Please read the Miami Herald article on Jeffrey Epstein.
How a future Trump Cabinet member gave
Burn. It. Down.
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Kevin Spacey too, not so oddly enough.
In contrast to the hysteria over Bret Kavanaugh, one hardly heard mention of this. Why are we only seeing this now? Because it is an angle against Trump? (Not that Acosta does not deserve the opprobrium.)
At least we are hearing it now.
Despicable us.
“It’s almost as if there’s a ruling class.” Sustained by an incestuous level of indifference, and a sense of entitlement. Expecting special attention and feeling entitled are key features of narcissism.
“Success has the seeds of destruction built into it” and the empire falls…
When has it not been so?
Regards the Miami Herald Julie Brown 11-28-18 article, aarrgghh, etc OMG!!!
The curious part above is the way some individuals were listed in the log: almost so obviously a play: President William J Clinton - seriously? I doubt the log hasn’t been manipulated or a manipulation. And I am a not-a-Clinton fan!
Occam’s Razor, smoke & fire. When you are part of the club that makes the rules why would you care where your name appears.
Epstein’s real-life Carcosa exploits and the cast of malignant characters that protected him sound like they inspired the plot for season one of True Detective.
And people wonder why far left and right media outlets continue to attract new subscribers? It is precisely because those are the only places who have not forgotten about Epstein’s sexual abuse of children and women. The far right QAnon conspiracy herd has spun the Epstein story into an international jewish illuminati child trafficking cabal. And the dirtbag left rightly excoriates Epstein as a premier example of the perversions that our pro-corporate pro-capitalist system generates and protects. In both instances, a moral argument about these horrors is what drives the narrative rather than the nothingness that defines centrist apologia.
As much as I agree with the title I am not sure that we don’t end up in a worse place to “protect” us from future evils.
Many crises ago after the tech bubble I think there was a brief movement by some high minded institutions that they were going to lean on corporations to be better stewards and not just capital disbursement schemes. Obviously that did not endure.
It seems to me that the way to strike at the heart of a corrupt system is to stop the money flow. What if a grass roots organization formed with enough voice to boycott select corporations. A day, a week a month enough to cause a stir and get a pulpit from which to ask for change?
If a large enough effort, maybe even demand it. Would enough people care? How many people out there are doing their job (like the local law enforcement from the article) but getting trampled by the corruption. When is enough, enough?
It worked for prominent disruptors of the past.
In fairness to legacy media, Miami Herald’s work here does feel like some proper reporting. Whether it qualifies as old school investigative journalism I’m not so sure. Maybe so if it emboldens more of Epstein’s victims to come forward. A few dogged attorneys and former law enforcement officials seem to deserve the most credit for keeping the case alive. But it is refreshing to see reporting where all of the involved parties were solicited for comment. Nobody from Team Epstein went on the record of course.
And I was just about to write off all legacy media for being hopelessly captured by commercial interests. Oh wait, what’s more commercial than a lurid child sex ring operated by a towel-clad billionaire?
Dr. Ben uses Team Elite as shorthand for the ruling class but I declare we should henceforth adopt Team Epstein. Seems apropos given the penchant for employing 14 year old cheerleaders with braces to
strokepromote their brand of narcissism.Unlike Alexander Acosta, I recall how our very fine President Trump quickly dispatched US Attorney Preet Bharara not long after being elected. Mr. Bharara naturally joined the ranks of the #resistance and is quoted as saying that federal prosecutors are actually American’s third political party. This insipid sentiment is rather accurate given the superior
protection racketrepresentation US attorneys like Acosta provide for America’s supercitizenry. Perhaps Epstein’s “extraordinary plea agreement” was simply primary season for the federal prosecutor party. After all, the unflappable Eric Holder would soon be nominated to run on a powerful Too Big To Jail platform.[Side Note] It was rather disappointing to discover that Holder’s upcoming TV biopic didn’t go with Too Big To Jail for its title. Perhaps Main Justice is a pet name for describing one half of the two-tiered system that we flounder under. Merciless justice for Main Street and just-trust-us for Wall Street.
From my foxhole, the non-prosecution deal Epstein got from Acosta’s team conforms to the same high standards of protection that were provided for W. Bush administration officials facing crimes surrounding the Iraq War. From the Intercept’s Jeremy Scahill:
“When victims of the U.S. torture program — the so-called extraordinary rendition program, or people that were taken to Guantanamo or to black sites — filed lawsuits in the United States against Donald Rumsfeld, President George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or other officials for the torture that they endured, or the kidnapping that they endured; the Justice Department intervened in those cases using something called the Westfall Act. Which actually has to do with U.S. labor law. And even Attorney General Eric Holder under Obama filed briefs in these lawsuits against Bush-era accused war criminals saying that even if they had committed genocide, that it was within the official scope of their duties. And therefore, they were removed as defendants in those cases and replaced by the U.S. government which has sovereign immunity and, therefore they were dismissed.”
Extraordinary rendition. Extraordinary plea agreement. Ordinary injustice.
[Source: https://theintercept.com/2018/09/26/trump-united-nations-noam-chomsky/]
The Epstein case and others like it have the look and feel of an empire on the verge of collapse, don’t they? And let’s not forget the Catholic Church abuse scandal too, which has a global footprint and is still unfolding. Ditto Harvey Weinstein. All these evil acts are repugnant but the delayed and inadequate justice is even more damaging to us than the crimes themselves (which will always exist and don’t implicate society at-large). But when I read about Epstein’s cushy “work release” jail conditions and paltry financial penalties it makes my blood boil. What a contrast to how the poor & unconnected are treated by our criminal justice system (pretrial asset forfeitures for non-violent misdemeanors, say what?)! That’s where the real shame lies.
My instinct (like many of you, I suspect) is that money is both the cause and cure of this. The prescription? A quick list: 1. Get money out of politics (no seriously, like, all of it - money isn’t speech and corporations aren’t people, Jack… so put an end to corporate campaign contributions, no anonymous giving, no PACs, set lower donation limits, end the revolving door between elected office and lobbying, etc.). 2. Pay honest civil servants and first-responders a decent wage with real financial upside for improved outcomes (narrowing the pay-gap to the private sector). 3. Enforce the damn tax law equally on everyone, not just honest people (e.g. where are all the big prosecutions we ought to be seeing as a result of the Panama & Paradise Papers? Why didn’t IRS/FINRA/SEC audits catch Madoff? Or Enron? Or Worldcom?). 4. Quit socializing the cost of damage caused by private interests - whether it’s environmental, financial, security, privacy, whatever - make the bad actors personally reimburse the Gov’t dollar-for-dollar for the cleanup and cost to prosecute stemming from their messes (this means no more hiding your wealth behind the quickly-engineered bankruptcy of some corporate entity fall guy). 5. Divorce health insurance from employers; enabling the bottom 90% to change jobs without losing healthcare coverage will ramp economic mobility and corporate efficiency significantly - just watch.
Do all that in the first year. Then work on fine-tuning.
I write this in a spirit of both hope and jest. Hope because such a program is far short of and less risky than “burn-it-all-down,” and jest because I doubt it will happen in my lifetime.
Hurts to read it - they’ve done away with the pretense of holding it up as a fair system and don’t even care if we believe it’s a fair system now - scary and bold. If balance applies, what pretense can we the non-rulers get rid of then?
Insightful observation here. The engines to turn practically every crisis, tragedy or event into multiple stories, tailor-made for different audiences, churn into action more or less immediately at this point.
Small victories: Trump labor secretary out of running for attorney general after Miami Herald report
Acosta’s future dims a bit. Not on par with his malfeasance, but heartfelt H/T goes out the Herald.
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article222365010.html
If you really want to get depressed and see the inverse of the Epstein story, listen to Season 3 of the Serial podcast (https://serialpodcast.org/season-three/about ) which spent a year recording in the Cleveland/Cuyahoga County Criminal Courthouse chronicaling how the criminal justice system works out for Team Underprivileged.
↑↑↑ Nail this to a church door. ↑↑↑
I struggle to understand whether this paradigm is new and calamitous, or ancient and banal.
“These decrees of yours are no different from spiders’ webs. They’ll restrain anyone weak and insignificant who gets caught in them, but they’ll be torn to shreds by people with power and wealth.” - Anacharsis as quoted by Plutarch
or frequently ascribed to Balzac, but I can’t find a citation
“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.” - Honore de Balzac
The ancient Chinese had a method for dealing with such people; Lingchi. It lasted a thousand years,but not as long as the abuse of young females by more powerful males. GM is routinely practiced even today in the US. How old was Aish Bint Abu Baker when taken by her husband?