The Real Difference Between “The East” versus “The West”

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

According to the UBS “Global Wealth Report 2023”, which is the leading authority on the world’s wealth-distribution, the “Ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) individuals [=] with net worth above USD 50 million at the end of 2022” were “243,060” (worldwide) (see p. 30). Out of the total world population in 2022 = 8 billion, these “Ultras” are each the richest individual in 32,000 persons, worldwide.

Then, the main breakdowns among these 243,060 Ultras are (p. 31):

A further breakdown of the UHNW group reveals 79,490 adults with wealth above USD 100 million at the end of 2022, of which 7,020 are worth more than USD 500 million. [Currently, Forbes counts the world to have 2,640 billionaires; and, so, UBS’s count of there being 7,020 individuals that have half a billion dollars each seems consistent with that. This 2,640 billionaires have a collective net worth of $12.2 trillion. In the year 2000, Forbes showed there then being 470 billionaires, and their collective wealth as being $898 billion. (The number of them rose 5.6 times, and their wealth rose 13.6 times.) Forbes, like Bloomberg, doesn’t list royal billionaires, but as I reported in 2015: “The richest person in the world isn’t anyone in the Forbes list, which excludes calculations for any heads-of-state, but is instead King Salman of Saudi Arabia, whose net worth is in the trillions of dollars. He virtually owns the Saudi Government, which owns the world’s largest oil company, Aramco, among other assets. Aramco alone is worth ‘anywhere between US$1.25 trillion[7] and US$7 trillion,[8] making it the world’s most valuable company.’”]

The regional breakdown of the UHNW group as a whole is dominated by North America with 128,470 members (53%), while 40,090 (17%) live in Europe, 32,910 (14%) in Mainland China and 27,700 (11%) in Asia-Pacific countries, excluding China and India. Among individual countries, the United States leads by a considerable margin with 123,870 members, equivalent to 51% of the world total (see Figure 6). Mainland China is a clear second with 32,910 UHNW individuals, followed by Germany (9,100), India (5,480) and Canada (4,560). Russia (4,490), the United Kingdom (3,980), Japan (3,930), France (3,890) and Australia (3,780) make up the remaining top ten countries ranked by UHNW numbers.

So: America, which has a total population of only 333 million, has over half of the UHNW group. Its 123,870 Ultras are not the richest in 32,000 Americans, but instead the richest in 2,688 Americans. There are far more of the super-rich in America, even though the bottom 50% of America’s wealth pyramid (the average, or “median” American) owns even less than the bottom 50% in virtually any of the U.S.-allied countries do. The U.S. has far more of the extremely rich, and also far more of the extremely poor, than any of its ‘allied’ (or vassal) nations do. But it’s those 123,870 extremely rich Americans who collectively control the American empire, and regardless of whether a person in the bottom 50% votes, “The preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” In fact, an academic study showed that merely the 400 wealthiest of America’s billionaires donated 29.86% of all of the country’s polical donations, and that America’s richest 1% of America’s richest 1% donate 57.16% of it. So: this is an aristocracy, not a democracy. It sets the standard for the collective West.

The Ultras control the majority of the world’s largest corporations, the major international corporations, and these hire and fire hundreds of millions of people; and their controlling owners, the Ultras, and the employees (including lobbyists) that the managers that they select, select to be employees, donate the majority of the political-campaign funds and buy the majority of the political-campaign advertisements that the public, the voters, receive. They also, via the placement of their ads in the major news-media (which Ultras also own or otherwise control) determine the editorial policies in these news-media, and so shape not only the news-reporting, but the selection of opinion-articles and commentary, that go out to and shape the opinions by (and votes of) the public.

Thus, the Ultras shape the public’s prejudices so that political candidates who serve the interests of the Ultras, and not the interests of the public, get elected and re-elected.

The United States’s empire represents the Ultras, not the voters.

My recent article, “RussChina Lead World’s Anti-Imperialist Forces”, describes how Russia’s Government is now starting to assist the majority of national Governments around the world that haven’t yet become part of the U.S.-&-‘allied’ (i.e., U.S. and its colonies) bloc; i.e., not yet controlled behind the scenes by America’s billionaires and its other Ultras. That article describes how Russia is assisting them to remain independent of the U.S. empire. Russia could not do this if it didn’t have substantial additional backing from China. So: RussChina is, for the first time, helping to protect, against the American empire, the world’s remaining independent nations.

Last year’s “Global Wealth Report 2022” had a global map on page 22 showing all of the world’s countries in varying degrees of darkness, with the richest (highest personal wealth) per-capita countries as the darkest; and those darkest were the entirety of western Europe (from Finland in the north, down to Italy in the south, and everything to the west), plus Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and, of course, the imperial master, the United States. And that is the collective West, the countries that are led by America’s billionaires and aiming ultimately to control all of the other countries — which, of course, include Russia, China, India, Iran, and more than a hundred other countries (the ones that America’s Ultras are still trying to acquire).

On 19 July 2023, Britain’s The Lancet medical journal included an article, “What water will the UN Conference carry forward: a fundamental human right or a commodity?”, which documented that all of the collective West (the U.S.-and-‘allied’ countries) were advocating, at the U.N., WHO, etc., for water resources to be treated purely as a commodity, which basically should be bidded out to whichever private investors will pay the most for it, and that any persons who won’t be able to pay for water under capitalism (privatization) should just be treated as charity cases so as for them not to be incapable of staying alive and staying clean. This is the Mr. Scrooge and Adam Smith view, that a person’s worth is his net worth, or whatever a richer person is willing to pay to him or her. The U.N.’s Global Commission on the Economics of Water argued that ‘underpricing’ of water should end because full market “pricing encourages more efficient water use, generates revenues and enables water systems to be invested in, extended across an entire population, maintained and renewed.” So, any poor people who aren’t of any personal interest to the Ultras should simply be excluded from the economic system; they’re ‘inefficient’ to maintain. That is the view of the Western countries, the present and/or former imperialist countries, and it’s set against all of the world’s nations in the global east and in the global south — the countries that oppose imperialism.

By contrast, there is increasingly emerging among the global east and the global south, in any countries that haven’t yet been taken into the U.S. empire, a diametrically opposite view, that the only good government is one which is honestly one-person-one-vote, instead of the system till now, of one-dollar-one vote ‘democracy’: control by the rich over the economy and over the government. Russia is now becoming increasingly active in providing military and natural-resources assistance to these countries, and China is becoming increasingly active in providing human-resources assistance to them. If those two operations, Russia’s and China’s, increasingly become united into one, then the long period of global dominance and control by the collective West will soon become replaced by the collective East and South, and an authentically democratic model in which the control of government will be on a one-person-one-vote basis, instead of the existing corrupt one-dollar-one-vote basis. The latter was advocated by Mussolini, who sometimes called it “fascism,” and sometimes called it “corporationism.” Of course: any corporation is controlled on the basis of one-dollar-one-vote: the more shares one buys, the more control one has. America has been fascist ever since 25 July 1945. Truman made that decision, under the advice of his hero, Eisenhower.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new 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.