To become a “made man” in the mafia the initiate is required to commit a serious crime, usually murder, in order to earn the trust of his fellow criminals.

What if the US political system operates in a likewise manner?

In the light of the Epstein saga, it appears that many of our politicians have also committed crimes in order to earn the trust of the deep state apparatchiks who manage the empire and of the billionaires who own it. Going further, I’ve come to believe that the made men who manage our empire enact the policies they do because of voluntary blackmail. Indeed, no powerful politician or billionaire is going to participate in Epstein’s honey-pot operation just because he was horny. When you’re powerful or a billionaire it’s not that hard to get laid. No. They flew on the Lolita Express to Pedo-Island to become “made,” and be part of the elite club.

The one that George Carlin joked: “it’s a big club but you ain’t in it.”

Iconoclast writer and publisher, Ron Unz believes that our top national figures are merely “attractive front-men selected for their popular appeal and their political malleability.”

Hello Obama.

Unz writes: “An obvious problem with installing puppet rulers is the risk that they will attempt to cut their strings, much like Putin soon outmaneuvered and exiled his oligarch patron Boris Berezovsky. One means of minimizing such risk is to select puppets who are so deeply compromised that they can never break free, knowing that the political self-destruct charges buried deep within their pasts could easily be triggered if they sought independence.

I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.”

The corporate media enables the utility of some blackmail, while minimizing or disappearing others. Unz elaborates: “Even if blackmail operations are successful at gathering powerful dirt, they can only become effective if those behind the effort also control or influence a significant portion of the media. Facts and evidence themselves are almost useless unless they are combined with a sufficiently powerful distribution channel to promote and publicize them. Thus blackmail operations and media control are intimately connected.”

So what are our compromised politicians busy doing? Across the Western world leaders appear to be “shoveling coal for Satan.” Austerity, bank and corporate subsidies/bailouts, endless wars and now up-front, out-in-the-open fulsome support for genocide.

The made men and women are all part of the elite network that manages the country and the larger American empire, that is justifying and supporting the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Max Blumenthal reports that “when Tucker Carlson alleged that Epstein had ties to Israeli Intelligence [and that this fact explained] why Trump is covering up [the Epstein Affair], the Israelis seemingly took fright. Naftali Bennett, the former Israeli Prime Minister, was summoned to declare that he had dealt, every day, with the Mossad and that Jeffrey Epstein did not work for the Mossad and was not an Israeli agent. He then threatened Carlson, saying: ‘We won’t stand for this’.

And here we pose a question. Why are so few Western countries willing to take action against Israel? There are many possibilities—the power of Israeli lobbies in the US and Europe, Israel’s strategic role as colonial attack dog in the Middle East and the blackmailing of lawmakers through honeytraps like Epstein’s—but one seems to overshadow all the others: they are all part of the same criminal syndicate that views Israel as vitally important to the war and surveillance industry that is key to their continued dominance.

Have you wondered why nothing changes even as we elect a Democrat then a Republican then a Democrat then a Republican?

I’m pretty sure that the essential criminality of the American empire is a big part of it. Politics consists of the made men negotiating with each other about how to divide the wealth they’ve extracted. Think of it as the mafia and Donald Trump as Tony Soprano.