Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

A contest for political control of Europe is gearing up between two American teams, one headed by the long-established George Soros, and the other now being set up by the upstart Steve Bannon, US President Donald Trump’s former campaign-manager. Soros has long led America’s liberal billionaires in controlling Europe, and Bannon is now organizing a team of America’s conservative billionaires to wrest that control from the liberal ones. Whereas Soros claims to represent the public’s interests, Bannon claims to represent the population’s interests - that’s the ‘populist’ side of America’s billionaires, versus the established ‘public-interest’ (Soros) side of them.

Two American brands of ‘philanthropists' will thus now be fighting for control over Europe's political markets (or institutions).

It’s a battle to serve either ’the public’ or else ’the people’, and each political brand will be struggling to keep Europe as an ally in American billionaires’ war against Russia (which all American billionaires want to defeat), but each team does this from a different ideological perspective, one being ‘liberal’, and the other being ‘conservative’.

Just as there is liberal-conservative political polarization between billionaires domestically within a nation, there also is such political polarization between billionaires regarding their given nation’s foreign policies; and America’s billionaires are politically very highly polarized, both nationally and, increasingly, internationally as well. None of them is progressive, or left-populist. The only ‘populism’ that any billionaire currently promotes is right-‘populist', which is Bannon’s team. (Stalin was left-‘populist’; and Hitler was right-‘populist’; but neither dictator really was at all populist, which is simply democratic and against the aristocracy.) Both teams demonize each other within the United States for control over the US Government, but both are now competing against each other internationally for control over the entire world, by two different brands: liberal versus conservative. Both brands endorse ‘democracy’ or “the allies”; and both support spreading that ‘democracy’ by means of invading and occupying ‘dictatorships’ or “the enemies.” In Europe, this is called “imperialism”; in America, it is called “neo-conservatism” or “neoconservatism”; but no American billionaire actively opposes it (because to oppose it would be to oppose the aristocracy itself, the billionaires’ control over the Government — the very system that has been enormously successful for them, far more than the public itself recognizes).

After World War II, America’s billionaires took control of, first western Europe, and, then, after 1990, once the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact military alliance ended, they gradually took all of Europe. They did this not only by expanding NATO after 1990 (even as its mirror-organization the Warsaw Pact had disappeared and thus NATO’s nominal raison d’etre was actually gone) but by means of the EU, which was created in the 1950s as a joint effort by American and European billionaires and their agents — all of them being anti-Russian (or, as the public line at the time went, ‘anti-communist’). Their real aim was conquest, first of all absorbing all allies of Russia, and then ultimately of absorbing Russia itself — complete global conquest.

The public announcement of this new war by American billionaires for control over Europe, appeared on 20 July 2018, in the US neoconservative (i.e., pro-imperialism) neoliberal propaganda-site, The Daily Beast (it’s pro-Soros, anti-Bannon; and so says that Soros has “given away $32 billion to liberal causes” instead of “paid $32 billion to liberal causes” — for isolating and ultimately defeating Russia). This “liberal” article, against the “conservative” Bannon, opened as follows:

HELLFIRE CLUB Inside Bannon's Plan to Hijack Europe for the Far-Right Bannon is moving to Europe to set up The Movement, a populist foundation to rival George Soros and spark a right-wing revolt across the continent. NICO HINES 07.20.18 9:57 PM ET LONDON — Steve Bannon plans to go toe-to-toe with George Soros and spark a right-wing revolution in Europe. Trump’s former White House chief advisor told The Daily Beast that he is setting up a foundation in Europe called The Movement which he hopes will lead a right-wing populist revolt across the continent starting with the European Parliament elections next spring...

Bannon has spent his career after the US military as an agent for various US billionaires, most recently for the ones that backed Donald Trump in the Republican primaries and so bought the Party’s nomination for him. Whereas the chief brain behind Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign was Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, the chief brain behind Donald Trump’s was Steve Bannon who had been hired for this purpose by billionaire mathematician and private-equity chief Robert Mercer who partnered on the operation with billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel. After Trump won the nomination, Bannon stayed on and his operation came to be funded most by the US-Israeli casino billionaire couple, Miriam and Sheldon Adelson. But all of the Republican billionaires(Jewish, evangelical Christian, and even some otherwise) were big supporters of Israel. Israel, of course, is allied with the Sauds, who own Saudi Arabia; and both Israel and the Sauds are even more focused on destroying Iran than on destroying Russia (the US aristocracy’s chief goal). Only America’s billionaires are obsessed to conquer Russia. They've been that way ever since World War II ended.

As the columnist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard accurately summarized in Britain's Telegraph, "The European Union always was a CIA project, as Brexiteers discover”:

US intelligence funded the European movement secretly for decades, and worked aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into the project. As this newspaper first reported when the treasure became available, one memorandum dated July 26, 1950, reveals a campaign to promote a full-fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency. The key CIA front was the American Committee for a United Europe (ACUE), chaired by Donovan. Another document shows that it provided 53.5 per cent of the European movement's funds in 1958. The board included Walter Bedell Smith and Allen Dulles, CIA directors in the Fifties, and a caste of ex-OSS officials who moved in and out of the CIA. Bill Donovan, legendary head of the war-time OSS, was later in charge of orchestrating the EU project. Papers show that it [ACUE] treated some of the EU's 'founding fathers' as hired hands, and actively prevented them finding alternative funding that would have broken reliance on Washington. There is nothing particularly wicked about this. The US acted astutely in the context of the Cold War. The political reconstruction of Europe was a roaring success.

However, his opinion at the end there isn’t entirely true, because at the same time, the CIA was working with thousands of secret Nazi and Fascist agents in Europe, whom the OSS had secretly collected and protected at the end of WWII and who continued secretly throughout the Cold War to carry out CIA operations to subvert not just communist agents in Europe but, even more than that, to subvert democratic agents in Europe who favored not subordination to the US but instead the democratic sovereignty of Europeans, over their own land's politics. Therefore, from the very get-go, the EU was a means to impose, upon Europeans, control by US international corporations, for the benefit of corporate America. That was the overriding purpose of the EU — subordination to America’s billionaires, no authentic democracy. Vassalage within the US empire was and is the goal of them all — to conquer, first, Europe, and then, the world.

Evans-Pritchard urges his readers: “In my view, the Brexit camp should be laying out plans to increase UK defence spending by half to 3pc of GDP, pledging to propel Britain into the lead as the undisputed military power of Europe.” This pro-imperialist view of his, is an extension of that by Cecil Rhodes late in the 1800s, for a UK-US global empire in which those two imperial powers — the old one and the new one — would gradually take control over the entire world. George Soros has been working for that objective feverishly. Steve Bannon is against that ‘internationalist’ viewpoint, and he favors instead the ‘nationalist’ one, but in both the liberal and the conservative versions, America’s billionaires will take in an increasing proportion of the world’s wealth. The contest between these two teams is over how best to achieve this objective.

There is also a second reason why America’s billionaires are rabid against today’s Russia, above and beyond that of America’s billionaires demanding to control the world. This reason is that, under Vladimir Putin, Russia’s policy has been to demand that all billionaires, both domestic and foreign, accept that in Russia, the welfare of the Russian public takes precedence over and above the welfare of any and all billionaires. This is a principle that billionaires everywhere, and especially the American ones who prior to Putin’s leadership were robbing the Russian federal treasury, cannot tolerate. So: in siding with America’s billionaires, Europeans have been siding also with billionaires as a class — siding with the super-rich — against the public, everywhere. Why would Europeans be doing such a thing? Aren’t they supposed to have at least some degree of choice in such a matter? Aren’t they supposed to live in a democracy?