Simon Dixon has a more detailed theory of who controls the U.S. empire than I do.

10 July 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

I asked ChatGPT a specific question about “Who controls ‘The West’?”, and it answered my question in the entirely truthful way, and providing the reasons, that I was expecting; so, I present here that conversation, since it might help to clarify your own view of “Who controls’The West’?”:

“Is the triumvirate that controls ‘the West’ MIC FIC and TIC, and, if so, what do those acronyms (which I might have misspelled) refer to?”

Yes. You have the acronyms essentially right: MIC, FIC, and TIC.

• MIC = Military-Industrial Complex
• FIC = Financial-Industrial Complex
• TIC = Technological-Industrial Complex — sometimes phrased Technology-Industrial Complex or Tech-Industrial Complex

The specific idea of a three-part power structure controlling “the West” appears to be associated especially with Simon Dixon, who explicitly says he uses a framework consisting of the FIC, MIC, and TIC. His own site defines them [HERE] as the Financial Industrial Complex, Military Industrial Complex, and Technological Industrial Complex.

The distinctions, as Dixon uses them, are roughly these: the MIC is the arms, defense, intelligence, war, and national-security nexus; the FIC is the major banks, asset managers, central-bank-linked financial order, investment institutions, debt and monetary system; and the TIC is Big Tech, AI, data, surveillance, digital identity, platforms, and technological control infrastructure. Importantly, Dixon does not always portray them as a harmonious triumvirate. He often portrays them as interlocking but competing power blocs: in one recent formulation, the MIC is associated with preservation of U.S. imperial primacy, the FIC with a transition toward a multipolar financial order, and the TIC with a more globally integrated technocratic system.

So if what you remember is the claim that “the West is controlled by the MIC, FIC, and TIC,” then yes—that is almost certainly the terminology you were trying to recall.

One important qualification: MIC is a long-established term, famously used by President Eisenhower in 1961. FIC and especially TIC are much less standardized, and the claim that these three complexes constitute the actual ruling triumvirate of “the West” is an analytical thesis, not an established finding of political science. Interestingly, however, the vocabulary has recently moved closer to mainstream discourse: Joe Biden warned of a “tech-industrial complex” in January 2025, and academic work now also uses that term.

I suspect this framework could be quite relevant to your own thesis that political parties represent competing factions of the billionaire class—but I would modify it substantially, because “MIC/FIC/TIC” may classify institutional sectors while obscuring the more fundamental question of who owns and controls across all three sectors.

“I raised this question because of Simon Dixon’s youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XULIRdazZPk&t=579s, which is my first access to his views, and he failed there to identify what those acronyms are. Your explanation is exactly what I was guessing that he referred to, and you are correct that my view agrees with his. I never yet phrased it that way, because I have instead referred only to competing factions within the U.S. empire’s billionaires, but his MIC, FIC, and TIC, more explicitly DEFINES those factions.”

Yes. And now that you identify the source as Simon Dixon’s YouTube video, I think your interpretation is exactly the important one.

Dixon’s MIC–FIC–TIC framework does something that your existing formulation—“competing factions within the U.S. empire’s billionaires”—does not yet do explicitly: it supplies a sectoral classification of the competing factions.

Your formulation identifies the class structure:

the U.S. empire is controlled by competing factions within its billionaire class.

Dixon’s formulation identifies three major institutional-economic concentrations through which that class power is organized:

• MIC — Military-Industrial Complex: billionaires, corporations, financiers, intelligence-linked institutions, contractors, and political networks whose power and accumulation depend disproportionately upon military expenditure, geopolitical domination, weapons production, war, sanctions, and imperial enforcement.
• FIC — Financial-Industrial Complex: major banks, asset managers, private equity, institutional finance, central-bank-connected networks, debt structures, and the monetary-financial architecture through which ownership and capital allocation are exercised.
• TIC — Technological-Industrial Complex: Big Tech, AI, cloud infrastructure, semiconductors, data, platforms, digital surveillance, and increasingly the technological infrastructure upon which both state and corporate power depend.

The conceptual fit with your own analysis is especially strong because these are not three separate classes. They are better understood as competing, overlapping factions within the same super-rich ruling class. A billionaire, corporation, investment fund, or family can have interests spanning all three. The classification concerns the dominant institutional basis of factional power, not mutually exclusive membership.

I think there is also a potentially important advance here beyond Dixon’s own formulation. Your theory can explain why MIC, FIC, and TIC compete without treating their conflict as evidence that no ruling class exists. Their conflict is precisely what one should expect if electoral “democracy” functions as competition among political organizations representing different factions of the billionaire class. On that account, party competition is not fundamentally people versus elite; it is substantially elite-faction versus elite-faction for control of the state.

That means Dixon may have supplied you with a much sharper middle-level taxonomy for a theory you already possessed at a more fundamental level:

Your level: Who ultimately rules?
→ Competing factions of the U.S.-imperial billionaire class.

Dixon’s level: What are the principal institutional-economic factional formations?
→ MIC, FIC, TIC.

Political level: Through what mechanism do those factions struggle for state power?
→ Political parties, candidates, media systems, think tanks, lobbying networks, foundations, and state bureaucracies.

One caution matters greatly for your own work: I would not simply adopt Dixon’s triumvirate as exhaustive without testing it empirically. The oil-and-gas complex, for example, may overlap heavily with MIC and FIC but might not reduce cleanly to either. The same issue arises with pharmaceuticals, insurance, agribusiness, and real estate. But as a classification of the three most powerful contemporary command systems—coercive, financial, and informational-technological—MIC/FIC/TIC is unusually powerful.

And I think this bears directly on your sentence from earlier conversations:

“What’s called ‘democracy’ is ruled by political parties, each of which represents only a faction of the billionaire-class.”

Dixon’s taxonomy may enable you to make that claim more empirically discriminating: the factions are not merely unspecified groups of billionaires; they can be investigated as differently situated concentrations of ownership and control within the MIC, FIC, and TIC, with extensive cross-ownership and shifting coalitions among them.

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MY COMMENTS:

I have stated many times my theory that America and its colonies (‘allies’), and their propagandists, lie to call themselves “democracies,” and are actually aristocracies —  rule by the wealth, not by the people. For example, on 14 April 2014, I headlined at Common Dreams, “US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study”, and reported about the landmark academic study soon then to be published, that “the findings in this, the first-ever comprehensive scientific study of the subject,” indicate clearly that, as the professors wrote, “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy,” and that ONLY the super-rich are actually represented by the U.S.Government. Little more than a year later (after that academic journal-article became published), I headlined at Huffington Post, “Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy”. On 16 April 2025, at Substack, I headlined “The public lack the intellectual ability that’s needed in order for an electoral democracy to work.”, and reported multiple follow-up studies of this topic, all of which confirmed the 2014 finding. I closed that article by saying “I haven’t here described what I propose to replace elections, but you can see that by clicking onto my “Does every democracy corruptly degenerate into control by the richest?”.” Moreover, I have also done several reports of relevant data on America’s various colonies, all of which seem likewise to be controlled only by billionaires (often including American ones). However, I am not yet able to report any comprehensive factorial analysis which would be sufficient in order to identify (as Simon Dixon now claims) the sub-categories of billionaires who are competing, as groups, against the other sub-categories who control opposed Party(s) in those electoral ‘democracies’. Nonetheless, I was able, in my 11 February 2026 article at The Duran, “How America’s Billionaires Control the Votes of American Voters”, to explain the legal trick that in America is used so as to assure that only billionaires will control the contending electoral Parties and their respective voters. A good example of this is The Week’s 10-17 July 2026 “The Data Center Backlash”, which opens by noting that “A recent Gallup poll found that 71% of voters, including 75% of Democrats and 63% of Republicans, don’t want a data center built in their area.”, and closes with a section titled “How are lawmakers responding to the backlash?” documenting (while not saying it out loud because they don’t want to disturb their own investors) that bipartisanly, U.S. Government and state officials are speaking and showboating against this enormous build-out while delaying to outlaw it until it has already been completed.  America’s united Deep State will shove it down American’s throats, as a fait accompli.

One place where I tend to disagree with Dixon is his statement at 25:07 where he said “The Financial Industrial Complex is leaning into the investment contracts [for reconstruction after the U.S. invasions] that will come, the rebuild contracts, and they [the FIC] want a multipolar world.” This contradicts everything that I have been saying, that, ever since 25 July 1945, the U.S. has been controlled by its billionaires, and they are unanimous that the U.S. Government must “come to control ultimately the entire world.”  I see this unity in the constant 95%+ votes in both the House and the Senate, by both Parties, in favor of evermore economic sanctions against countries — such as Syria while Assad was in power, and Russia, and Iran, and Venezuela while Maduro was in power, etc. — that the empire wants to add to be come their colonies, and in fundings for coups and for increase in armaments contracts, and all the rest of the U.S. military, even when the Government’s spending for everything else is going down. Neoconservatism (the ideology to expand the U.S. empire) is overwhelmingly bipartisan here, just as it is in Europe, Japan, etc. — all of the Deep States in America’s colonies are solidly neocon.

Furthermore, at 24:51, Dixon said that “The West is controlled by private corporate interests,” instead of the honest “The West is controlled by its billionaires”; and, so, he’s covering-up, instead of revealing, whom the individuals are, who are ultimately to blame. So, I cannot, of course, accept that cover-up obscurantism, which is hiding the most important fact of all — that this ‘democracy’ is instead an aristocracy, a dictatorship by the super-rich.

Also, whereas Dixon said on July 10th, about the MOU, that, “In my opinion it will hold. It won’t fall apart.”, I think that it has already fallen apart.

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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.