Congress pushed the defense budget vote past November's election, which Stephen calls a deliberate, bipartisan grift.
A vote after the election is leverage taken awayStephen: your vote only works if you know what the budget vote will be before you cast it.
Lame ducks vote with nothing left to loseLosers stay in office until January but vote on December 11th, open to consulting offers from the interests they just helped.
The bureaucracy outlasts whoever you electReplace a politician and the administrators underneath — Mary and Jane, 45 years in, pension coming — still push the same buttons.
Executive SummaryAI
Stephen tells Rich the current fight in Congress is the defense budget going from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, and that members voted roughly 148 to 20 to table it until after the November election.
He argues the delay does two things: voters lose all leverage because they cannot know how their congressman will vote, and members who lose in November still get to vote on December 11th before leaving in January.
His example is a congressman in Butte, Montana who opposes a weapons factory, loses his seat, votes anyway, and is then hired as a consultant — a favour system he says also runs through big banking, pharmaceutical and weapons industry and the lifer bureaucrats underneath the politicians.
Stephen's remedy is local: county commissions set property taxes, energy, broadband and electricity bills, and his own video on five ways a county commission can affect the cost of living still draws letters from sitting commissioners who did not know.
The second half turns to Florida, where Ann Van der Steel is campaigning to ban hyperscale data centers over noise, water and the near-absence of permanent jobs, while Trump and Promethean Action back them on the argument that America must win the AI race against China — a claim Stephen says is false because the US already has far more AI data centers.
Key Quote
“My vote is only useful as leverage if I know what I'm voting for or against.”