I’m in the Epstein Files and I Feel Unclean
It's the twisted, beating heart of a degraded and dying system.
It’s trivial, really—but it feels so creepy.
A couple of writers I know commented that they found their own names in the latest release of the Epstein files. Killing time while on hold—and expecting nothing—I typed in my last name and hit “return.” What came up was an email newsletter Epstein received in 2013 by someone named Greg Brown, who is listed as an investment counselor with a group called GlobalCast (one of several with similar names).
I was writing in The Huffington Post those days in my role as a Senior Fellow at the Campaign for America’s Future, where my primary beat was Wall Street and financial corruption. (My colleague in that effort was Zach Carter, who later achieved considerable success with his biography of John Maynard Keynes entitled The Price of Peace.)
Brown—about whom there is remarkably little online—writes as follows:
“Last week I read an article in The Huffington Post by Richard Eskow - The Hearing: Reality, Delusion, and the Federal Reserve - which centered around Janet Yellen appearance (sic) before the Senate banking committee on November 14, 2013 for a hearing on her confirmation as the Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank.”
He goes on to cut and paste liberally (and often carelessly) from my column, e.g.:
“Yellen, a mainstream economist, isn’t likely to transform it into the central bank our nation needs. That may take a political mandate—one we’re not likely to see soon in our corporate-dominated political process. The real reason for this is that the Fed has become far too deeply embedded with the banking industry. This can be seen in its board structure, as well as in its policies.”
Pretty populist for the Epstein crowd, although I doubt the man actually read it. Brown’s newsletter (this one, anyway) ran to 45 pages, after all. It seemed like output from one of those mailing lists we all find ourselves on and never get around to unsubscribing from.
Still—and perhaps childishly—I feel unclean just being in those files. I know it’s irrational, but my level of loathing for Epstein and his crowd knows no bounds. That is not irrational. I’m sickened by the image of powerful people cavorting in the hot tub where so many young hearts were scarred and broken.
We live in an empire of psychopaths. From the above video commentary (lightly edited):
“(The behavior of Epstein and his crowd) is part of the same—I’m going to call it psychopathy—that leads people to cheat and lie, go behind people’s backs, break deals, and do whatever they have to do to get ahead.
I could tell you stories from my own career—not about myself, but about people I worked with or for and observed. The rush they get off of (lying and cheating)—well, you can get that same rush off of breaking the spirit of a young girl for your own sexual satisfaction.
It’s so loathsome, so disgusting. But to me it’s all of a piece. It’s this sort of capitalist, ultra-hyper-capitalist monkey house where the big apes are served by the medium ones, the medium ones by the little ones, and then down to the frail ones that they just beat and batter and throw away.
And to me it represents the lowest of human existence. My only prayer for this, if I may use that theological word, is that people come to understand that this is what our system does. This is what it is. This is the real thing, right? You’re getting to see the beating heart of it now.
If you don’t like it—and you’re sick if you don’t hate it—you might want to change the whole system that put these people in charge of ... everything.”
I realized in retrospect that my reference to the “monkey house” was unfair to nonhuman primates. It’s true that they have often engaged in this kind of aggression in zoos, but that’s the fault of the humans who trapped them in inhumane conditions.
It was also unfair because the behavior of these captives is worsened by a scarcity of space and resources. The human animals in the Epstein crowd have more wealth and comfort than anyone could ever need. And yet, they descended again and again to the lowest rungs of moral and corporeal depravity.
Look at them. Don’t turn away. Look, and remember: These are the people who run everything.
If that’s not a good reason to start a revolution, by God, I don’t know what is.
Zach Carter’s book was about John Maynard Keynes.
We are mired in the legal trap of hunting individuals without looking at patterns from a more sociological perspective. Like Durkheim's attempt to understand suicide spiking in the 19th century France of La Bohème. My recent attempt:
Epstein, late Capitalism and masturbation:
Reflecting on the horrific stuff that people have been able to pick from the frass in the Epstein files released to date:
Sexual release is a basic physiological urge (or need) common to many animals, including humans: it’s just more obvious among males. The moment of sexual release is associated with a feeling of personal power and well-being. But there are many other sources of personal power and well-being, related to our healthy connections to others and contributions to their well-being in our family and community relationships.
The focus on accelerating mass production essential to endlessly concentrating capitalist growth leads to personal isolation, whether that be in the sweatshop, on the assembly line, in the cubicle or a big glass-walled office. In the horrific social fragmentation of warfare, sex is purchased or forced on others. In isolation, associated with repressive circumstances and social fragmentation, masturbation takes the place of interactive sexual play and is spurred by fantasy. In isolation, people are easier to manipulate and they fixate on symbolic figures and repetitive scenarios.
The movements for Peace, Love and Community associated with the late 1960s led people to prioritize interpersonal connections, even temporarily abandoning industrial products for handmade goods. In the Sexual Revolution, perhaps people didn’t have more sex but sexual pleasure was temporarily – potentially – disconnected from inequality, ownership, authority and control. Although in Movement circles, all those abuses re-emerged among leaders and followers, because this is the soup we swim in.
In late Capitalism, “money” is the coin of power and sold as the key to a good quality of life and personal satisfaction. The reification of money causes people to weaken community and family ties and seek to maximize individual earnings, increasing isolation. Especially in the USA, social fragmentation has increased. In the 1980s, the Reagan era message that being “out for yourself” maximized social benefits codified this tendency into an official ideology. Epstein forged his power in that decade by connecting sex, money, drugs, military products and “intelligence” in manipulative social relationships that promised men – and women – something they think they want.