In addition to all the other reveals, the Epstein Files have shone a light on the ongoing looting operation, where it’s much more lucrative to sabotage the US economy so that the billionaires can profit from the destruction.
The latest batch of Epstein emails includes an illuminating exchange between Epstein and Peter Thiel. The email is dated 26 Jun 2016, right after Brexit, and in it, Epstein writes: “return to tribalism counter to globalization. amazing new alliances. you and I both agreed zero interest rates were too high, as i said in your office. finding things on their way to collapse , was much easier than finding the next bargain.”
That really sounds like what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” and it’s been this way since the crash of 2008, when bankers were bailed out while mortgage holders were evicted by the millions to “foam the runway” for the banks. The Wall Street crash converted a lot of homes into “distressed assets” that were purchased at bargain basement prices by hedge-funds, who turned around and rented those homes back to Americans at exorbitant rates thanks to algorithmic pricing.
Before the bailout there was decades of out-sourcing and plant closures, leading to millions of lost jobs, decimated communities and deaths of despair. The US has suffered from the endless privatizing, offshoring, contractorizing, and many other initiatives of the past forty years that have enriched the wealthiest while impoverishing everyone else, even the professional/managerial/class, who are now feeling the lash.
And now the looting is occurring at an industrial level in concert with the massively corrupt Trump Administration. That Trump and Epstein were partners in crime is illustrative of our milieu.
William Gibson’s 1984 science fiction novel Neuromancer, had a great bit of dialogue–“the street finds its own uses for things.” With the Epstein Class, we can extrapolate that insight into how our system of capitalism will always bring the greatest benefits to the worst sorts of sociopaths. Epstein and Trump are simply the end result of late capitalism’s perverse incentives.
Update: Even though Epstein and Trump were confidants, the contrast in attire suggests a power disparity, where Trump has on a suit and tie while Epstein wears a button down over jeans. Make of it what you will.
Update 2: Serendipitously, Rob Urie, posted this account of Obama’s culpability at Naked Capitalism.
“A recent series of interviews with former US President Barack Obama and his associates reveal that Mr. Obama ‘didn’t see Donald Trump coming.’ As with most quotes of this sort, it reveals more about the speaker than the subject. Within three or four months of Mr. Obama taking office, a reasonable number us were warning not of Mr. Trump per se, but of a fascist response to Mr. Obama bailing out Wall Street while leaving tens of millions of unemployed citizens to their own devices.
That Mr. Obama didn’t see this coming makes him, and the people that he surrounded himself with, fools. A clearer historical analogy could hardly have been possible. Wall Street had been freed to create new types and classes of financial instruments based on their never having failed before— because they had never existed, before. A financial crash in 1929 set off a chain reaction in the heavily financialized Western economy. The resulting Great Depression set in motion a series of fascist uprisings across Europe.
In the 2010s, as with the 1930s, it was the failed liberal response that did most of the social damage. In the 2010s as with the 1930s, liberals used austerity to punish poor and working people for mismanagement by the ruling class. The Nazis were brought to power to fix the mess that self-dealing liberals had created. By 1933, wealth was still heavily concentrated through financialization in the hands of a few self-dealing oligarchs.”
camelotkidd 