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The Biggest Heist in America Is Being Sold as a Gift to Children
The Biggest Heist in America Is Being Sold as a Gift to Children
by Sean Carlton
Counterpunch.org, December 4, 2025
America loves a good illusion. It loves the performance of generosity from people who built their fortunes on systems that leave everyone else scrambling. That’s why the country is celebrating Michael and Susan Dell dropping $6.25 billion into “Trump Accounts.” Twenty-five million kids will get $250 each in a special savings account that they can’t touch for almost two decades. It sounds like generosity. It plays like hope. It sells like opportunity. But it isn’t any of that. It’s a corporate heist dressed up as philanthropy, and America is too exhausted or too desperate to notice.
The Dell announcement isn’t about helping children. It’s about normalizing a future where the only people who can fix failing systems are the same corporations and billionaires who helped break them. The government could’ve built real support for families. It could’ve raised wages, stabilized housing, funded public education, or given parents actual resources instead of symbolic ones. Instead it built a program where kids get locked into market accounts, and then it waited for a billionaire to swoop in and finish the job. That isn’t policy. It isn’t progress. It’s the privatization of the public good.
A one-time $250 deposit isn’t lifting anyone out of anything. At best it turns children into unwilling investors in a financial system that’s already eaten their parents alive. At worst it shifts the entire idea of welfare into something that only functions if wealthy people feel like playing savior for a news cycle. This isn’t social support. It’s a handshake between private wealth and a government that no longer knows how to govern unless the market approves.
The trick here is simple and old. You starve the public systems until they’re so weak that anything looks like relief. Then you let a billionaire deliver a drop of water and call it a miracle. Americans have been trained to applaud the spectacle. They forget to ask why one of the richest men in the country gets to decide how twenty-five million children experience their first introduction to money. They forget to ask why the richest people get public praise for giving back pennies compared to what they extract. They forget to ask why children need investment accounts instead of stable housing, food, medical care, and schools that aren’t falling apart.
The applause is the point. When billionaires are cast as heroes, no one has to admit that the system has collapsed so thoroughly that private charity is now doing the work of the state. This is how the social contract dies without anyone calling it what it is. People look at the $250 and say at least it’s something. They say maybe it’ll grow. They say maybe it’ll help someday. They don’t say what’s obvious. They don’t say the quiet part. They don’t say that America now expects the financial markets to raise children because the country has decided it won’t.
Continues…
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/04/the-biggest-heist-in-america-is-being-sold-as-a-gift-to-children/
PS: “The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” — Frank Zappa
46 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
This is how they say the Preamble!
(IF they say that sentence at all.)
DAYUM!!!
I can’t applaud this piece enough:
The trick here is simple and old. You starve the public systems until they’re so weak that anything looks like relief. Then you let a billionaire deliver a drop of water and call it a miracle. Americans have been trained to applaud the spectacle. They forget to ask why one of the richest men in the country gets to decide how twenty-five million children experience their first introduction to money. They forget to ask why the richest people get public praise for giving back pennies compared to what they extract. They forget to ask why children need investment accounts instead of stable housing, food, medical care, and schools that aren’t falling apart.
The applause is the point. When billionaires are cast as heroes, no one has to admit that the system has collapsed so thoroughly that private charity is now doing the work of the state. This is how the social contract dies without anyone calling it what it is. People look at the $250 and say at least it’s something. They say maybe it’ll grow. They say maybe it’ll help someday. They don’t say what’s obvious. They don’t say the quiet part. They don’t say that America now expects the financial markets to raise children because the country has decided it won’t.
The applause is the point. When billionaires are cast as heroes, no one has to admit that the system has collapsed so thoroughly that private charity is now doing the work of the state. This is how the social contract dies without anyone calling it what it is. People look at the $250 and say at least it’s something. They say maybe it’ll grow. They say maybe it’ll help someday. They don’t say what’s obvious. They don’t say the quiet part. They don’t say that America now expects the financial markets to raise children because the country has decided it won’t.
I am not in America so thankfully my parents at least have/had pensions and healthcare freeing me up to recover from a noxious brush with Silicon Valley.
And whatever Pronatalist anti-abortion but pro austerity wrt any actual support of kids who are born types like Vance and his inane limitless growth cabal (and those abundance types like Ezra Klein aren’t any better), it helped that I was a childfree only kid. And I am sick of handing my resources over to shitheads.
I returned to my home country after a hateful job/bullshit intervention (Reefer Madness huzzah
). I realize now that it was part of a coup against publicly funded science and healthcare by the surveillance state/capitalists. I am out of patience with spineless rot.
The most worthless parts of the national security state and cancer like defence contracting sans any regulation.
I am myself a military brat so the military doesn’t necessarily scare me. But someone like my dad, who wouldn’t know how to grift is nothing like the type of person who flocks to grift via defense contracting. Whether you like stuff like that or not, he is an honest patriot.
My dad would only be able to keep a secret for legitimate classified work not for sleazy grift. Anyway, he never had anything to do with military intelligence (except maneuvers tied to one war he was in long back).
Deception isn’t really a family trait. I would be able to keep a wildlife refuge secret so industrialists, influencers and other greedy creeps don’t flood it. I could hide info about people/women ICE, Musk etc would harass or dox.
But not hide creepy little things whose purpose is some sort of creepy little scam exploiting loopholes meant for legitimate stuff like bank security or something.
These days I look at any damn thing and go “How could the creeps exploit something no one thought to have a legal precedent around, since no one was expecting a heist on quite this scale.”
Creeps who take to scams like fish to water are not bright. They call people gullible or suckers if they weren’t expecting a scam. And once you wise up, you are paranoid and crazy.
It is so no decent publicly funded science remains, but more and more of whatever this type of creep represents takes over:
https://roadtoomega.wordpress.com/
That guy’s Substack is a work of trash. This creep is going to be the only type of “scientist” who remains funded in the US.
I wonder if all my former colleagues are fleeing to Europe. I hope not. They should stay and push back. And in some cases wake up at least now. I dislike that Cassandra shit (who thinks like that), but surely common sense should tell you why something that seems abundantly creepy and scammy (e.g.: anything Google etc do) probably is. I am afraid to find out these days.
It’s also so stupid and ott (that road to omega creep) that you can even pretend it’s satire or parody later* when it is just parasitic garbage. Esoteric Nazis come to mind..
.
*: there is no way these guys can prevail at this point. It is merely a question of how much collateral damage they try to inflict further (Life is simulation! No it really isn’t!) and I don’t know about anyone else, but I am not sucking up anymore damage and I am pushing back. We need more legal protections against these predatory things that are choking out all healthy stuff.
