Date: Tuesday, 23 December 2025
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/america-is-a-brutal-dictatorship
https://theduran.com/america-is-a-brutal-dictatorship-by-its-billionaires-no-democracy
America is a brutal dictatorship by its billionaires, no democracy at all.
23 December 2025, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)
You won’t find this news-report getting front-page (if any) coverage on any of the U.S.-and-allied billionaires’ ‘news’-media:
A blistering CBS News 60 Minutes exposé of a Trump Administration atrocity (which was almost certainly illegal) had cleared all of CBS’s news division's approvals for airing on Sunday December 21st — the lawyers had okayed it, Standards & Practices also did, it had passed on all 5 separate screenings of it — but then the neocon Zionist pro-imperialist person whom the Ellison family (CBS’s new owners) had only recently chosen as the editor of CBS's news division, killed it at the last moment.
Here’s the best summary of this matter:
https://www.instagram.com/reels/DSkjTcgEbCB/
On December 22nd, Vox provided the fuller story, headlining “Is CBS News censoring 60 Minutes? Bari Weiss blocked a critical story about the Trump administration — as CBS’s billionaire backers seek Trump’s help.”
Those “CBS’s billionaire backers” are Larry Ellison, the top personal donor to Israel’s army, and his son David Ellison, and they have won — and are winning — from Trump the biggest consolidation of the billionaire-controlled ’news’-media and “social media” sites in world history; so, this decision by Weiss, for the Ellisons, is a landmark displaying that the First Amendment and the rest of the U.S. Constitution have been effectively bought out by America’s billionaires. America has now reached the stage in which censorship against the truth is becoming ridiculously extreme.
The fuller story here was told by Gregory Shupak at Middle East Eye on November 17th, headlining “As Israel's image collapses, US billionaires move to silence dissent: Facing record opposition to Israel's genocide in Gaza, America's elites are seizing control of news and tech companies to suppress criticism and rescue a crumbling narrative.” He reported:
One influential ghoul after another - from Hillary Clinton to wealthy tech investors and members of Congress - has attributed this shift to TikTok, as if American youth are incapable of independently concluding that it is wrong to repeatedly set fire to tents filled with displaced persons. …
the US ruling class is aggressively asserting control over powerful media organs.
Control of the narrative
On 25 September, US President Donald Trump issued an executive order mandating that for TikTok to continue operating in the US, one or more Americans had to own the majority of the platform.
Trump's actions, it is worth noting, build on the Biden administration's approach to TikTok, which also called for US control of the app, a position with bipartisan support in Congress.
War on Gaza: Why Israel deserves to be singled out for criticism
Accordingly, a group of US investors led by the software firm Oracle is taking control of 65 percent of TikTok.
Oracle is set to oversee TikTok's US operations, provide cloud services for user data storage and secure a licence to take charge of the app's algorithm.
Oracle founder Larry Ellison is one of the top donors to the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), a US nonprofit that effectively subsidises the Israeli military. He has said that he feels a "deep emotional connection to the State of Israel" and "we", seemingly a reference to Oracle, will "do everything we can to support the country of Israel".
A similar process has unfolded in traditional news media. In August, the Ellison family's media company, Skydance - an outfit financially supported by Larry Ellison and run by his son, David - acquired Paramount, a movie studio that owns CBS and a host of cable channels.
Bari Weiss, a talentless behind-kisser and tattle-tale passionately opposed to free speech and to Palestinian freedom, has been named CBS News's editor-in-chief.
Now, the Ellison family has its sights set on Warner Bros Discovery, which owns HBO, TBS and CNN.
Media capture …
The American state and the billionaires it serves know that they cannot win the Palestine-Israel debate, and they see that their colonial outpost is rapidly losing perceived legitimacy. …
And an even fuller account had been given on August 7th by Alan Macleod at Scheer Post, headlining “Israel’s Biggest US Donor Now Owns CBS” and opening:
After reaching an agreement with President Trump, David Ellison — the son of the second-richest man in the world, Larry Ellison — has acquired Paramount Global, the media giant that owns CBS News.
Larry Ellison, the largest private funder of the Israel Defense Forces, is deeply tied to the Israeli national security state and counts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu among his closest friends.
David has already announced significant changes at CBS, promising “unbiased” news coverage and “varied ideological perspectives,” which are widely understood to signal a shift toward right-wing, pro-Trump coverage. Worse still, Bari Weiss, a journalist with a long history of zealous pro-Israel advocacy, is being considered as the network’s new ombudsman, shaping its political direction, precisely because of her “pro-Israel stance.”
The cancelled CBS News 60 Minutes story was about Trump’s summary expulsion of some ‘illegal immigrants’ to the notorious giant prison in El Salvador built under their President Nayib Bukele, an ardent supporter of Israel.
As-of 20 December 2025, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, the U.S. has 42 of the world’s richest 100 people (not including King Saud, whose net worth is over a trillion dollars but he doesn’t allow that fact to be included on such lists). (Larry Ellison is #4 on that list.) China has 13. India has 8. Germany has 6 (one of whom, Andy Bechtolsheim, ranked #76, had actually built his fortune in America, and has long lived in America, but still chooses to retain only his German birth citizenship, and so is shown there under “Germany” not “United States”), France has 4. Americans occupy 14 of the 16 top ranks on that list; thus has the vast majority of the world’s richest super-rich. Furthermore, for example, if America, with its 343 million people, had the same percentage of its people being among the world’s 100 richest as China does, then China’s 13 out of its 1.3 billion people would instead be 49. If that day will ever come, it will come at the expense of the rest of the population, just as it did in America. At the very top of the wealth-pyramid, the wealth-inequality is higher in America than it is anywhere else in the world. So, it’s easier here for the billionaires to control this country than it is for the billionaires anywhere else to control their country.
And now, the Ellisons seem set to also control CNN. On December 22nd, Jake Johnson at Common Dreams headlined “Trump Ally Larry Ellison Puts Up $40 Billion to Help Son Buy CNN Owner”.
It’s America’s billionaires who have been behind America’s hundreds of invasions, such as against Iraq in 2003, Iran (which they took via coup in 1953 and demand to retrieve again), Libya, and numerous others. And now on Tuesday December 23rd, Trump repeated his promise to get Greenland (though over 80% of Greenlanders in polls say “No way!” to that) and this time his excuse for it is “We need Greenland for national security.” War! War! War! Gung ho! The billionaires crave it; the public don’t — DESPITE the billionaires’ war-mongering media. But now, what the public need can even be ignored by the Government, with impunity, to serve instead what the billionaires crave, which is constant conquest.
America is a country that has become privatized to the billionaires; so, the voters are mere pawns of competing billionaires, and usually the particular billionaires who control the country at any given time are the ones who are willing to spend the most money to achieve that objective. It’s a spending-contest in a competition to deceive the most voters. (I’ve proposed a solution to end this problem, but no one seems interested in it. So, apparently, the billionaires have nothing to worry about — the public are entirely passive.)
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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.
