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Can Western Global Elites Really Control their Endgame?

By Karl North | July 24, 2025

What is Pax Americana, defined in a single sentence? Pax Americana is a globalist parasitic regime that attempts to extract wealth from the rest of the world through the imposition of a transnational financial oligarchy backed by a system of worldwide military bases and an expeditionary force that exacts obedience through financial oppression and military violence. Its parasitism rests on two pillars: a monopoly on printing money and the ever-looming threat of horrible military violence. The US dollar monopoly (of which the rapidly declining Euro is a mere concession) was at first (right after World War II) backed not just by military might but by a large industrial base, huge fossil fuel reserves and more than sufficient gold. Over the intervening decades the industrial might has been whittled away and what now remains is a raw materials-based and agrarian economy with an overgrown services sector, all of it operating at a large and constant loss and accumulating debt at an ever-increasing pace.

- Dmitry Orlov

After a five-hundred-year run, the attempt of Western elites to exploit the planet’s peoples and plunder its resources has finally encountered three fatal obstacles to its agenda that have thrust the Western economies into terminal decline. The first is internal financialization and its exponentially mounting debt. The second is massive depletion of the resources that are essential to industrial economies, and mounting competition for the remnants. The third is competition from a multipolar alliance of nations led by China and Russia, who are determined to take back their sovereignty from the predations of Western hegemony. This essay will analyze the process of Western decline and contemplate its gradual replacement by a multipolar alternative.

Financialization

Financialization is self-inflicted: it is built into a political economy designed to allow unrestrained competition and a minimum of service to the common good. The result is a dynamic where, over time, economic contenders seek and achieve security in monopoly control by maximizing profit above all other goals. As this economic system globalized, starting over half a century ago, corporate and financial capital whose loyalties are only to profit fled the mature Western economies for more lucrative lands to exploit, leaving the West to deindustrialize until its growing peri-urban urban tent cities of homeless have come to increasingly resemble the renowned shanty towns of the global south.

Accordingly, the US-led Western financial elite has been exporting the industrial economies, first of the US, now increasingly of Europe, to more lucrative cheap labor foreign shores. The deindustrialization of the industrial sector has increasingly left the US as a warehouse economy distributing foreign-made goods. This solution presents its own downsizing challenges.

Many Americans live in a manufactured media bubble where no one mentions the deindustrialization of the US that has been going on for forty years. The rust belt in the heartland alone extends from the Great Lakes to Pittsburg and down to the Gulf. The latest presidential administrations of both political parties acknowledge it implicitly in their slogans. It takes enormous financial power to move the core industries of the last remaining superpower to another continent. The working-class workforce of these former core industries, demoted to low wage service industry jobs, is written off as “the former middle class”. Yet, few of us ask, “Who did this?” Instead, we want to believe that it was just an accident of history. The gradual impoverization of the Western working class is generating rising social unrest as they begin to question the economic system itself.

The question for Western elites became how to continue to squeeze profits from the dying core economies of the Western world while keeping the public pacified. One solution, at least for a while, has been to replace domestic production with imported cheap goods to by printing dollars to pay for imports. This has required foreign producers to accept payment in dollars, but the dollar as a viable currency is now under attack.

The other answer was to financialize Western economies – convert them from producing real wealth to rentier economies that extract remaining wealth through usury and debt. The goal of financialization, first in the US, then Western Europe has been to eventually buy everything up and rent it back to the previous owners. This creates a parasitic economy where these rents paid to the rich make the rich richer and everyone else poorer. Interest paid to the banker class on a US federal debt now at $37 trillion is growing exponentially.

But now the financial elite has painted itself into a corner. Raising interest rates to prop up the dollar currency is off the policy table because of all the debt that will be called in, which would crash the economy. The likely alternative is to hold rates low, which will make it impossible to control inflation. So, the goal will be to keep rigging the stats and the narrative to hold off perception of inflation as long as possible, to put off the tipping point where awareness rips through the collective consciousness. When that happens, hoarding begins and shelves go bare quickly, and hyperinflation occurs, savings evaporate, etc.

Downsizing Scenarios

The increasingly militarized attempts to sustain the Western empire are now risking WWIII, an external conflict that might downsize uncontrollably, perhaps in a nuclear exchange. The financial elite is now shifting its strategy to downsize the empire from within in a way that avoids class conflict by diverting blame from itself– a sort of controlled demolition. The first method chosen was the pandemic scam. This delivered the desired result – a sharp downturn of the economy that could be blamed on a virus. This could not work for long, so elites must cast about for new ‘natural crises’ to manufacture and sell to the public – the so-called disaster capitalism described by Naomi Klein. Examples: provoke disruptions of the now hyper-fragile global supply chains and blame them on China, use false flags of foreign threats to justify unaffordable serial wars, enlist climate catastrophists in a campaign to convert to impossible alternatives to fossil fuels.

One downsizing strategy appears to be the artful and imperceptible construction of a digital financial complex aimed to achieve totalitarian control. This would occur in a global economy Norbert Häring describes thus:

In 1997, when political scientist Samuel Huntington coined the term “Davos Man” to describe a global elite that “has little need for national loyalty, views national borders as obstacles, and sees national governments as residues from the past whose only useful function is to facilitate the elite’s global operations,”

To serve these goals, the power elite has captured the apparatus of the state by incorporating congress into the military industrial complex and achieving regulatory capture – control of all federal agencies mandated to force business interests to serve the public interest. This is typical under laissez-faire capitalism: economic sectors claiming to serve the public interest -the pharmaceutical industry, the weapons industry, industrial agribusiness, communications, scientific research, etc. – fall under monopoly control, becoming legalized rackets for shaking down the public. So, like the private-public partnership known as Japan Inc., the economic sectors under capitalism evolve into War Inc., Healthcare Inc., Agri-food Inc., etc. An example in the weapons industry of the capitalist pattern of putting profit before the public interest is the outsourcing of parts for weapons to other nations, especially to China, which puts US security at risk in case of a major war.

The deindustrialization strategy also has an Achilles Heel that affects US security interests. Downsizing the empire from within also achieves the goal of weakening its ability to beat up wayward client states that are increasingly seeking and declaring sovereignty. Even now, the Pentagon has acknowledged its inability conduct a major war.

The end of oil

Underlying all the drivers of Western decline already mentioned is the massive depletion of finite planetary raw materials, of which the key resource is energy. This slow-moving disaster, like the undertow at the beach, is currently invisible to most people and, when pointed out, provokes vehement denial and fanciful solutions. I have described the end of the oil civilization and probable futures at length in other essays.[1] As one analyst of the collapse of industrial civilization describes it:

A bunch of mildly clever, highly social apes broke into a cookie jar of fossil energy and have been throwing a party for the past 150 years. The conditions at the party are incompatible with the biophysical realities of the planet. The party is about over and when morning comes, radical changes to our way of living will be imposed.[2]

This vision provokes important questions, some of which I have attempted to address in other essays.[i]

[i] An agroecological model for the end of the oil age

The quality of peasant life: a scenario for survival

Cities and Suburbs in the Energy Descent: Thinking in Scenarios

What aspects of our current world can and should be preserved? What are the possibilities of creative destruction as we enter the turmoil of the downslope? In the food economy for instance, the extreme domestication of plants and animals is so energy intensive that it must diminish in a post-petroleum world. As an example, the high production dairy cow, which is a cash cow for the corporations that monopolize the milk industry, is an extravagant energy consumer in several ways that are unlikely to survive the end of cheap oil. How will agriculture adapt to progressive undomestication? The persistence of denial prevents the public from taking such questions seriously.

Strategies of social control vs revolt

The information landscape in the West is owned by a power elite who have achieved full spectrum control over the narrative: via its deep state agents in govt, via the media cartel of a handful of mega-corporations, via corporate control of academic research funding.

As the lender of last resort, a wealthy and powerful global banker elite exerts control thru debt that is shaping Western societies in the modern age, reducing whole societies to debt slavery at all levels, from personal to governmental to balance of payments in international trade. It is important to understand that this phenomenon is not new and has deep roots in the history of Western Civilization, as anthropologist David Graeber (Debt: The First 5000 Years) and political economist Michael Hudson (…and forgive them their debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption From Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year ) document in what have become instant classics in the genre.

In ancient societies of Western Asia, a merchant class became wealthy from the lucrative trade from the Mediterranean across the region and eastward along the old silk road. As money lenders to the masses, they gradually reduced to debt peonage the farmers and craft people whose labor supported city states and rulers like Egyptian pharaohs and Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. People could no longer pay taxes and even ceased work when interest payments to the banker class consumed their incomes. Rulers whose regimes were threatened declared debt jubilees that reset all debts to zero.

Notice the parallel today as a US working class reduced to low paying service jobs by a banker elite orchestrated deindustrialization refuse to return to Bullshit Jobs (another Graeber book) after the plandemic lockdowns.

Graeber and Hudson chronicle a series of jubilees across the ancient world leading the emergent monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, to set limits on usury. As the West emerged from the Middle Ages, bankers again took control, fostering and financing wars between European monarchs and warlords, and keeping kings in their debt.

In the twentieth century, the international banker elite promoted the two world wars and the cold war, and quietly but openly financed the war economies of all participating nations. Banker control of information created a narrative of war hysteria and patriotic fervor that deflected attention from their use of war as a profit-making racket.

In recent decades, Western bankers created the IMF and the World Bank to offer investment opportunities to the nations of the global south that ensured their reduction to debt peonage. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins chronicles how this works. Leaders among the native elite who resist these bad investments he was instructed to turn over to the “jackals”, the real hit men, for elimination. There is a reference in the film The International to the jackals.

The solution in Western civilization that is in a deindustrialization process has been to replace production with debt-based imports. Unlikely to declare a Jubilee, how will financial elites confront exploding debt?

On psyops, false flags and strategies of desperation

An alliance of ideological collective myth makers and gate keepers – deep state agents of power elites, structured as an intel establishment core instructing policy makers, govt bureaucrats, mass media, science establishment and school teachers – build and constantly evolve official narratives to fit changing conditions. These works summarize the history and methods of the deep state:

The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World by L. Fletcher Prouty

JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy – Prouty 2011

Harlot’s Ghost by Norman Mailer 1992. 1300 pages

Faced with weakening imperial control, the deep state agents of power elites have resorted to strategies of desperation. A recent prime example was the disastrously failed color revolution to orchestrate the takeover of Ukraine, turning it into a Nazi police state aimed to terrorize and cleanse the country of its largely Russian population, which had been part of Russia for centuries. When Russia came to the defense of its people, Washington strong-armed Western Europe into cutting economic ties with Russia, a trade relationship that is essential to survival of Europe as an industrial economy. The crowning episode has been the recent sabotage of Europe’s energy lifeline to Russia, which appears to be a turning point in the demise of the West.

A fragile system

The history of Western Imperialism – whether economic, political, or cultural – shows that it cannot tolerate alternative civilizational models. The very idea of a civilizational alternative threatens a capitalist system that imprisons its population in wage slavery to private capital while skimming off profits of labor to an ever more wealthy and powerful financial oligarchy.

Some examples of the frightened reaction that exposed the hypocrisy of Western ideals are:

1) Faced with the Soviet alternative, the Great Depression and WWII begat a powerful socialist movement in Europe. Western finance hurriedly injected funds to finance the reconstruction under capitalist control (the Marshall Plan) and finally was forced into a compromise with organized labor in Europe that allowed ’social democracy’, a kinder, gentler capitalism, to emerge for a while to pacify the proletariat.

2) The CIA used mass murder to take down an Indonesian Sukarno regime, whose leadership of the global anti-imperialist movement posed the only threat.

3) It carried on a vicious economic warfare against any socialist experiment, such as Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua, no matter how small the country.

4) It suppressed for decades socialist China’s entry into the international community and the global economy.

5) Finally, the Trump administration’s mere articulation of previously taboo views and policy goals activated a weaponization, fully backed by the mass media, of the Democratic Party (and liberals generally) in repeated projects to destroy Trump’s presidency. This desperate action occurred despite the fact that the US deep state has so far easily neutralized any attempt on Trump’s part to carry out his expressed policy goals.

In Sum: Who rules the Western world, and how does that work?

Research has shown that over centuries a small set of banking families have accumulated a vast money power using usury (lending at interest). But that is only the top of a hierarchical structure of power relations, whose operation needs to be understood to answer questions like: why are elected leaders mandated to make policy so boxed in, so limited in the power that they can actually wield, as Trump obviously is.

Open exercise of power, as in ancient Rome, where the emperor sends out the legions to conquer territory and loot wealth, is no longer in vogue, to put it mildly. It has become clear to some analysts that in the modern world, power over decision making no longer flows down through a military type of chain of command. Hence, what has emerged is what is best understood as an inverse totalitarianism, where the chain of decision making is looser, the top players in the power hierarchy more obscure, yet in the long run still serves the financial powers at the top. The latter, as lenders of last resort, shape decision making of the major borrowers – the transnational corporations, which are the next level down the power structure. Decision makers at each level have some wiggle room, but not too much. The question that is important to ask is how do the interests of the actors at each level serve (or not) those of the banker elite.

In the US, the next level up from elected leaders is what has been called the deep state, a permanent shadow government that steers policy making as agents of big capital. The deep state as it is constituted today has a long history starting at least with the creation of the CIA after WWII. The function of the CIA, actually a wide network of operatives and assets, is covert and overt action to maintain and expand the US empire. But this imperial agency is only one of a tripartite alliance of convenience that also includes the military industrial complex and the Zionist power configuration, both of which are highly organized forces in their own right, and date back many decades at least. one can see the common interest of all three deep state elements at play in the creation and support of Israel.

The Zionist Power Configuration in most Western nations, backed by disproportionate Jewish wealth and clannish organizational power, have grown over the 70 years of the existence of Israel to serve as a tail wagging the dog of national governments that bends policies to serve Israeli interests. As an example, a shrewd Zionist pattern of campaign contributions to both major political parties in the US has assured almost total congressional loyalty to the Zionist primary interest, US support for Israel. Zionists include Israeli dual citizens who hold unusual numbers of high government positions and ownership of mass media. They stifle criticism with threats and accusations of anti-Semitism and increasingly with laws that criminalize anti-Zionist speech and even criticism of Israel. In the US, the large population of Christian evangelicals serve as willing foot soldiers for Israel in the electorate.

Individualism vs collectivism

What alternatives to the Western model are on the horizon, or are even possible? In America vs America Wang Huning argues that the true strength of a civilization lies not in freedom, but in cohesion, discipline, and purpose. He argues that when freedom becomes an absolute, it destroys the moral architecture needed for long-term societal continuity. In other words, the liberty that promised the future has annihilated it.

In the early 19th century Toqueville saw a US where:

In the US today, we can see that everything that Toqueville predicted has occurred, and created a society whose cultural beliefs and values are those of a decadent civilization.

The multipolar alternative

Wang contrasts the Chinese social tradition rooted in the insights of Confucious – humility over innovation for its own sake, acceptance of the status quo to conserve social order. The result is a modern China where networking advances knowledge better than the competition among private businesses standard in the US, and where long-term visioning contrasts with the short-term profit motive standard in the US. As the lead industrial economy in the emerging multipolar alternative to centuries of Western imperial domination, the current Chinese state policy of sovereign control over a mixed economy bears watching. The rise of a prominent private billionaire class in China puts it in potential conflict with the goal of “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. The outcome of this conflict will affect the destiny of the world.

[1] Energy and Sustainability in Late Modern Society – the long story

The Industrial Economy is Ending Forever: an Energy Explanation for Agriculturists and Everyone – a synopsis

What props up the delusion of growth paradigm? – an analysis of denial

[2] N.J. Hagens. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800919310067#fig0030

[i] An agroecological model for the end of the oil age

The quality of peasant life: a scenario for survival

Cities and Suburbs in the Energy Descent: Thinking in Scenarios

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