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https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/the-big-picture-and-the-decline-of

https://theduran.com/the-big-picture-the-decline-of-the-west/

The Big Picture & the Decline of The West

29 March 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

Right now, the center of the American empire — the U.S. Government itself — is in the early stages of shedding some of its colonies, especially in Europe (such as by demanding them not to consume the most inexpensive fuels that were available to them, which came from Russia — and which had fueled European industries and kept EU countries economically competitive with other nations), and is just now starting to shed even its own public, by slashing the federal programs (such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and services to the poor) that have the highest public support. This self-cannibalization is normal for an empire in decline, because its billionaires (its richest, the country’s aristocracy — the individuals who collectively control the Government), have been the beneficiaries of empire, and can no longer keep up the lifestyles to which they are accustomed, unless they extract it increasingly from their colonies and from their own public. No longer can they extract even more from conquests (via invasions, coups, or otherwise) — basically looting the vanquished. Destroying countries outside the empire (such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Venezuela, and Iran) becomes increasingly replaced by destroying itself.   

“The West” — the U.S.-and-‘allied’ (i.e., colonies) countries — are shrinking as a percentage of global GDP PPP (Gross Domestic Product at Purchasing-Power-Parity, this being the real measure of an economy). Their approximately 2,000 billionaires, whose percentage of that national wealth has been increasing while that of their countries are declining, are becoming less and less dependent upon exploiting the entire world (which thereby is becoming increasingly capable of self-defense and thus of defending itself against further expansion of the U.S. empire). Thus, these billionaires are becoming more and more dependent upon exploiting their own people — their domestic population of workers and consumers. It is the stage of imperial over-reach. Consequently, for example, America’s current President, the Republican billionaire Donald Trump, who represents America’s billionaires who have funded his political career, is now seeking to extract from the American people yet more money to further-enrich those billionaires. This is being done despite the news-media of the Democratic Party’s billionaires focusing increasingly upon how unpopular this extraction from the public is among the American people. And increasingly the Democratic Party billionaires’ theory of why Trump is so blatantly doing this, is that it will drive down so low the American people’s respect for America’s Government, as to make the public favor increased privatization of everything, which will then mean even higher profits for America’s billionaires. This die-off (attrition) of America’s Government will thus be very profitable for America’s wealthiest individuals. Not only will the public become more desperate (and willing to work for lower wages etc.), as those federal protections get taken away, but ultimately everything will become privatized so that this model of capitalism (the resultant purification of American ‘libertarianism’: the ‘free market’) will approach even closer to 100% than they now already do — so that the controlling billionaires will end up in control over everything in America (including basic services to the public, and especially to the poor — the most desperate people of all). Anyone who isn’t a billionaire will be dependent upon billionaires. This is how it has been in America ever since, at least, 1980.

For example, the Newhouse family are Democratic Party billionaires who control such news-media as the liberal USA Today and the intensely neoconservative (i.e., favoring further expansion of the U.S. empire) New Yorker, and such online sites as Reddit. On March 27th, their USA Today headlined by their Arizona newspaper the Arizona Republic’s columnist E.J. Montini, “Elon Musk has a dodgy plan to gut Social Security and please billionaires”, which is a remarkable headline because it openly acknowledges the opposition between billionaires and Social Security. It has thus stepped into politically progressive territory, though the Newhouse billionaires are as hostile toward progressives as Republican billionaires are. (Democrats are liberals — not proressives.) This has become a real war between Republican billionaires and Democratic billionaires. So, even within The West’s imperial country itself — the U.S. — things are starting to come apart.

Montini opened:

America's co-president Elon Musk has referred to Social Security as “the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

The leader of the Department of Government Efficiency told Fox Business, “Most of the federal spending is entitlements. That’s the big one to eliminate.”  [Actually, America spends each year $1.5 trillion on its military, 26% of which goes to its armaments manufacturers (America’s most profitable corporations), but only $1.4 trillion on its Social Security, virtually all of which goes to its recipients, who had personally paid for it.  And notice that even Newhouse’s employee Montini fails to point out Musk’s lie here. The Newhouses are, themselves, big boosters to America’s armaments manufacturers.]

Musk and his helper Donald Trump want to gut the system. After all, billionaires have no need for Social Security.

However, they know that if they tried a direct approach and simply slashed Social Security benefits, even their most ardent sycophants in Congress would balk, knowing they’d be booted from office in the next election.

DOGE cuts make it tough to access Social Security benefits

White House Senior Advisor, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk attends a cabinet meeting held by U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on March 24, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Instead of drastically cutting benefits, the plan seemingly is to make it more and more difficult for people who have earned those benefits to get them.

That’s why Musk and his DOGE bros want to cut thousands of jobs from Social Security’s workforce, close regional offices and limit phone service by "requiring recipients to show up in person to verify certain changes to their accounts," according to The Washington Post.

That March 25th Washington Post (owned by the Democratic Party billionaire Jeff Bezos) article “The Trump Presidency: Long waits, waves of calls, website crashes: Social Security is breaking down” opened

A flood of cuts led by Elon Musk has sent the agency into chaos as a new commissioner prepares to take charge.

The Social Security Administration website crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts. In the field, office managers have resorted to answering phones in place of receptionists because so many employees have been pushed out. Amid all this, the agency no longer has a system to monitor customer experience because that office was eliminated as part of the cost-cutting efforts led by Elon Musk.

And the phones keep ringing. And ringing.

The federal agency that delivers $1.5 trillion a year in earned benefits to 73 million retired workers, their survivors, and poor and disabled Americans is engulfed in crisis — further undermining the already struggling organization’s ability to provide reliable and quick service to vulnerable customers, according to internal documents and more than two dozen current and former agency employees and officials, customers and others who interact with Social Security. …

“What’s going on is the destruction of the agency from the inside out, and it’s accelerating,” Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) said in an interview.

Increasingly, the Democratic Party billionaires’ media are coalescing around the theory that what their Republican colleagues are trying to do, is to make Americans so anti-Government as to facilitate eliminating the little socialism that DOES exist in their country, in order to transform America into the standard model of a fascist regime, which is libertarian, or otherwise called (by Mussolini) “corporationist”, or (also called by Mussolini) “fascist,” in which whatever had been socialized will become privatized — and so the billionaires will become enriched even more than before. Everything will thus be oligopolies and monopolies, and there will be no effective regulations, only this ‘free market’. (Basically, the ‘libertarian’ theory is that a government is built upon an economy, instead of that an economy is built upon a government. They ignore that without laws by and from the government, no economy can even function, contracts are unenforceable. This stupid ideology — libertarianism — is the fraud that Republican billionaires promote. By contrast, liberal or Democratic Party billionaires add to it progressive-sounding hypocrisies, so as to appear to be different from Republicans.) 

I believe that if the Republican Party’s billionaires will be able to pull through the present period by retaining control of the Government through to the end of Trump’s term in 2028, then America will likely be a full-fledged police-state, and the public will be crushed; but, if the Democratic Party’s billionaires instead succeed to take over the Congress in the 2026 mid-term elections, then it will go back to the Obama-Biden strategy, of intensifying U.S.-and-‘allied’ efforts to conquer Russia, China, and Iran — more of an outward-facing, than of an inward-facing, aggression. But, in either case, the U.S. empire will continue declining, and the future will be with Russia and China (or, as I have called it, “RussChina”). For example, after 2020, Russia has had a higher GDP PPP than Japan; and, whereas Japan’s has remained stagnant, Russia’s has still been growing despite all of the U.S.-empire’s sanctions; and, after 2015, China’s GDP PPP has been higher than America’s, and has had higher growth-rates than America since 2001; so, China and Russia are actually already leaving America in the dust. Meanwhile, the European Union has been around as stagnant as Japan, which is even more stagnant than America. I showed all of these data more clearly than the World Bank’s own website does, in my 4 March 2024 “Statistical Comparisons U.S. v. Russia (etc.)” (which likewise used the World Bank’s figures). Whereas especially the Democratic Party’s billionaires during 2012-2024 were hoping that piling sanctions onto Russia would stop Russia’s economic success, that strategy has, by now, clearly failed; and, so, increasingly, America’s billionaires — and especially the Republican ones — are looking within their own empire, and most especially within their own nation, for their targets to exploit. Therefore, if Trump will continue beyond 2026 to control Congress, then the police-state character of post-WW2 America will become increasingly obvious to virtually everybody (because increasing use of police will be needed in order to control the public’s unrest). If that happens, then the U.S. empire will be recognized even within the EU as being fascist. And, then, European billionaires will be faced with the decision whether to quit it. NATO might consequently collapse. If Trump invades Greenland before November 2026, then NATO’s collapse could come even earlier.

I am expecting the Democrats to come roaring back to control of at least one if not both houses of Congress, and then to win the Presidency in 2028. The reason isn’t ONLY that the Trump-Musk chainsaw to slash the federal programs that the American public the most want to be increased instead of cut — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, services to the poor, and education — but is ALSO, like I had headlined and explained on February 11th, “Trump’s ‘deal’ to end Ukraine’s war is to continue Biden’s policy.” In other words: Trump has been proceeding upon the false assumption (from Biden) that Russia would be willing to compromise on its most essential needs for national security, such as permanently preventing Ukraine to join NATO, and such as denazifying Ukraine (both needed in order to prevent an Operation Barbarossa #2). I wrongly reversed that conclusion when I headlined three days later, on February 13th, “Russia has now won the war in Ukraine.”, where I accepted Stephen Bryen’s opinion because of his undeniable expertise, in his conclusion that “Trump Makes His Ukraine Move: No NATO Membership for Ukraine, No U.S. Troops.” Only now is it clear that his opinion was wrong, as is explained on March 29th at The Duran, by the discussion “US-Russia Talks Stall, Escalation Expected – John Mearsheimer, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen”. Trump remains a neoconservative, after all. This Mearsheimer-Mercouris-Diesen discussion makes clear that regarding Russia, at least, Trump is in accord with the majority of his advisors, who are the neocons he had appointed. The ambiguity about that matter is now gone. This means that Trump will lose the voters who had trusted his anti-neocon assertions. He really is just a salesman for U.S. armaments manufacturers. Losing the anti-neocon vote, and losing the anti-billionaire vote, will make almost impossible his retaining control over Congress in the final two years of his term. Internationally, this will solidify even further the coming-together of Russia and China, as Rhod MacKenzie headlined on March 29th, “How the U.S. Plans to Split Russia and China”. Those “plans” are certain to fail. I think that the ultimate result will probably be the formation of a new federation, which might be called “RussChina” or “ChinUssia”, which would finally replace “The West” by “the East” — so that the U.S.-and-allied world order will atrophy as the EurAsian world order will dominate and takes its place. If the latter occurs, then the possibility will exist for FDR’s plan for the U.N.’s Charter (to outlaw and prohibit ALL empires) to finally become possible, so that the existing Trumanist U.N. will become replaced by FDR’s anti-imperialist design for it. And, if THAT happens, then, at long last, world peace will finally be possible. Right now, it isn’t even POSSIBLE. If Trump follows through with his threats to invade Greenland — which he has made extremely hostile because of those threats — then not only will that invasion effectively terminate NATO, but it will decisively END the entire Trumanist, neoconservative, world order, and thereby virtually force the U.N.’s Charter to be seriously Amended, if not basically rewritten — into the FDR mold. 

The last two Chapters, 9 and 10, of Frank Costigliola’s masterpiece, which was misnamed ROOSEVELT’S LOST ALLIANCES but was instead about Truman’s reversal of FDR’s plan for the post-WW2 world, describes how thoroughly Truman took a wrecking ball to it. Everybody should read that, because a meta-ranking of U.S. Presidents by 25 surveys of historians and political scientists showed overall FDR as ranking #2 and Truman as #7 among the 46 that were ranked; and, so, ‘historians’ and political ‘scientists’ are evidently ignorant that Truman fundamentally reversed the most masterful aspect of FDR’s Presidency: international affairs. Roosevelt was even better at that than domestically, but this historical fact (and the bottom actual ranking of Truman) is unknown amongst ‘the experts’, now, even 80 years into the catastrophe that Truman — the creator of neoconservatism — created on 25 July 1945. Those two Chapters display how totally bad Truman was in the very same field where FDR was overwhelmingly the greatest national head-of-state during at least the past 3 centuries. This is implicitly a commentary also on the actual current status of the two fields of political ‘science’ and history. Most practitioners in those professions fail even basic logic in their analyses, opinions, and narratives. These professions are still in a pre-scientific condition, like physics was before Copernicus: they aren’t failing at math, they are failing at logic, which is even more basic.

The decline of The West started, however, even before Truman became President — he made the decision to activate it, but already in the Anglophile Wall Street Establishment that FDR had set up as the precursor to the CIA, the OSS, and which was headed by the Wall Street lawyer “Wild” Bill Donovan, the anti-FDR scheming to make the post-WW2 world be some type of aggressive U.S./UK war against the Soviet Union was already being prepared, behind FDR’s back. Costigliaro was kind enough to suggest that I read an article about this by the late Jeffrey Burds, and in Burds’s January 2001 “The Early Cold War in Soviet West Ukraine, 1944–1948” I found, for example, this (p. 19):

Solid evidence in Soviet archives, substantiated by documents in U.S. collections, reveals not only that U.S. and British intelligence were supporting Ukrainian and Polish underground rebel actions against Soviet forces long before victory over Germany, but moreover that the Soviet leadership was by autumn 1946 deeply cognizant of this support — information which had a powerful impact on U.S.-Soviet relations during the crucial years of postwar transition from 1944 to 1948.   

As I pointed out in my 24 July 2020 “How the Cold War, Which Never Actually Stopped, Actually Started”, the historical root of all this can be traced back to the plan by Cecil Rhodes that Rhodes first stated in 1877, which ended up being the Rhodes Trust, which activated upon his death in 1902, and the young Winston Churchill was a protégé of Rhodes and a business partner of his circle. The plan finally became the U.S. Government’s reality on 25 July 1945, when Truman — under the influence of Churchill and of General Eisenhower — started the Cold War and turned decisively against his predecessor, FDR. Roosevelt knew that he could not trust the imperialists that he had been required to appoint, but — in what was perhaps his biggest and most inexplicable error — he fully expected to serve out his Presidency through to 1948, so that he would be around to see to it that all of his plans would be carried out. This is how it came to be that we are living in the world that Truman made, not in the world that FDR made.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.