The Atlantic Ruling Class from Milner to Epstein

In what follows, I argue that the social disintegration and the increasingly repressive environment in the West are the consequences of the transnationalisation of its ruling class. Three major stages in this process can be distinguished, each with devastating consequences. The first was the late 19th-century Anglo-American ruling class alignment against Germany that led to World War One; the second extended transnational class rule to continental Europe during World War Two and the Cold War. Following the collapse of communism, the West passed under the direction of Atlantic Zionism and the banner of the War on Terror. Through these episodes, popular forces considered most dangerous at each juncture were neutralised, from pre-1914 Social Democracy via the Communist workers’ parties to the population at large today. Lord Milner and J.P. Morgan around the turn of the 20th century pioneered Atlantic ruling class formation; Jeffrey Epstein can be understood as a key power broker in the Zionist turn from the 1990s.

How to Understand the Ruling Class

A ruling class deserves that title because it is able to control, using the means of wealth generation and the means of violence at its disposal, the levers of human survival for the rest of society. Whatever the narratives woven around this ability, this is the material aspect without which it cannot maintain its rule. No claim regarding divine right, human freedom, or historical necessity will sustain the ruling class if its ability to generate wealth and impose its will by violent means falters. Then a revolutionary situation ensues and ultimately a new class will take over.

‘Rule’ is, therefore, ultimately synonymous with the power over life and death. Wars, but also states of emergency such as the recent Covid scare, accordingly are as much instances of the exercise of class rule as are the profitable operation of an economy.[1] The further a ruling class is removed from structures of class compromise like a national parliament, the more repressive and destructive its rule will become, as we can see today. Even the most powerful states such as the United States no longer pursue a ‘national interest’ in the sense of acting for the benefit of its society as a whole; rather, the transnational ruling class exploits the North American social basis as ruthlessly as others’ and uses what it needs of the US power apparatus to serve its own interest, irrespective of what happens to the rest of society.[2]

Today, globalising capitalism is the dominant mode of production worldwide, but with mercantilist state control still operational, too; whilst in terms of foreign relations, sovereign equality is being left behind by the Atlantic ruling class trying to impose ‘global governance’. Resisting it are what I call contender states, societies entrenching behind the principle of sovereign equality (as in International Relations ‘realism’) and with mercantilist economies. The contemporary structure of a G7 facing the BRICS countries is the obvious reference.

Today ruling class formation is dominated by surveillance capitalism, made possible by the advances in information technology (IT). Because of the West’s no-holds-barred imperialist policies, the BRICS bloc is expanding because it adheres to the principle of sovereign equality, rather than a different mode of production other than mercantilist elements. Against this background I analyse the formation of a transnational ruling class, in which the West remains unique.

The English Origins of Global Capitalism and Governance

The process of Atlantic class formation only began at the close of the 19th century between Britain and North America; it was widened to include Western Europe during and after World War II, and after the collapse of communism, Atlantic Zionism enveloped the entire West. Each phase was underpinned by a particular mode of accumulation within capitalism: finance capital (i.e., in combination with heavy industry); ‘Fordism’, mass production of consumer durables and financial repression; and after another round of financial liberalisation, the rise of surveillance capitalism. These modes of accumulation are important to identify the leading ‘capital fractions’ which chart the course for the ruling class as a whole under a particular concept of control.[3]

The social space in which this transnational ruling class formed, can be traced back two more centuries, to the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 concluding it. In the wake of the Whig triumph on the British Isles, Freemasonry emerged as an international movement propagating the Glorious Revolution; the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century was its high tide.[4] Masonry is best understood as a pervasive class compromise between a commercially-minded aristocracy and the ascendant bourgeoisie. It was simultaneous in many countries but not yet itself transnational class formation in the sense used here, because the aspect of agency was mostly lacking. Certainly the secession of the United States, the French Revolution, and the breakaway of Latin America from Iberian overlordship all were inspired by it. Freemasonry all along has been a lubricant of transnational communication, but its agency was mostly nationally specific, serving as subcontractors to transnational forces on occasion — in our own days, say, the Propaganda Due (P 2) lodge in Italy during the 1970s when it acted for the Atlantic ruling class to stop the Communists in their quest for political legitimacy.

Britain’s Industrial Revolution, feeding on its wide-ranging imperial resource base, established the country as the dominant world power until around 1860. The rest of the world was either turned into a periphery or, in rare cases, followed the example of France which established the afore-mentioned contender state model, a combination of mercantilist and sovereign equality policies. France pioneered such a role, but under the Bourbon monarchy was defeated in the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). The French Revolution then modernised the country’s contender posture by mobilising a self-conscious nation supporting sovereign equality. On that basis the country booked spectacular successes; but in the later phase of Napoleon’s rule it fell victim to his imperial aspirations. The mercantilist Continental System set up by France proved inefficient against Britain’s financial and maritime supremacy. It was a different matter when Germany was unified by Bismarck following the war with France in 1870-71 and adopted a contender posture too, with Austria-Hungary in tow. Britain would not be able to defeat this fast-rising new formation on its own but its ruling class faced other challenges as well. Here begins our account of the formation of a transnational, Atlantic ruling class as an effective agency.

Phase 1: The Atlantic Turn of the British Ruling Class

From the late 19th century all major countries and the United States passed through a phase of late industrialisation to achieve equality with Britain. Capitalism passed through a second Industrial Revolution of large-scale heavy industry associated with railway construction. This was held together by finance capital in the sense of banks interlocked with large corporations for which they mobilised the money capital requirements, whilst securing access to foreign markets and/or entrenching behind tariff walls. Their concept of control was imperialist, i.e., chauvinistic and Social Darwinist.

Against this concept and the inherent drift to war, a labour movement of socialist inspiration emerged in all major industrial states, especially in newly unified Germany. The German labour movement was made part of the contender state effort by Bismarck, who kept it on a tight leash through the Socialist Laws limiting the Socialist Party’s activities to parliamentary work. Assisted by a degree of social protection, this allowed the German workers’ movement (and that of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy) to develop a social autonomy in the sense that workers’ daily lives did not follow the bourgeois ideal of self-enclosed family life and possessive individualism. Instead, workers’ clubs and cooperatives focused on social inclusion, health and cultural development.[5] Here an important difference between the capitalist heartland and the contender states played out as in the liberal heartland, the population is conceived in purely quantitative terms; too many or too few, too old or young, to be replaced when necessary irrespective of its social cohesion; indeed, the less social cohesion, the better. Those holding power in a contender state, which I label a state class because it power is conditional on its control of the state apparatus, necessarily adopt a qualitative view of their population. Like the other productive forces available within their sovereign territory, the population represents a key asset which the state class cannot exchange for another because its own rule is confined to that state. So it is not out of love for humanity that it looks at its population with special concern, ‘taking on the “protection” of the working classes against the excesses of capitalism’.[6]

In combination with the unparalleled spurt in German-Austrian economic, scientific and cultural development overall, a veritable ‘species boost’ that inspired Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, plus the prospect of all this potentially coming under a socialist or even an SPD coalition regime was an issue transcending the capacity of the German ruling class to deal with. Certainly the rulers of Germany were concerned with their powerful socialist labour movement and fantasised about how a war might deal with it.[7] It was not different for the other national ruling classes, but the British also looked beyond their own borders, both for the problem (the German workers’ movement in combination with the country’s rapid progress on all fronts) and the solution (an alliance wit the United States and preparation for war). Adopting a bird’s eye view of the international socialist movement they began their quest for an Atlantic rapprochement to assemble the forces that would be able, not just to defeat ascendant Germany in a direct confrontation of sovereign equals; more specifically the British ruling class took on the responsibility to destroy the European working class and invited its counterparts across the Atlantic to join it.

Power in Britain and the Empire had coalesced around the set of people who had waged the Boer War (1899-1902), which was caused by the quest for gold and diamonds by Cecil Rhodes but which also revealed the limits of Britain’s military capacities. Rhodes and his fellow advocates of English-speaking moral superiority including the Governor-General of South Africa, Alfred Milner, provided the personnel of the enlarged British ruling class once its tasks exceeded what the prior family networks had still been able to handle.[8] The capitalist aspect of the rise of the Milner group entrusted with Rhodes’ fortune after his death included the Atlantic circuit of finance capital organised by J.P. Morgan. That Morgan offered Milner the directorship of his London branch (he turned it down) highlights to what extent capital circuits associated with post-Civil War railway construction and trust formation in the United States were interwoven with transnational ruling class formation. Elsewhere I have analysed how the Morgan network became the financiers of the Entente bloc (with France and Russia) against Germany. German capital needs on the other hand were handled by Morgan’s Wall Street rivals, Kuh, Loeb, which would later gravitate into the Rockefeller/Chase orbit. The First World War was meanwhile being meticulously prepared by the Milner Group and key Liberal fellow-travellers in London over a period of more than a decade.[9]

Thus, the first instance of transnational class formation served to destroy the European working class, first of all the German-speaking one, but also Britain’s own. So much for any ‘national interest’. Thanks to timely US intervention, Britain ‘won’, yet came out broke, certainly after the 1939-45 sequel. The bloodbath of the First World War was trans-nationally conceived in the sense that the Anglo-American ruling class (Woodrow Wilson and the Morgan interests in the US, the Milner Group and the City in the UK and the Dominions) consciously targeted the organised labour movement. This diagonal, cross-border perspective in that sense heralded the new mode of foreign relations, global governance, of which Wilson’s League of Nations project and attendant national self-determination policy to contain the European spread of the Russian Revolution, was the one explicitly ‘global’ in reach. I need not repeat that with the First World War, the willingness of the Atlantic ruling class (as its lesser, national equivalents) to literally exterminate the workers and destroy Europe’s progressive future, was starkly brought out.

Phase 2: Euro-Atlantic Ruling Class Formation Against Communism

The second major instance of transnational class formation added a new layer to the established Anglo-American one. This new one aimed at integrating Western Germany into an expanded Atlantic bloc; it challenged national sovereignty and, ultimately, again targeted Europe’s working class, over which Communist Parties extended their influence on account of their resistance record and the prestige of the USSR gained by its victory over Hitler’s Germany. The mode of accumulation at this juncture was Fordism, the combination of financial repression in line with the recommendations of J. M. Keynes, with the mass production of consumer durables named after the US automaker. Anti-communism here served to isolate militant workers and privilege the second-generation Social Democracy willing to sign up to class collaboration, the Cold War and neo-colonial wars. Also the domestic market emphasis of Fordism rolled back the world market movement of capital of the pre-World War I era, temporarily resurrecting the element of national democracy which today has largely evaporated again.

The ruling class element here included, in wartime London, key figures among the continental exile community such as German-born Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, Unilever director Paul Rijkens, and Polish agent Josephe Retinger, former secretary to the Polish general in exile, Sikorski. They elaborated a post-war strategy aimed at opening the larger Western European economic space which threatened to be compartmentalised by national reconstruction policies. France under the De Gaulle, under a national unity government (with token Communist Party participation) was the key example of this threat. The European League for Economic Cooperation (ELEC), one of Retinger’s projects in London, attracted large corporations sharing the free trade ideology of the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris. Directors of French companies assembled by the finance aristocracy (Baron Boël from Belgium and the French banker, E. Giscard d’Estaing, father of the future president) formed the backbone of ELEC. A West-German contingent led by Deutsche Bank director an Hermann Abs joined in 1950. The Americans had placed Abs, in spite of his conviction as a Nazi war criminal, at the head of the reconstruction bank to distribute US funds in West Germany.[10]

In London, Rijkens led planning groups involving Royal Dutch Shell and other large corporations. But already in August 1944 German business itself assembled under SS auspices in Strasbourg to prepare for the post-war situation. Representatives of Krupp, Messerschmitt, Röchling, Rheinmetall, Volkswagen and a host of others discussed the need to forge alliances with Atlantic capital. In turn, steelmakers such a US Steel, chemical corporations, and others were under an obligation to work with German companies on account of patents jointly held by the two sides. Although not present in Strasbourg, the head of the Nazi party, Martin Bormann, was involved in providing capital from war profits to lubricate such cooperation, using Swiss banks.[11]

Bormann, of course, disappeared but all the other names resurfaced in the early 1950s when Prince Bernhard and Rijkens, jointly with the CIA, and with Retinger as secretary, organised the Bilderberg Conferences to deal with serious disagreements between Anglo-American and continental European economic statesmen concerning trade with the Soviet bloc and China, and forge a Euro-Atlantic ruling class consensus. Hermann Abs would join Bilderberg in 1958. In the meantime, US trade unions were active in several European countries to help split the labour movement along communist/anti-communist lines, and an Atlantic underground army (later named after its Italian component, Gladio) was established and made capable of using force against those not amenable to persuasion.[12] The Marshall Plan went a long way in synchronising liberal policies across Western Europe (whilst exacerbating the East-West division of Europe as a whole). When De Gaulle returned in 1958 to deal with France’s decolonisation crisis and returned to national sovereignty policies, he found himself the target of several assassination plots. Thereupon he severed the country’s military links with NATO in 1966 and expelled the alliance’s HQ from Paris to Brussels.

Otherwise the new round of Atlantic transnationalisation worked to bolster ruling class unity beyond sovereign equality. Ultimately, as with the previous Anglo-American round, this unity was directed against the populations even though a measure of (economic) class compromise was inherent in the Fordist model. Politically however, the people were robbed of their sovereign right to influence national politics (the only frame, however restricted, in which their vote counts) and had to be content with a simulacrum of democracy at the European level, charted by the 1976 Tindemans Plan for a European Parliament. Eventually the traditional framework of national politics, with a Right broadly speaking based in the propertied classes, and a Left with its historic origins in the working class, would be slowly emptied of content. More and more decision-making moved to the supranational level, where the transnational ruling class charts its course in bodies like Bilderberg (which continued after the corruption scandal of the 1970s that led to the resignation Prince Bernhard from the chairmanship). At that point, a host of comparable bodies, such as the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission (with a Japanese contingent, today Asian), and others, were launched. These too serve as informal ruling class planning networks complementing the formal international bodies such as NATO and the EU. Together with the networks of interlocking directorates of large corporations, they constitute the infrastructure of rule, which remains centrally anchored in the Atlantic area.[13]

In contemporary Europe, it would appear at first sight that the trias politica of executive, legislative, and judicial power has been reproduced at the European level in the Commission, the European Parliament, and the Court of Justice. In reality, the European Union operates under a ‘multidimensional’ governance in which the Commission in close conjunction with business organisations such as the European Round Table of Industrialists, and with the Council of Ministers (or the European Council of heads of state and government) acts as the executive, and the Court is preoccupied with constitutionalising free market principles.[14] Since the Euro-Parliament is just a cardboard façade, what has been removed is the democratic dimension. The ability of national politics to reverse that course has been effectively scrapped and as we have seen in Slovakia, dissident prime ministers must fear for their lives. In Rumania and elsewhere, governments inclined to act against EU or NATO direction can be prevented from being elected in the first place. Dissidents can be struck by EU decisions to suspend their civic existence by closing their bank accounts, against which no appeal is possible because the state of law itself has been suspended.

Phase 3: The Rise of Atlantic Zionism after the Communist Collapse

The global collapse of communism, that is, the working class parties under that banner, the Soviet bloc states, and ultimately, the USSR itself, ended the life of the historic Left as a potential counterweight to the Atlantic ruling class. After China, Vietnam, and other state socialist formations had already re-introduced capitalist property relations, the very idea of a socialist society evaporated, with only a few besieged hold-outs such as Cuba remaining. Social Democracy had already surrendered the aspiration of changing society by turning against the Russian Revolution and around the time of World War II, by signing up to the Fordist/Keynesian class compromise. Thus, it tied its fate to that of capital and the West; its superficial internationalism rendered it incapable of challenging transnationalisation or supranational structures of power and influence of the Atlantic ruling class. Hence, the communist collapse left the defence of democracy against ‘globalist’ power to national-populist parties easily penetrated by capital. Popular concern about the dismantling of welfare state arrangements was deepened by large-scale immigration of a labour reserve increasing the number of those dependent on them. Immigration provides the national-populist parties with a theme the historic Left has not been able to deal with.

From the 1990s, Europe as a bastion against communism was relegated to secondary status for the Atlantic ruling class. Hence the military might of the West, through NATO, was directed against Yugoslavia, in part to overcome German and Vatican support for the secession of the Western-most republics, in part also to use the Muslim bulwarks of Bosnia and Kosovo-Albania as stepping stones to the energy resources in the Middle East and post-Soviet Central Asia. Here, Israeli concern that after the narrow victory in the 1973 war it would be preferable to have the US fight its wars henceforth under the banner of a War on Terror (hoisted first in 1979), blended with Western energy appetite.[15] Besides Yugoslavia, the European loss of clout in the Atlantic balance transpired also in the disregard of Russian interests when NATO eastward enlargement was decided on in 1994, breaking solemn promises made in 1989. This effectively precluded the development of mutually beneficial relations between the EU and Russia.

In the 1990s, Fordism with its emphasis on domestic markets and class compromises was disassembled by relocating production to Asia and other reservoirs of cheap and docile labour. The liquidation of fixed capital in the automotive and related sectors added to the speculative financialisation that exploded in 2008. Surveillance capitalism, enabled by the development of new information technologies pioneered by US intelligence and military research, henceforth became the dominant mode of accumulation. The directive fraction of capital at this point can be depicted as a triangle of intelligence, IT, and multi-media.[16]

Just as the Atlantic circuit of finance capital in Morgan’s days had underpinned the Anglo-American rise of a transnational class agency targeting Germany, and US direct investment in the 1950s and 60s backed up the extension to a Euro-Atlantic ruling class with figures like Paul Hoffman and Jean Monnet, the 1990s saw Israeli capital in key IT and communication sectors cross the Atlantic. In the US, they merged with the existing intelligence, multi-media, and IT triangle already dominated by US Zionists. Silicon Valley was very much their preserve, and the massive multi-media concentration triggered by the 1996 Telecommunications Act also reinforced the Zionist element. By 2000, there were already 110 Israeli companies listed in New York, jointly representing twice the combined market value of the 665 companies listed in Tel Aviv.[17]

Let me give one example of a mediator in the formation of the Atlantic Zionist IT/finance connection before turning to Epstein, whose role was key in this respect. Alvin B. Krongard, whom Christopher Bollyn calls ‘Israel’s agent at the CIA’, was an important player. Krongard’s multiple roles highlight that ‘intelligence’ in our triangle can rightfully be compared to economic sectors such as IT and Media. As CEO of the oldest investment bank in the US, Alex. Brown & Sons, Krongard in 1996 travelled to Israel to confer with Prime Minister Shimon Peres on tightening business links between the two countries. Alex. Brown & Sons specialised in tech companies and was advising Scitex, an Israeli company connected to military intelligence and of which Yair Shamir, the son of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, was general manager. Shamir Jr. was also a director of Orckit, a high-speed voice and digital transmission company taken public in the US by Alex. Brown. Orckit was founded by a former commander of Unit 8200, the signal intelligence branch of the Israeli military; in the US, it won a tender to work for GTE, one of the top-10 phone companies in the world. Krongard meanwhile oversaw the merger of Alex. Brown with Bankers’ Trust in late 1997 and then unexpectedly moved to the CIA as a consultant to director George Tenet in February 1998. The bank merger turned out a debacle and the combination was taken over by Deutsche Bank within a year. At the CIA, Krongard then became involved in setting up In-Q-Tel, the venture capital firm meant to ensure that the agency had access to the latest information technology.[18] In the War on Terror, Krongard served as a paid adviser to Blackwater, the private military company of whose owner, Eric Prince, was a close friend. In March 2001, Krongard became Executive Director of the CIA, the no. 3 post.

We now turn to Jeffrey Epstein and the father of his companion Ghislaine, Robert Maxwell. Their exploits as organisers of an Atlantic Zionist ruling class even leave Krongard’s in the shadows and would have momentous consequences in setting up a surveillance capitalist infrastructure across the West.

Maxwell and Epstein

The Anglo-American ruling class targeted European Social Democracy besides confronting the German contender challenge head-on; Euro-Atlantic class formation was mobilised against communism and the USSR. Atlantic Zionism, having little or no productive engagement with the population to offer in the first place, backed up surveillance capitalism with a War on Terror, specifically against Muslims to serve Israel, but ultimately against the population at large. In this light, Robert Maxwell, a Mossad agent originally from Czechoslovakia, was a key figure in marketing the surveillance equipment necessary for the control of the population around the globe.

In the mid-1980s Maxwell, who after changing his name became a politician and media owner in Britain, began to market a computer programme used for the surveillance operations of Marine Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North. This was at the time of the Iran-Contra episode, the clandestine arming by Israel of Iran (then at war with Iraq) of which the proceeds were channelled to the Contras fighting the progressive government of Nicaragua. The database North and his team developed was called MainCore and served to spy on domestic dissidents in the context of the Continuity of Government (COG) system. COG was meant to create a shadow government when constitutional government would have broken down or become impossible. MainCore used the Prosecutor’s Information Management System (PROMIS), created and marketed by Inslaw Inc., a company set up by a former NSA official in 1982. Inslaw leased PROMIS to Ed Meese, Attorney General in the Reagan administration and a participant of the US-Israeli War on Terror conference in Washington D.C. in 1984.[19]

PROMIS allowed the integration of databases on a previously unimaginable scale and for this reason caught the attention of Israeli spymaster Rafi Eitan, Menachem Begin’s ‘advisor on terrorism’. In 1982, using a false name, Eitan was given a demonstration of the system and obtained the software from a former Inslaw employee. He then had an Israeli-American programmer install a trapdoor, or clandestine back entrance, into it. A marketing agreement next created two versions of PROMIS, one that gave Israeli intelligence access to any PROMIS database, another one giving the CIA that access. The CIA version mainly focused on finance; the Israeli version of PROMIS spied on US intelligence and the country’s public sector including the military, and focused on classified information.[20]

Robert Maxwell was closely involved in the machinations that created these two bugged versions of PROMIS. In selling them, he operated through companies that were fronts for Israeli intelligence. Besides the aforementioned Scitex, this involved Degem, a computer company operating in Central and Latin America and Africa. Maxwell marketed PROMIS so successfully that Israeli intelligence soon had access to the communications of innumerable governments, intelligence agencies, and corporations. In Latin America, the dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, and Guatemala used PROMIS whilst, thanks to PROMIS, Mossad was able to assassinate ANC cadre in southern Africa as well as Latin American guerrilla leaders.[21] Maxwell also wanted to sell PROMIS to Los Alamos, the US atomic weapons testing ground, which would have given Israelis access to US nuclear secrets. Instead of Degem, Maxwell for this operation used a new company based in Berkeley, California, Information on Demand, another front for Israeli intelligence. Maxwell’s daughter Christine was made the CEO of Information on Demand (her sister Isabel also worked for the company). After their father’s suspicious death in 1991 (see below), the company was renamed Research on Demand.[22] All along, Israeli intelligence was looking into the communications of institutions using PROMIS, whilst having its agents in key places.

Jeffrey Epstein made his career at the investment bank of Bear Stearns under the patronage of Alan Greenberg, of the family associated with Zionist organisations such as United Jewish Appeal and the Jerusalem Foundation. Leslie Wexner, the lingerie and Ohio real estate mogul, relied on Epstein to manage his finances and those of the Wexner Foundation, set up in the 1970s to assist promising Jewish professionals in North America and mid-career public officials in Israel. At some point, Wexner jointly with Charles Bronfman of the Zionist Seagram dynasty set up a group of the twenty most influential Jewish businessmen in North America, called the Study Group or the Mega Group. They were concerned about the level of intermarriage of Jews with non-Jews, fearing a dilution of Jewish self-consciousness — the fear of assimilation that has driven Zionism from its inception. As a long-standing confidant of Wexner, Epstein too was involved in the Mega Group.

The Mega Group took the established Israel lobby to a new level. The older networks, authoritatively analysed by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, consist of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), and organizations like the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) or Christians United for Israel (CUFI). This core group is surrounded by concentric circles of interests laterally connected to the Zionist state.[23] The Mega Group originally intended to address the problem of ‘declining support for Israel’s policies’. Besides Wexner and Charles and Edgar Bronfman (then-president of the World Jewish Congress), the membership of the Mega Group included Max Fisher, who had organized US support for Israel during the wars of 1967 and ’73 and in 1975 became chairman of the board of United Brands+ and Laurence Tisch, an old OSS hand who, besides building his own hotel chain, was helped by junk bond fraudster Michael Milken in taking over CBS. Other members included Hilton hotel heir Lester Crown, as well as movie maker Steven Spielberg, a protégé of Lew Wasserman, the Hollywood power/broker who previously fostered Ronald Reagan’s career.[24] The Tisch and Bronfman families are also listed in the 1996 network of billionaires’ social circles, another measure of the transnational ruling class.[25]

Epstein was introduced to Israeli military intelligence officer Ari Ben-Menashe by Maxwell in the mid-1980s, after he had probably been vetted already by Ehud Barak, head of Israeli military intelligence (AMAN) and later Prime Minister. Right in 1991, the year of Robert Maxwell’s death, Epstein began sexual blackmail operations jointly with Maxwell’s youngest daughter, Ghislaine. They exploited under-age women to keep tags on a growing cohort of politicians, public figures, and businessmen. According to Ben-Menashe, the operation was initially motivated by Israeli concern over Clinton’s attitude to the Zionist state. Amdocs, an Israeli phone-billing company operating in the United States, had been part of the consortium entrusted with the upgrading the White House phone lines and as a result Israeli intelligence had 30 hours of the president’s conversations with Monica Lewinsky on tape.[26] In the meantime, another US president was suspected of being manipulated on account of his recorded relations with under-age girls and even children.

Epstein, in fact, suspected that Israeli intelligence had played a role in Maxwell’s death. In an email of 2018, Epstein revealed that Maxwell had tried to blackmail the Mossad and had threatened that ‘unless they [the Mossad] gave him £400 million to save his crumbling empire, he would expose all he had done for them.’[27] Intelligence contacts are always clouded in secrecy, but Epstein’s high-level contacts with Israeli intelligence have been confirmed by the recent (incomplete) publication of the Epstein files. An FBI memo reported he ‘was a co-opted Mossad agent’, having been ‘trained as a spy’ for Israeli intelligence. His Zionist profile is corroborated by his funding of the Friends of the Israeli Defence Forces, the settler organisation the Jewish National Fund, and other Israeli groups. With US intelligence, Epstein’s links ran through his long-time lawyer and Harvard professor, Alan Dershowitz; through him, Epstien was also in touch with students from wealthy families including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his brother Josh.[28]

Epstein, then, was a key mediator in the networks constituting the Atlantic Zionist ruling class, with high-level links to intelligence at both ends, and in surveillance capitalist operations characteristic of the new mode of accumulation. His contacts included, besides Leslie Wexner and the Mega Group, the top management of J.P. Morgan Chase. A former FBI agent, Shaun O’Neill, revealed that the bank, apart from financing Epstein’s exploits, had also impeded the judicial investigation of his exploits. Jes Staley, head of J.P. Morgan asset management and later, of its private bank, was a key Epstein contact. Leon Black, the billionaire co-founder of Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm, was involved in a project to embellish Israel’s reputation; an eight-book set called Jewish Lives was published by a partnership of Yale University Press and the Leon D. Black Foundation. In all, wealthy donors paid Epstein and his closest associates $2.4 billion and as two authors writing for CounterPunch ask, ‘Was this $2.4 billion for hush money payments? Was it fees for sex and/or Israel intelligence services?’[29]

Epstein also introduced Ehud Barak to Peter Thiel of Palantir, the crown jewel of Atlantic surveillance capitalism, the privatised continuation of the original Total Information Awareness programme developed by the Pentagon under Admiral John Poindexter. In 2015, Palantir would set up an office in Tel Aviv to bolster Israel’s IT and tech sectors. Other seminal Epstein contacts included Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, and Ariane de Rothschild of the famous banking dynasty.[30] Yet the large corporate media in the West preferred to highlight the sensational details of the blackmail operations by Epstein and Ghislaine, and who was on the list of visitors to Epstein’s island, his ranch in New Mexico, and his New York penthouse, all bugged for recording incriminating behaviour. Media silence on the transnational ruling class involvement has a sound reason, viz., their owners’ involvement in these networks.[31]

American law enforcement initially was at a loss for what ‘Mega’ meant, but thanks to Whitney Webb, we know it was the Zionist billionaire group with links to both the intelligence world and organized crime.[32] In the Bush Jr. administration that took office in January 2001, the links of key figures in strategy formation such as Richard Perle to the technology sector stand out; they are second only to those to finance. Prominent among Atlantic Zionists, Perle in 1996 directed the formulation of a new concept of control to be pursued by an incoming Israeli government, which had the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) as its counterpart and several prominent Zionists on both.[33]

Another node in the Atlantic Zionist web, besides the Mega Group, was the Challenge Fund, an Israeli intelligence operation primarily invested in by the Bronfman and Andreas families. The Bronfmans were mentioned already; the Andreas family is the main force behind grain broker Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). The Challenge Partners, who manage the eponymous Fund, are headed by Joseph Ciechanover, an Israeli who was former chairman of El Al and chairman of the board of Israel Discount Bank (IDB), the country’s third largest, besides a number of political positions in the foreign affairs and defense fields. Others in Challenge are Major-General Ilan Biran, board chairman of Rafael, an Israeli defense corporation; David Ivry, president of Boeing Israel and twice chair of the board of aerospace giant IAI and a close associate of US anti-terror chief Richard Clarke; Jacob Perry, former head of Shin Bet and after retirement, president of Cellcom, Israel’s largest mobile phone company. Avi Naor of Aurec/Amdocs is also connected to Challenge. Finally, Yair Shamir, the aforementioned son of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, was also manager of Challenge at one point.[34]

The shared worldview of the US and Israel also included Washington’s defence of Israeli war crimes, motivated in part by concern over the legality of the US’ own overseas military operations. The similar experience of a frontier society conquering the land of natives considered inferior and/or irrelevant is also a unifying factor. The Israel lobby structure inside the United States against this background serves to ensure that the much larger and diverse North American society does not stray from this shared worldview regarding Israel, besides ensuring that no dissident Jewish opinion gains traction.[35] It speaks for itself that this task has become much harder since the genocidal campaign unleashed in Gaza by Israel following the IDF-facilitated outbreak of Palestinian armed resistance in October 2023.

The integration between the United States and Israel in the context of Atlantic Zionism reached a new stage with plans for the integration of their respective military into a single structure.[36] In spite of the unspeakable atrocities committed by Israel from the time of its foundation, which in the last few years have become widely publicised — leading belatedly to the multiple condemnations by the world’s top international courts for its genocide of Palestinians. The planned military merger takes the earlier ventures such as In-Q-Tel to the level of a comprehensive fusion of the US and Israeli military machines. The two countries, with Europe in tow, have effectively declared war on the world, and in their final bid for global governance are resisted only (and as a result of the aspirations of their own oligarchs, half-heartedly) by the BRICS bloc countries.

Once again, the transnationalisation of the ruling class produces massacres without end among peoples targeted for destruction. Western populations, in turn, are paying for the private money-making schemes that, as Julian Assange has claimed, have come to take the place of military strategy aimed at achieving victory.

1. I have worked this out in States of Emergency. Keeping the Global Population in Check. Atlantia, Georgia: Clarity press, 2022.
2. Trump’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ was intended to turn the tide but obviously only a disempowerment of the ruling class can achieve such a result, as we can see today.
3. Bob Jessop and Henk Overbeek, eds. Transnational Capital and Class Fractions. The Amsterdam School Perspective Reconsidered [foreword, Gerd Junne]. London: Routledge, 2019; Jonathan Nitzanand Shimshon Bichler, ‘Bringing capital accumulation back in: the Weapondollar-Petrodollar coalition—Military contractors, oil companies and Middle East “energy conflicts”.’ Review of International Political Economy, 2 (3) and their work since.
4. Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment. Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991.
5. William F. Drischler, The Yankees did it! The Origins of World War I and the Russo-Ukrainian Conflict, 2022-2024. Self-published, 2024, p. 56.
6. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks [trans. and ed. Q. Hoare and G.N. Smith]. New York: International Publishers 1971 [written 1929-’35], p. 262.
7. Documented by Fritz Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht. Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland 1914/18, abridged edition. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1984 [1961].
8. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment. From Rhodes to Cliveden. New York: Books in Focus, 1981 [1949] and Tragedy and Hope. A History of the World in Our Time. San Pedro, Cal.: GSG Books, 1998 [1966].
9. See my Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class, London: Verso 2012 (1984); Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History. The Secret Origins of the First World War. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 2013.
10. See my Een Amerikaans plan voor Europa. Amsterdam: SUA, 1978, pp. 101-2, citing F.X. Rebattet, The European Movement 1945-1953. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, St. Anthony’s College, Oxford University, 1962.
11. Tony Gosling, The Traitors of Arnhem—Martin Bormann and the Bilderberg Group, 2nd ed. Bristol: Gosling Publishing, 2024 [2021], pp. 36-9; I. F. Stone, ‘The Nazi Industrial Plot for the Next War’ and Ámerican Big Business and the Future of the Reich’[both from 1945] in The Truman Era. New York: Vintage,1973 [1953], pp. 18-23.
12. Daniele Ganser, NATO’s Secret Armies. Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. London: Frank Cass, 2005.
13. The shifting structure of the transnational ruling class (networks of interlocking directorates, planning groups, families and social networks) between 1996 and 2006 is documented in William K. Carroll, The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class. Corporate Power in the Twenty-First Century. [with C. Carson, M. Fennema, E. Heemskerk, and J.P. Sapinski]. London: Zed Press, 2010.
14. Otto Holman, ‘Asymmetrical regulation and multidimensional governance in the European Union’ (2004) in Jessop and Overbeek, Transnational Capital and Class Fractions, pp. 149-51.
15. What followes largely draws on my forthcoming Israel and 9/11.
16. This triangle of is in my States of Emergency pp. 77-84; Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, The Global Political Economy of Israel, London: Pluto Press, 2002, p. 272, fig. 5.9; see also Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books, 2019.
17. Nitzan and Bichler, Global Political Economy of Israel, pp. 345-6.
18. Christopher Bollyn, ‘9-11 and Alvin Krongard—Israel’s Agent at the CIA.’ New 911 Inside Job, 27 March 2012 (online).
19. Whitney Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail. The sordid union between Intelligence and Organized Crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein. Waltersville, Oregon: Trine Day. 2022. 2 vols. Vol. 1, p. 382.
20. Ibid., pp. 390-391; on Maxwell’s role, vol. 2, p. 363.
21. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 386-7.
22. Ibid., pp. 389-91 and vol. 2, p. 162; on Ls Alamos, pp. 291, 294.
23. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, p. 113.
24. Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, pp. 77, 124-5, cf. 110; Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby, p. 128.
25. Carroll, The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class, p. 148, Fig. 6.6.
26. Ibid. vol. 2, pp. 8, 20-2, 128-91; Misha Glenny, McMafia. Seriously Organised Crime. London: Vintage, 2009, pp. 22-3.
27. Simon Speakman Cordall, ‘What Were Jeffrey Epstein’s Links to Israel?’ Al Jazeera, 9 February 2026 (online).
28. Ibid.
29. Pam Martens and Russ Martens, ‘The Billionaires in the Epstein Files and Their Ties to Israel’. CounterPunch, 11 August 2025 (online).
30. Richard Gizbert, ‘The Anatomy of the Epstein Network’. Interview with Meenakshi Ravi (contributions by Murtaza Hussain). The Listening Post, Al Jazeera, 9 February 2026 (online); and ‘Epstein, Israel’s Barak discussed “gigantic” consultancy sums paid to Blair’ Al Jazeera (staff report), 4 February 2026 (online)
31. Murtaza Hussain in Gizbert, ‘The Anatomy of the Epstein Network’.
32. Webb, One Nation Under Blackmail, vol. 2, pp.125-7.
33. Bastiaan van Apeldoorn and Naná de Graaff, American Grand Strategy and Corporate Elite Networks. The Open Door since the end of the Cold War. London: Routledge, 2016, pp. 147-8, fig. 5.2; Richard Perle et al., A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. Jerusalem and Washington: The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, 1996.
34. Christopher Bollyn, Solving 9/11. The Deception That Changed the World [foreword, G. Stanish]. Self-published, 2012, pp.179-82.
35. Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby, pp. 122-4.
36. ‘Military Merger’, interview with Dennis Kucinich. The Tucker Carlson Show, 6 July 2026 (online)
    
    (Featured Image: “Donald Trump speaking at AIPAC, Washington DC” by Lorie Shaull is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.)