[Ray20]

> I would say the German political system is much less corrupted by lobbyists compared to the United States.

I highly doubt it. I'm certainly no expert on Germany, but has Germany's bureaucratic machine spent decades destroying its own energy sector to buy energy from Russia, funding the war machine of Putin's totalitarian dictatorship?

And not just by buying these resources, but by OVERPAYING for them many times over. I just opened a chart of the prices at which Germany bought natural gas from Russia before the war with Ukraine, and it's wild, it is several times more expensive than Germany is now paying for gas delivered from the other side of the globe on tiny ships. It was a direct subsidizing of this war.

And then you look at these high-ranking (and not so high-ranking) bureaucrats who made all these decisions... And literally all of their families got richer during the time these decisions were made, by tens (and sometimes hundreds) of millions. There's zero accountability, zero media coverage, and it's all being hushed up to such an extent that I can't think of any other explanation other than EVERYONE was taking the money. We are literally talking about the level of existence of a centralized totalitarian machine for the forceful silencing of anyone who tries to talk about this topic.

So do I say the same about the CHIPS Act in the US? Probably. But the level of corruption seen in Germany – pervasive, bloody, destructive – is simply unimaginable in the US.