During a Senate hearing to review the FBI’s FY2026 budget request, Director Kash Patel was forced to admit that, despite the law requiring it, he had no such request ready to review.
This surprising development came during an awkward back-and-forth with Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), the ranking Democrat and Vice Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, which oversees and approves budget requests.
Senator Murray reminded the FBI Director that the budget request was legally required “last week,” and after the director responded, she surprisedly added, “And your answer is you just understand you’re not going to follow the law?”
It’s not just AIPAC that’s the main problem (although it absolutely is a problem); the Democrats and Republicans both get massive amounts of “donations” from large PACs (including AIPAC), corporations, billionaires, etc. that they choose to represent them by any means necessary, since that’s who they get their paycheck from.
The only way to fix corruption for good is to permenantly make it so that corruption can never happen to begin with. Few individuals/stock traders shouldn’t be allowed to own/influence these massive corporations; they need to all be forcibly converted to worker-owned coops (which will also abolish the stock market), and we also need a hard wealth cap (something like $50 million tied to inflation in both liquid and non-liquid assets). Imagine if you got to both vote for who your manager is and also vote to fire them if they do a bad job.
Any system that is still capitalist by nature (like social democracy) will still have an elite few who are able to buy influence. Capitalism actively encourages this to occur by its very nature (as pro-capitalists would say: “greed is good”)
AIPAC is more of a symptom of a larger problem.