It's not an accident that in an era where every single part of the US budget is being gutted (or likely to be gutted before all of this is over with), the Pentagon received an enormous increase. The MIC runs the US. If the CEO of Lockheed Martin makes a call to Trump, you had better believe Trump listens closely.
Regardless of how you may feel about it, that's how the governments of most other Western countries saw it. This is evidenced by US bases all over the world, low investment in national defense by most NATO countries, the dollar being the world's primary reserve currency, etc.
The diminishment of global influence and power is not because of those things, but because of domestic affairs: in the richest country in history, businesses broke the social contract with workers, the cost of health care skyrocketed as hospitals became for-profit business, and half the country was too brainwashed by consolidated media conglomerates to see what was really happening.
Basically, the libertarian values that have always been the underpinnings of American society finally reached their apotheosis at the same time the Internet and propagandist entertainment news caused the cultural fabric of society that had formerly acted as a counterweight to begin to unravel. Every man for themselves writ large. The chickens came home to roost.
You've got to imagine that if the US somehow got into a shooting war with a country they had previously sold arms to, and it were possible to remotely disable their aircraft, that someone in the MIC would say, "Hold on. If we use this kill switch, the world will see it and literally no countries will ever buy weapons from us again."
Unless the immigration lawyer in question is on parole as the letter stipulated, it's either a mistake, a malicious fake, or a malicious effort by the administration to provoke self-deportation with a wide net.
Summary: Democrats are doing nothing about stopping the flow of funds to Israel after increasingly brazen massacres of unarmed civilians and other war crimes.
It's not concern about theft, it's just penny-ante nickel-and-dime BS to get you to buy more than you need. But as you said, it's so hostile to customers that you wind up going somewhere else for bigger ticket items. Of course the opportunity cost is invisible to them.
I hate that I can't avoid them entirely in my area except for nuts-and-bolts type things, which I go to my local hardware store for. Home Depot and Lowe's have a monopoly in my area when it comes to most goods, but I had to give up on Lowe's entirely due to the truly terrible customer experience.
(Home Depot has a bad customer experience too, but my local Lowe's is on a different level.)
Harvard has a $52 billion endowment