By Kevin Curry in News — 11 Feb 2025

Our Crumbling Empire: How Greed and Bluster Are Leading America Astray

America’s empire is in decline, fueled by corporate greed, broken trade wars, and union busting. Explore the contradictions—and why real change starts below.

Photo by Briana Tozour / Unsplash

If you told someone a decade ago that by 2025, the United States would still be neck-deep in economic contradictions, endless culture wars, and a goddamn carnival of political theatrics, they might have laughed you out of the room. Yet here we are—with a president who tweets (or “Truths,” or whatever social media plague is currently trending) about buying Greenland one day and torching trade deals the next, all in the name of “protecting jobs,” while actually risking the livelihoods of millions of working people.

Welcome to the ongoing experiment of late-stage American capitalism. On the one hand, we’re asked to believe the economy is booming. On the other, everyday workers feel the sting of stagnant wages, suffocating debt, and the whiplash of unhinged policy decisions. How the hell did we get into this predicament, and why does it sometimes feel like America’s playing out its last days like a Roman Empire spectacular?

Let’s dig deeper into the contradictions fueling today’s chaos. Because, spoiler alert: it’s not just about the “coastal elites” or “flyover states” or any other lazy label the media tries to throw at us. It’s about an economic system that has come unmoored from the lives of real people—and a ruling class that is desperate to keep us from looking too closely at why everything is so messed up.

1. America’s Economic House of Cards

A. Tariffs as a Clumsy Weapon

One of the most glaring hypocrisies of this current era is the reckless use of tariffs. Politicians love to push the lie that tariffs “punish” foreign countries. What they never mention is that tariffs are taxes—taxes that Americans pay on imported goods. You might see a 25% tariff slapped on electronics or cars from abroad, but that doesn’t magically get deducted from some Chinese or Mexican company’s bottom line. It shows up in the sticker price at your local big-box store, shrinking your paycheck’s buying power.

Reference: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (explains how tariffs are collected by the U.S. government from importers, not foreign exporters).
Data Point: According to an analysis by the National Bureau of Economic Research, U.S. importers and consumers bear the majority of tariff costs, resulting in higher consumer prices.

Meanwhile, imposing tariffs on essentials like steel or electronics can provoke retaliation abroad. Countries slap their own tariffs on U.S. exports, cutting off markets for American producers. That means fewer sales for our farmers, our manufacturing workers, and our small businesses—precisely the people whom these “America First” policies were supposed to help.

It’s a lose-lose scenario:

We pay more at the store.
We lose export markets.
We piss off trading partners who might have cooperated on global challenges.

All because some politician is flailing about, trying to prove he’s got the biggest tariff club in the room.

B. Union Busting: A Crime Against the Working Class

For more than half a century, labor unions in the United States have been under siege. You can draw a straight line from the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act—which restricted union power and drove leftists out of leadership roles—to today’s historically low union membership rates in the private sector. Employers love it. They can pit desperate, non-unionized workers against each other, slash wages, and duck out on benefits.

Data Point: The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that private-sector union membership is now under 7%, down from a peak of around 35% in the 1950s.
Why It Matters: A weaker labor movement leaves ordinary people with almost no collective power to negotiate wages, benefits, or safe working conditions.

Anyone who doesn’t realize that we’re getting screwed by corporate greed should look at the trucking industry, fast-food sector, or gig economy. When you slash union power, you slash people’s ability to stand up and say, “We will not work for poverty wages.” No wonder workers get fed up with the old establishment that promised them prosperity but delivered decades of wage stagnation instead.

C. Whose Prosperity Are We Really Talking About?

Take a walk in any major city—New York, Seattle, San Francisco—and you’ll see gleaming towers stuffed with tech moguls while the homeless crisis spirals out of control a few streets away. This is the economic chasm the mainstream media rarely underscores. We’re told the stock market is at record highs. Great, but unless you own a fat portfolio or live off capital gains, that’s not your rally—it’s theirs.

The dirty secret? Those rising stock values have come from outsourcing good manufacturing jobs to cheaper labor markets or leaning on advanced automation (AI, robotics) to shed workers. And while technology can be beneficial in many ways, guess who pockets most of the increased profits from cheaper production? Not the working class.

2. The Politics of Distraction

A. “Naughty Boy” Strategy: Bluster Over Substance

Having a bombastic figure in the White House is not entirely new in American politics. But the level of pure performance art, the constant “I’m not part of the establishment” shtick—that’s been cranked up to eleven. Far-right populism thrives on cynicism: it’s fueled by the anger of millions who feel betrayed by a two-party system that delivered them crap wages, exploding student debt, and zero sense of economic security.

Rather than actually solving the issues, our leaders give us a circus. Talk about building walls. Talk about buying Greenland. Talk about anything that stirs up a headline and keeps us from looking at the boss class raking in record profits while we scramble paycheck to paycheck.

This is classical “divide and conquer.” If we’re too busy blaming one another—red vs. blue, city vs. countryside, “elite” vs. “ordinary folk”—we won’t notice the obscene inequalities that corporate America has locked in place.

B. Demonizing the Left: Old Tactics, New Targets

Since the mid-20th century, being leftist in the U.S. has too often meant being tarred as a communist or a national threat. Let’s be clear: we’re not dealing with imaginary boogeymen here. This is the same kind of demonization we saw during the McCarthy era, when “reds” were portrayed almost like Nazis in the public imagination. The irony is grotesque—we were the ones purging people from their jobs, blacklisting them for their beliefs, and stifling democracy in the name of “freedom.”

Today, if you dare say “social safety net” or “Medicare for All,” you might get cast as a threat to American life. Meanwhile, corporations rake in billions in taxpayer subsidies every year. So which group is draining society? The worker who wants a living wage, or the CEO who doesn’t pay taxes while sending jobs to sweatshops abroad?

3. Declining Empire: The Global Shake-Up

A. China and the BRICS Surge

While we’ve been busy policing the globe and launching one fruitless trade war after another, countries like China have been quietly building up robust infrastructure, investing in education, and pushing AI frontiers. This is no longer about who has the biggest aircraft carrier. It’s about the relentless logic of economic growth and technological innovation.

IMF Data: In 2024, China’s GDP growth hovered around 5%. Meanwhile, the U.S. clocked in at about 2.8%. India clocked an even higher rate around 7%.

Those differences matter. Faster growth means more resources to invest in cutting-edge tech, in manufacturing expansions, in forging alliances with emerging economies. And guess what? It also means the old U.S. empire can’t just snap its fingers and expect the world to fall in line.

B. Europe’s Woes and the Global Shuffle

Europe, historically aligned with the U.S., is finding itself squeezed between rising powers like China and the never-ending demands of American foreign policy. Washington’s push for sanctions, new tariffs, and fresh NATO entanglements has cost European industries big-time—especially after the fiasco of severing cheap energy ties with Russia.

We’re effectively watching a decades-long global realignment. If America keeps doubling down on “America First” while ignoring how capitalism’s contradictions are playing out worldwide, we’ll keep losing ground to more coordinated approaches in places like China. Not because they’re saints, but because they have a plan that doesn’t revolve around short-term electoral theatrics.

4. Where Do We Go From Here?

Here’s the blunt truth: nobody is coming to save us. Neither the flamboyant “outsider” politician nor the milquetoast middle-of-the-roaders are going to end these contradictions overnight. We have to face the structural mess head-on:

Revive the Labor Movement: Tear up the union-busting legislation that has gutted workers’ rights. If we want to close the wealth gap and give real political power to ordinary people, we need strong unions capable of demanding better wages and stable careers.
Public Investment in Infrastructure: That means serious funding for affordable housing, green mass transit, and universal healthcare. Yes, these are radical concepts in the U.S. because we’re conditioned to think of “public” as a four-letter word. But the rest of the industrialized world already does this to varying degrees.
Restrain Corporate Power: Enough with blank checks for Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Oil. We need antitrust policies that aren’t mere window dressing. We need to reimagine trade so it works for people, not just corporate boards.
Sober Engagement with the World: Stop the chest-thumping. It’s not “unpatriotic” to acknowledge that China has outpaced us in certain areas or that the world is shifting. We can’t keep tossing around half-baked sanctions and expecting the rest of the planet to obey.
Political Accountability: Don’t just fixate on personality cults. Start building local power through grassroots organizing, mutual aid, and alternative economic structures (co-ops, community land trusts, etc.). If democracy is going to mean anything, it has to be more than an empty label plastered over a rigged capitalist system.

Final Thoughts

We’re living through the tail end of what can only be described as a self-inflicted empire decline. And yes, it’s both terrifying and goddamn enraging to watch. But let’s not bury our heads in conspiracies or pretend some heroic politician will wave a wand to save the day. Real change has always come from mass movements, from the bottom up—from people who refuse to swallow any more bullshit about why we should settle for a busted system that only works for the few.

If we’re going to build a future that isn’t dominated by corporate greed, resource pillaging, and authoritarian fearmongering, we need to stand up, unionize, organize, and make it happen ourselves. Otherwise, we’ll keep watching the spectacle from the sidelines—until the circus tent collapses on our heads.