{"id":236329,"date":"2026-06-12T17:51:48","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T17:51:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/?p=236329"},"modified":"2026-06-12T17:51:48","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T17:51:48","slug":"the-stealing-of-america-youre-not-a-citizen-youre-a-revenue-stream-for-the-power-elite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/the-stealing-of-america-youre-not-a-citizen-youre-a-revenue-stream-for-the-power-elite\/","title":{"rendered":"The Stealing of America: You\u2019re Not a Citizen \u2013 You\u2019re a Revenue Stream for the Power Elite"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people<\/em>.\u201d \u2013 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations<\/em><\/p>\n

You\u2019re not imagining it.<\/p>\n

Everything costs more. Everything is monitored.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Everything feels like it\u2019s designed to take \u2013 from your wallet, your time, your freedom.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s because it is.<\/p>\n

The government has turned everyday life into a revenue stream \u2013 funding endless wars, bloated agencies, surveillance systems, and profit-driven policing, all on your dime.<\/p>\n

You\u2019re not just paying taxes. You\u2019re paying to be watched. Paying to be policed. Paying to be controlled.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t government. It\u2019s a business model.<\/p>\n

By now, it has become painfully clear that the only economic plan being advanced by the U.S. administration is the kind that enriches the oligarchy at the expense of everyone else.<\/p>\n

If the government\u2019s newly dubbed \u201cwar on waste<\/em>,\u201d headed by Vice President J.D. Vance, is anything like its deceptively futile past efforts to drain the swamp and use DOGE to cut spending that is inefficient, we should expect to see corruption, graft and waste rise while vital programs that benefit the taxpayer get slashed.<\/p>\n

The level of self-serving corruption, indulgence and excess by the elite ruling class while Americans struggle to make ends meet is off the charts:<\/p>\n

A $200 billion in additional defence funding<\/a> so Pete Hegseth can make a game out of war with Iran. More than $16 billion was spent in the first 12 days of war on Iran. That does not include the rising cost of gas and consumer goods or the long-term costs of supporting those injured in the war.<\/p>\n

$1 billion to a French company to not develop two wind projects<\/a> off the coasts of North Carolina and New York.<\/p>\n

$14 billion in oil revenue to Iran<\/a> to fund its war with the U.S.<\/p>\n

$22 million in one month on lobsters and ribeye steak<\/a> so the Defence Department wouldn\u2019t have to risk losing some of their taxpayer-funded budget. $1.8 million for musical instruments, including a \u201c$98,329 Steinway & Sons grand piano for the Air Force chief of staff\u2019s home, a $26,000 violin, and a $21,750 custom handmade flute from the luxury Japanese brand Muramatsu<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

$400 million for a 90,000-square-foot ballroom<\/a> to which most taxpayers will never be invited.<\/p>\n

$75 \u2013 $150 million to turn a public golf course into a championship-level golf course<\/a> in the nation\u2019s capital.<\/p>\n

$100 million for a 250-foot \u201cArc de Trump\u201d<\/a> next to Arlington National Cemetery.<\/p>\n

At least $60 million for a UFC event on the White House South Lawn<\/a> to commemorate Donald Trump\u2019s 80th<\/sup> birthday.<\/p>\n

While members of Trump\u2019s inner circle dine on lobster and filet mignon, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. suggests that Americans struggling with the high cost of food instead buy and eat \u201ccheap cuts<\/em>\u201d<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the rest of the country is left to absorb a higher cost of living driven by Trump\u2019s tariffs, inflation, and economic policies<\/a> that punish the many to benefit the few.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

At every turn, the US administration\u2019s claims of slashing government spending have translated into even greater expense for the taxpayer with little to nothing to show for it.<\/p>\n

All of those DOGE layoffs may have reduced the size of the federal workforce on paper, but in reality they have resulted in taxpayers footing the bill for unemployment benefits instead of salaries.<\/p>\n

The US administration may have dropped oversight into police misconduct \u2013 effectively giving a green light to police violence \u2013 but taxpayers will still be forced to pay<\/a> for every lawsuit and settlement that follows.<\/p>\n

In the eyes of the elite, you are not a citizen \u2013 you are a revenue stream, and the government is cashing in.<\/p>\n

Call it what you will \u2013 taxes, penalties, fees, fines, regulations, tariffs, tickets, permits, surcharges, tolls, asset forfeitures \u2013 but the only word that truly describes the constant bilking of the American taxpayer by the government and its corporate partners is this: theft.<\/p>\n

We\u2019re living in a topsy-turvy Sherwood Forest where the government and its corporate allies aren\u2019t stealing from the rich to feed the poor \u2013 they\u2019re stealing from the poor, the middle class, and anyone not politically connected to further enrich the powerful.<\/p>\n

The result is as predictable as it is devastating: the poor get poorer, the rich get richer, and the American Dream has been replaced by a surveillance state propped up by endless war, crippling debt, and legalized plunder.<\/p>\n

What Americans still fail to grasp is this: if the government can take your property, your income, your privacy, and your freedom at will, you don\u2019t have rights \u2013 you have privileges.<\/p>\n

And privileges can be revoked.<\/p>\n

The American police state, with its surveillance cameras, militarized police, SWAT raids, fusion centres, drones, AI tracking systems, predictive policing algorithms, asset forfeiture schemes, and privatized prisons, is not about keeping you safe.<\/p>\n

It is about profit.<\/p>\n

It is a sprawling, multi-trillion-dollar ecosystem designed to move money from taxpayers through government agencies and into corporate hands, all under the ever-shifting justifications of \u201csecurity<\/em>,\u201d \u201claw and order<\/em>,\u201d and \u201cnational emergency<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The rationalizations never modify.<\/p>\n

We are told it is about terrorism, drugs, immigration, public safety, or civil unrest. Today, those justifications have simply been expanded to include artificial intelligence, foreign adversaries, domestic extremism, and a permanent state of war abroad.<\/p>\n

But these are pretexts.<\/p>\n

The real motive has remained the same for decades: control the population, monetize the system, and keep the money flowing upward.<\/p>\n

Follow the money and the truth becomes impossible to ignore: The government isn\u2019t serving you. It\u2019s billing you.<\/p>\n

The federal government is now barrelling toward $1.5 trillion in annual military spending<\/a>, a staggering escalation that will add trillions more to the national debt<\/a> in the coming decade. At the same time, the US administration is pouring hundreds of billions more into a widening conflict with Iran, where the cost of war is measured not only in lives lost but in taxpayer dollars funnelled directly into the coffers of defence contractors.<\/p>\n

At home, policing has become a billion-dollar industry unto itself. Federal, state and local governments spend more than $80 billion a year on policing, much of it used to transform civilian police forces into paramilitary units equipped with battlefield weapons and surveillance technology.<\/p>\n

The prison system continues to operate as a profit engine, costing more than $100 billion annually while warehousing nearly 2 million people and placing millions more under government supervision. It costs taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars each year to incarcerate a single person, many of them nonviolent offenders, while private prison corporations reap the financial rewards of a system designed to keep cells full.<\/p>\n

Through civil asset forfeiture, law enforcement agencies seize billions of dollars in cash, cars and property, often without ever charging the owner with a crime, creating a perverse incentive to police for profit rather than justice.<\/p>\n

The Department of Homeland Security, once sold to the public as a temporary safeguard, has become a permanent fixture of the American landscape, consuming more than $100 billion annually while expanding its reach into every corner of domestic life.<\/p>\n

Immigration enforcement has evolved into a sprawling detention and deportation machine fuelled by tens of billions in taxpayer funding, increasingly targeting not only undocumented immigrants but also legal residents and individuals whose only offense is dissent.<\/p>\n

Layered on top of all of this is a rapidly expanding digital dragnet in which government agencies partner with private tech companies to deploy artificial intelligence systems capable of tracking, predicting and cataloguing human behaviour, turning everyday life into a series of data points to be monitored, analysed and controlled.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Even local governments have been drawn into the scheme, generating billions through fines, fees, traffic cameras and automated enforcement systems that disproportionately target those least able to pay, turning ordinary citizens into revenue streams.<\/p>\n

This is not accidental. It is a business model.<\/p>\n

The same government that claims it cannot afford healthcare, education or housing somehow always finds unlimited funds for war. As President Eisenhower warned, the military-industrial complex feeds on conflict, and today that machine has become both global and permanent.<\/p>\n

The wars do not end.<\/p>\n

The spending does not stop.<\/p>\n

And the bill always comes due to the American taxpayer.<\/p>\n

Every bomb that falls, every missile launched, every drone strike carried out carries a price tag, and that price tag has your name on it.<\/p>\n

At home, the logic is no different.<\/p>\n

Policing has shifted away from protecting communities and toward managing populations, particularly those deemed inconvenient, undesirable or expendable. SWAT raids are deployed for minor offenses, predictive policing programs target individuals before any crime has been committed, and surveillance technologies are used to monitor activists, journalists and political dissenters.<\/p>\n

Poverty itself has been criminalized, with people fined, ticketed and jailed for low-level infractions, while homelessness is treated not as a social failure but as a law enforcement opportunity.<\/p>\n

Even the nation\u2019s schools have been folded into this pipeline, where zero-tolerance policies and truancy enforcement funnel children into the criminal justice system at an early age.<\/p>\n

What passes for law enforcement today is increasingly indistinguishable from revenue enforcement.<\/p>\n

None of this occurs in isolation.<\/p>\n

Corporate America is deeply embedded in every aspect of this system. Defence contractors profit from war. Technology companies profit from surveillance. Private prison corporations profit from incarceration. Data brokers profit from harvesting and selling your personal information. Financial institutions profit from the ever-expanding national debt.<\/p>\n

Even prison labour, paid pennies on the dollar, feeds directly into corporate supply chains, creating yet another incentive to keep the system running at full capacity.<\/p>\n

When government power and corporate profit become intertwined in this way, the Constitution<\/em> becomes optional and profit becomes policy.<\/p>\n

In this new economy, you are no longer just a citizen.<\/p>\n

You are a revenue stream, a data point, a potential suspect, and a body to be managed.<\/p>\n

Whether through taxes, fines, surveillance or forced labour, the system is designed to extract value from you at every stage of your life.<\/p>\n

And when you add it all up, the cost is not merely financial \u2013 it is constitutional.<\/p>\n

Every dollar poured into this machinery comes at the expense of your privacy, your property, your due process rights, your freedom of movement, and your freedom of speech.<\/p>\n

If this system continues unchecked, the future is already taking shape \u2013 a nation in which everything is monitored, everything is monetized, and nothing is truly free.<\/p>\n

The solution is not more funding, more surveillance or more enforcement.<\/p>\n

It is the opposite.<\/p>\n

It is time to defund the police state, dismantle the profit incentives, restore constitutional limits, and return power \u2013 and resources \u2013 to the people.<\/p>\n

Because until that occurs, the theft will continue.<\/p>\n

And the only question left will be how much is left to steal.<\/p>\n

Author: Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

yogaesoteric
\nJune 12, 2026<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThere is no art which one government sooner learns of another than that of draining money from the pockets of the people.\u201d \u2013 Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations You\u2019re not imagining it. Everything costs more. Everything is monitored. Everything feels like it\u2019s designed to take \u2013 from your wallet, your time, your freedom. That\u2019s because […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1188],"tags":[1516],"class_list":["post-236329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-power-and-corruption-the-matrix-of-the-master-and-slave-3480-en","tag-article_of_the_week"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236329"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236339,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236329\/revisions\/236339"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/yogaesoteric.net\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}