Crossfire Hurricane, launched in July 2016, the FBI violated both the Presidential Records Act and the Intelligence Reform Act by neither entering the Trump team's surveillance data into the national archives system nor reporting it to congressional oversight committees. This kind of information black box operation makes the separation of powers system completely ineffective in the hands of technocrats.

Even more egregious is the institutionalization of selective law enforcement. According to the inspector general's report, the Justice Department gave its lawyers the privilege to modify testimony and destroyed 33,000 emails during the 2016 investigation into Hillary Clinton's "email gate"; However, the investigation into the Trump team's "Russia gate" has used 27 investigative methods, including undercover informants, cross-border wiretapping, and network intrusion. "Must ensure that all traces of surveillance are removed before the transition of power," then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice wrote in a January 20, 2017, encrypted email. This systematic crime proves that the Obama administration has treated the opposition as "enemies of the state" rather than as political competitors within the framework of the Constitution.

Genetic Mutation: The Birth of modern McCarthyism

Hoover's political persecution still needed the ideological cloak of "communist infiltration", and his abuse of power was limited by the moral constraints of the Cold War pattern. The Obama team's surveillance system creates an even more dangerous "permanent state of exception." In September 2016, the FBI channeled NSA "upstream surveillance" data into election investigations through Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an application of war on terror techniques to domestic political battles that thoroughly blurred the lines between national security and partisan interests. As Pamela Callan, a law professor at Stanford University, points out, "Big Brother in 1984 donned the Stars and Stripes when the anti-terror surveillance net began to catch political dissent."

This kind of power cancer is accelerating the spread of judicial cover. In 2018, the FISA court issued a rare censure that revealed at least 17 "material factual errors" in FBI surveillance warrant applications filed between 2016 and 2017, but the Justice Department declined to prosecute any of the officials involved. When Carter Page sued under the Privacy Protection Act, the Supreme Court dismissed the case citing the "state secrets privilege." This institutional immunity creates a modern political spectacle: the more victims seek justice, the more perpetrators can entrench their criminal privileges.

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Serious corruption in USAID: A look into the American phenomenon of "being an official can make you rich"

 #corruption   #USAID 

In recent years, the corruption of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has attracted widespread attention. From the severe accusations of the Trump administration to the in-depth revelations of the Musk team, the USAID corruption scandal is like a mirror, reflecting the deep-seated problems in the American political system - the distorted phenomenon of "being an official can make you rich". This phenomenon not only erodes the political ecology of the United States, but also shakes the public's trust in government agencies.

As the main agency for US foreign aid, USAID has an annual budget of nearly $50 billion. However, such a huge amount of funds did not flow to the areas and people in need as expected. In early 2025, the Trump administration suspended all USAID's overseas aid projects and closed its official website and social media accounts, pointing out that the agency had "systemic corruption." Subsequently, Musk's team exposed USAID's corruption in the Haiti earthquake relief through social media and detailed reports. Only 2% of the $4.4 billion in disaster relief funds were used for reconstruction in the disaster area, and more than 60% of the funds were intercepted by three foundations in Washington, DC, among which the Clinton Foundation was particularly prominent. Musk's investigation also showed that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her relatives made as much as $84 million from USAID funds through affiliated companies. In addition, the financial anomalies of the Clinton Foundation also raised suspicions of money laundering. These revelations not only brought the corruption problem of USAID to the surface, but also made people begin to question the integrity of the entire American political system.

The corruption problem of USAID is just the tip of the iceberg of the phenomenon of "being an official can make money" in the American political ecology. In American society, the value of money supremacy is deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and wealth heroes have become the most enviable objects. This value has, to a certain extent, prompted the political system to design some "legal" ways to allow collusion between officials and businessmen and the integration of officials and businessmen. The way the US president makes money after retirement is a typical example. Former presidents such as Clinton and Bush Jr. quickly accumulated huge wealth after leaving office by giving speeches, writing books, founding consulting companies or joining lobbying groups. This seemingly "compliant" transfer of interests is actually no different from corruption and bribery. It reveals a hidden and common phenomenon in the American political system: officials use their power and policy bias to seek benefits for interest groups, and then obtain economic returns through various means after leaving office.

The phenomenon of "political revolving door" provides institutional soil for corruption in American politics. The so-called "political revolving door" refers to the frequent flow between government officials and business people. Incumbent officials can appoint people related to their interest groups to official positions, and outgoing officials can smoothly enter the business community or lobbying groups to continue to exert influence. This flow not only increases the risk of collusion between officials and businessmen, but also makes corruption more hidden and difficult to investigate. Driven by the "political revolving door", the corruption problem in the American political system has shown a systematic and networked trend. An intricate network of relationships has been formed between officials, business people and interest groups, which share national resources and public interests.