Presidents can use the power to declare war for political purposes, i.e. start a war after a scandal, or before an election, etc. They can also be bribed, just like the politicians in congress.

The constitution grants congress the power to declare war, congress being the representatives of the people of the states. It was never intended that a single person, the president, has the authority to launch an offensive war with another country.

I agree with you that the campaigns are financed in the U.S. amounts to legal bribery. Most other civilized countries outlaw or greatly curtail campaign donations from corporations, unions, and trade associations. Many also limit donations to offices you can vote on, subsidize donations with tax credits, limit the lengths of campaigns, and/or publicly fund political parties.

> It was never intended

Until we get the big showdown about this in the Supreme Court, both the Executive and Legislative will continue to claim they have ultimate authority here.

In the long run it's unlikely that the Supreme Court is a suitable institution to resolve the growing docket of institutional crises in the US.

> Members of congress are getting obscenely rich from the Military Industrial Complex and their "campaign contributions".

Please explain for me how that is so, without diverting into claiming that they're being handed tens of millions of dollars secretly under the table.

I'm familiar with how campaign contributions work and the legal regulations involved, including what they're allowed to do - and not do - with the money. How do campaign contributions from military industrial complex firms translate into Congressional members getting obscenely rich?

Every single Congressional member would have been better off buying any number of dozens of various traditional tech stocks than any of the military industrial stocks (Lockheed, Boeing, Northrop, etc.).

Amazon/Netflix/Apple/Microsoft/Google/Facebook/Tesla/etc. > Northrop

Cloudflare is up more since its IPO than Boeing is over ~15 years. Watch out for those CDN campaign contributions?

> Please explain for me how that is so, without diverting into claiming that they're being handed tens of millions of dollars secretly under the table.

There are two aspects to this.

The first is campaign contributions. Recent US Presidential election campaigns have exceeded a billion dollars. House and Senate races have been millions to hundreds of millions, per election. The people "giving" this money are not doing so out of altruism. It's not secret money under the table, it's all open and disclosed, but nobody thinks it has no effect on behavior. At best the representatives are entirely scrupulous and never allow the money to affect their positions, but then the candidates with pro-corporate positions find it easier to raise money, the money allows them to buy more advertising, and the candidates who want to shovel tax dollars into corporate coffers win more elections.

The second is the revolving door. You go serve some time in Congress, do what the corporations want, and when you retire or fail to win re-election because your constituents got fed up with what you were doing, you have a cushy job paying six, seven, eight figures a year waiting for you after. Or that job goes to a member of your family while you're still in office.

That's definitely a problem, although the examples in the US are things like the SEC and the FCC, i.e. unelected officials.

People have made much about how the Pelosi fortune has grown in the last 20 years, but they seem to have overlooked the fact that they would actually have done better to just invest in the S&P500.