Jeffrey Epstein IS the Empire (w/Richard Wolff)
“The emails don’t expose a scandal—they expose a system.”
The Jeffrey Epstein story isn’t a “scandal.” It’s a glimpse into the way American elites have always operated. Prof. Richard Wolff joins me to discuss the cultural, psychological, and political meaning of the Epstein saga, using it as a lens with which to view elite power, sexual exploitation, and the normalization of predatory behavior inside ruling institutions. (Larry Summers gets mentioned, too.)
We explore why the public is simultaneously appalled and unsurprised and connect these revelations to longstanding patterns of inequality, secrecy, and entitlement in the elite system of academia, politics, and empire. The public’s fascination reflects a deeper societal need to expose the hypocrisy and decadence of those at the top. Hopefully, greater transparency will ultimately undermine the power structures that have made this behavior possible.
(Selected quotes and full transcript are below.)
Selected Quotes:
Eskow:
“People sense that their kids are getting screwed by the system—that’s why QAnon’s ‘dark tunnels’ conspiracy had metaphorical truth.
“If transparency leads to a rejection of the elite structure that enabled all this, that can only be good for society.”
“When inequality reaches this level, depravity stops being secret and becomes unavoidable.”
Wolff:
“When a few people wield extraordinary power, it inevitably disconnects them from the many below—and that disconnect has sexual dimensions.”
“This behavior is the norm in elite institutions, not the exception.”
“Pulling back the curtain shows us what the peak of power in late capitalism really looks like.”
TRANSCRIPT:
Richard Eskow: It’s hard to throw a rock anymore without finding somebody hitting somebody. Who’s talking? Not that we want to. Who’s talking about the Jeffrey Epstein emails, both those that have come out and have been inserted in a searchable database and those that have yet to come out but are rumored and names the people.
This is on top of years of slow drips of revelations of who was on the Epstein plane, et cetera, et cetera. But I thought perhaps you, and in all humility, we could approach it, you know, from our own perspective of, you know, we’ve seen a lot of crap go on over the years and we’ve seen the way the power relationships in this country and the power dynamics in this country have evolved.
We’ve come a long way from C. Wright Mills and the Power Elite, which seems positively staid compared to 70 years later. We’ve got. Well, it’s not the power elite. I hesitate to know what to call it, but the pedophilia elite or something along those lines. And, and yet part of me says maybe this is simply an insight into how things always were, but the level of depravity, the level of predation, it’s really shocking to me.
It’s like a play about the Borgias or something. I don’t know. Before we get into the sort of politics of it economics, what’s your, what’s your reaction to these emails?
Richard Wolff: Well, I have been inundated, as I think almost every American has, by the frenzy of the mass media to provoke one politician or another to weigh in on all of this because of the involvement of Trump, obviously, at multiple levels of all of this, the presidency gets involved and given the close balance in the Washington between Republicans and Democrats, it becomes necessarily wrapped up in football skirmishes, excuse me, between them.
So in a way, we have to deal with it. It’s simply part of the air that we breathe. Here’s my first reaction. I was reminded of a movie that I found very disturbing years ago. It was by Pierre Pasolini, an Italian director, great Italian director. And it was called, I believe the title was A Hundred Days of Sodom, which.
Or something close to that.
Richard Eskow: Right, right. I remember, yeah.
Richard Wolff: And it was a kind of in your face depiction of Jeffrey Epstein like activities among, I think, Mussolini, Fascism’s elite in Rome or whatever government was enacted in that culture. Because it seemed to me that that movie was trying very hard to make us look at what is a key dimension of that society, but carefully kept from public view, even when it happens in public.
And it’s almost as though you’re dealing here with people who want to get caught on some level, but can’t quite bring themselves to do it. So that leads me then to wonder, not that people in high places are doing this. I think that’s always been true. I think that when you have social systems or communities in which a very few people have extraordinary wealth and power, that a dynamic sets up which ends up in this kind of behavior, among other kinds of that the disconnect of the few at the top from the many below them will have, sooner or later, sexual dimensions and transgressive.
I’m being careful here, sexual implications. So I’m not that I don’t find that surprising, and I don’t find it surprising that it finally sees the light of day. I think that in a peculiar kind of social justice, the mass of people want, if you allow me, the metaphor, to pull aside the curtain that normally hides all of this in the sphere of private life of these people, there’s a kind of wieristic pulling back the curtain.
So it’s all out there for everyone to think about, talk about, gawk at and so forth. So what am I left with? But where my brain takes all of this is, I think, all Americans, I really do. I think we all know this. I think there’s something stunningly unsurprising, and not just for you and me, but for everybody.
It’s in the newspaper because everyone. Everyone says to himself or herself or to his partner or her partner, I knew it. You know, a kind. Even if they didn’t, I there. You want. Well, what is it you want? You want this not to be a surprise. So here’s my conclusion. There are many things.
I learned this from my wife, who’s, as you know, a psychotherapist. For a long time, she marveled at the frequency with which the people who came to see her for help had had, as children. A trauma of incest of one kind or another. And what fascinated her, and she taught me, I hadn’t thought about it, was not that it’s so widespread, although she had to learn that she didn’t know that, but that it has always been handled in our culture precisely in the opposite.
In other words, we all know what that is, but we all think it happens very rarely and to isolated people in some mountain backwater of Maine or West Virginia or something like that. Not to demean those states, but the imagery of an isolated house when it’s everywhere and that’s where we left it in our conversations.
She And I. And all that comes back to me now, we all know, and I think we’re right, that this is everywhere in a society as unequal as ours, and yet we are needful, even, including you and me, of somehow acting as if it was very exceptional. I even had the thought before we began this conversation right now that somehow maybe this is not an appropriate topic for you and me because it is so atypical when I, in fact, don’t believe that.
Richard Eskow: Right. Icky almost, you know, but that’s fascinating, Rick. Have, as you can, as I typically do, some thoughts about that. One is, I remember when QAnon was overwhelming the media. Anyway, this rumor mill, this conspiracy theory, shock wave, one of their prime theories led to a shooting at a pretty good pizza place down the street.
One of their theories was that the powerful, rich and powerful, especially in Congress, here in Washington, D.C. had miles of underground tunnels, dark tunnels, where they were keeping children hidden in the darkness and using them for sexual purposes. And so they thought that this pizza parlor was a doorway into it or something, which is insane, of course, but it has a kind of metaphorical truth.
So, you know, because people on some less than conscious level understand, whether they say so or not, that their kids are, pardon my language, getting screwed by the system, that they’re being exploited, that there are things going on they don’t know about, deals being made, pleasures being consumed, you know, power being exploited in ways that they don’t see.
Hence the darkness and the tunnels. And now here we have a case of actual pedophilia. Occasionally, when I would write about it as such, some conservative, pompous person would chime in, in the comments. Technically it’s hebophilia, because it’s just get lost, you know, by. Our society defines them as children, hence pedo. Besides, hebephilia sounds to me like sexually attracted to Jews, which was not my experience as a single man, but a serious subject, obviously.
I don’t mean to make light of the subject, but far from it. That’s why I insist on the term pedophilia. But so we have that. Then we have things like the Bill Clinton, Mona Lewinsky affair, Monica Lewinsky affair, which fascinated people. She was victimized by the way it was handled, including by Clinton and the party and his, you know, so on.
But as she was not a child, she was 22, so she was, you know, barely into adulthood. But, you know, there’s this tradition of exploitation and the lord of the manor, you know, taking the surf, the young surf girls, and nobody can do anything and so on. That’s supposed to be and twisted mind of exploitation, one of the perks of power.
And then I’ll also throw into the mix, because since you met your wife, your wife being a psychotherapist, what it made me think of was the anthropologist Gregory Bateson had a theory of schizophrenia that turned out not to apply to schizophrenia, but it’s an interesting image, which is that of the double bind.
And I find it very useful psychologically, just in terms of examining my own history, even, that when things are one way for a child and the world is presented to them in another way, oh, no, we’re a happy family. Oh, no, your parents love each other. Oh, no, your. Your dad’s a good dad, whatever it is.
And on some level, they know that’s not right. They feel it in the mother. Terrified. They’re victimized, but they internalize it. And then there’s this disconnect, right? And it creates tremendous anxiety. And sometimes it can be shocking to learn to know actually, whatever the situation, your dad’s a bad dad or your parents hate each other or whatever.
But there’s always a sort of fascination and relief. And so, you know, everybody. I’ve heard criticism that people are being salacious and their fascination with the Epstein emails, and I’m sure there’s some of that. But I also think maybe it’s a little bit of a resolution of a double bind, too. Like, we know this is a crappy system.
We know all these people, Donald Trump and Bill Clinton and Larry Summers and this one and that one, Ehud Barak and Israel, they all know each other and they all do horrible things together. So, you know, getting back to your point, I think there’s a part of us that says, yeah, you know, okay, at least I know now.
At least you guys are out in the open. Does that make sense?
Richard Wolff: I think that. Absolutely. I think that’s part of the fascination. It’s so interesting that I come at it this way, you come at it that way. What we’re doing, though, is it’s almost as though we were cataloging the multiple ways in which this experience speaks to people. And so I hate to admit it, but I can now understand better why the mass media put it on the front page, because it sells newspapers.
You know, it gets you the eyeballs of the people who want somehow to get a certain kind of catharsis out of reading up, you know, reading deep into the story in the newspaper in the umpteenth paragraph to get the latest salacial tidbit that the reporter has woven into the story, and I see myself sort of fascinated with it.
I’m particularly struck with the, you know, the fact that a famous economist is like, I’m an economist, a professor like me at the school I also attended. And, you know, it’s famous in academic circles, this story of the quote, unquote, senior male professor surrounded by young women who are in their 20s or maybe in their 30s.
And the power situation in there is so lopsided. The fate of the young woman. Will she get an A? Will she get a good reputation in the department? Will she get her degree? Will she get a letter of recommendation that will boost her into a job or not? All of that depends on pleasing this man.
When you know that the emotional maturity of most academics, at least those I’ve met, is, how shall I put it? Underdeveloped. You put together an underdeveloped male professor in a position of power, extraordinary power, and a ambitious young woman who wants to succeed at what she’s giving herself to as a student. You have a recipe for what indeed happens all the time.
Richard Eskow: And you’re being polite.
Richard Wolff: Yes, well.
Richard Eskow: And you’re not mentioning Cough, cough, Larry Summers. Cough Cough. My name. But, you know, Summers is. I mean, he’s part of the world you live in. So I’m sure you guys have known each other, Canada, you know, have history of some kind of familiarity with one another. I. I’ve only, you know, passed by him in corridors, you know, here and there in Washington, but never interacted with.
I’ve interacted with Geithner and some of the others, but that’s another story, Larry. So Larry Summers is on record in. And I think it’s worth mentioning it by name for a couple of reasons. Some of the specifics of his story, one, he’s in the Epstein emails by name, continuing to talk with him as if you were a very close friend.
Well, after his initial conviction, plea deal in 2005, including both about how to get funding for a project of his wife, who we won’t name for discretion purposes, but getting funding for Larry Summers wife and for advice on how to continue seducing or seduce or whatever, consummate or reconstummate a relationship with a young female economist.
Now, this is the worst of professorial behavior. It’s considered an ethics violation by. I mean, I don’t know if she was a student, so maybe not, but. But it’s certainly not considered good behavior. This is a guy who’s been at the very pinnacles of power as Secretary of Treasury and everything else doesn’t understand, first of all, not to do this stuff, secondly, not to put it in an email.
I mean, you know, and so there’s that piece of it. But there was another dimension of the Larry Summers. There’s a searchable database. And of course, one of the first names I put in was Summers. And I couldn’t help myself because, you know, politically and been an adversary on so many policy issues, and I didn’t just find that everybody’s reporting about the.
The young woman, right? And Epstein says he’s being Larry’s wingman, you know, disgusting. But I also found this. Rick, I think you’ll find it interesting. Larry Summers writes to Jeffrey Epstein about a meeting where they, quote, unquote, yipped about inclusion, end quote. Now, this is Larry Summers after he really harmed his public reputation and I think had to leave the presidency of Harvard for suggesting that women were innately less capable of doing math and science than men.
So he said he went to this place where they, quote, unquote, yipped about inclusion, end quote. Then he says, with all the air of someone who thinks they’re way more clever than they actually are, he writes to Jeffrey Epstein, quote, I observed that half the IQ in the world is possessed by women without mentioning that they are more than 51% of the population, end quote.
Richard Wolff: Ha.
Richard Eskow: Meaning that he’s saying women are. He’s still saying women are less intelligent than men. Right? Do the math.
Richard Wolff: Right.
Richard Eskow: It’s pretty simple. He also says, quote, I’m trying to figure out why American elites think that if you murder your baby by beating and abandonment, it must be irrelevant to your admission to Harvard. But hit on a few women 10 years ago and you can’t work at a network or think tank? And then in capital letters, do not repeat this insight.
Larry’s. I mean, I think the thing that struck me the most about it, besides the horrible thought, was the word ins. You think that’s an insight? You think that. What the hell? I mean, but the psychology of. I just feel this is probably a lot more common in some of these circles than we think it is.
The bigotry, the self satisfaction. I don’t know. What do you think?
Richard Wolff: I mean, I’m trying to think of a superlative I could use to give you an idea of how much I agree with you. Let me try it this way. I spent 10 years of my life, from the day I began as a freshman to the day I got my PhD. The first four years of those 10 years were spent at Harvard.
Then I spent A year at Stanford, and then I spent the next five years at Yale. So I have spent 10 years of my life endlessly circulating with the Larry Summit, including him on more than one occasion, being in a room, in a seminary session, in a cocktail party, or whatever it was at the academic.
As I went through the academic hoops and what you call common or what you just told us about that email, that’s the norm, I kept encountering it. I kept being, I don’t mind admitting it, somewhat shocked because the family I came out of had not prepared me for this. My parents shipped me off to Harvard, saying, you know, you’re going to a temple of learning, the great university.
I mean, not particularly that it was Harvard, but the university where there is a great library and you will be taken through the highest products of civilization. That kind of mentality shit went off to the university with me. So I wasn’t ready for any of this, by the way. I wasn’t ready for it among the students and I wasn’t ready for it among the faculty, nor in the relationships between them.
But by the time I was done with my 10 years, I was able to say what I’m telling you now, it is the norm. And there’s another dimension of this, I think, which proves it. All of these people, Barclays bank executive whose name I forget, Ehud Barak, highest official of Israel, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, they all went on that airplane to an island where young girls who obviously don’t live on the island were present and were being interacted with, as careful as I can be.
And they didn’t think to themselves, this could be recorded, this could be filmed. I am taking chances with my own life and my own career and my own marriage, and what am I doing? This is the most compulsive behavior you could imagine. The risks. A Bill Clinton who might have missed being the president because he had been caught earlier, if you remember, running around the couch in a motel room after a secretary or whoever the woman was, and who had had all the Monica Lewinsky catastrophe.
And so they are so used to this, they are so used to getting away with it, that the notion that I’m at risk here doesn’t occur to them. Why? Because this is so normal, a regular procedure. You know, it’s like people in the subway here in New York City. You know, if you’re in a crowded subway, you’re going to get bumped because, you know, you’re packed like, sorry.
And the someone brushing against you doesn’t. Nothing happens. You don’t turn on that person, you barely notice it. Why? Because you understand, you’re in the subway, that’s the way it is. And women and men bump up against each. I mean assumedly most of the time. It’s a non event for these people getting on an airplane today, having heard, which they must have, that this guy has gotten into trouble for pedophilia, been hauled into court, which suggests the trouble is serious, Blah blah, blah.
Didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
Richard Eskow: You know, Donald Trump sent that card. He denies it, but it’s clear that he did made the drawing, so called erotic drawing, talking about getting girls, you know, I mean, and the whole notion that these poor traumatized young women were treated like disposable, you know, products and, and so many of them had their lives ruined.
But you’re right, the sense of imperviousness, the sense of invincibility, even after the guy had, you know, faced court problems and everything else, the comfort of, you know, kind of noblesse oblige of it all is shocking. But there’s Richard Wolff. There’s one question that keeps. Excuse me. That I keep wondering about, which is to what extent is this a perennial thing?
If we could have looked into the 1940s or the 1920s, we would have seen the same thing. And to what extent? You know, you mentioned the pasolini film Salo, 100 Days of Sodom, which is about the last couple years, if I recall correctly, of the Mussolini era. Before the fall of Mussolini’s Italy.
You know, there have been movies about the decadence of Rome before the fall of the empire. I wonder to what extent this is the decadence that precedes the fall of empire and to what extent it is just. Will these ultra powerful people have always been like this the way.
Richard Wolff: It’s a good question and I don’t really know the answer. Here’s my suspicion, which is all it is, that it’s normal, but it becomes aggravated toward the end. It becomes, it overflows so that you see it because before efforts were made that succeeded in keeping it quiet, I mean, when I was at Harvard as a student, we were all told about the Kennedy family.
Everybody who was a student talked about it. First of all, the Kennedys weren’t that much older than us anyway as students and they were famous that the two brothers, John and Robert, had endless affairs with endless women that were procured for them. And then there was the story of the third brother, a Chappaquiddick, if you remember that accident, and abandoning a young woman there and all the rest of it.
And we were all presented with that story as if it wasn’t notable. Or let me put it differently, it was only notable because the Kennedys were famous. Otherwise it wouldn’t have been noted because it was so normal, it was so rampant, it was so everywhere. And women didn’t speak about it because they were ashamed, would get blamed for whatever happened.
It would not be the man who got blamed. The worst he would have is he got caught but not blamed, whereas the woman would suffer, you know, extraordinary blame and abuse, including from her own friends, her own family, and on and on and on and on. So I think what happens is at the end, it overflows.
It becomes a hysteria of the men who perpetrate and of the culture that kind of now demands to see it. And I’m struck with this one because it was known, we had all heard about it, whatever it is, six or seven years ago, and here we’re recycling the whole thing. I mean, this is a culture that wants to deal with this.
It doesn’t allow the president to sweep it under the rug.
Richard Eskow: Right. Or and this is, you know, I’m glad you brought that up because nor does it allow a consensus of both parties to sweep it under the rug because people are saying, well, when the Democrats had the presidency and both houses of Congress, why didn’t they put this stuff out? Well, to me says because not all, but there are enough people in both parties who kind of enjoy the perks of this system, thank you very much, and do not want to upset it.
Never mind that there are Democratic names and donors on there as well as Republican. You know, someday we might like to be on that jet to whoever we is in that case.
Richard Wolff: Absolutely. That in my 10 years in the Ivy League, I saw that all the time. People in positions of power who had a fellow feeling, let’s call it, for others in a position of power and saw all this as threatening, you know, this would be. I’m going to make up a case this is not a real story, but this would be the.
I’m going to exaggerate even further. Let assume a woman president of a college who hears about a faculty member or administrator under her in the pecking order who is inappropriate with some young lady or something like that, or some man for that matter, she will, nine times out of 10, she will not intervene in a public way, and that’s because she wants to protect the institution.
I had a friend, he’s no longer alive, so I can quote him and he can’t refute what I say he was a policeman at Yale University, working for the Yale Police Department. And I got to know him because babysitters for my children came from his family. So we got to know them. And he used to tell me what was his instruction when there were sexual improprieties.
He used words like that between students and the surrounding community. Well, much of the surrounding community at Yale University in New Haven is African American. I mean, it’s a black ghetto. And so now you had the added issue you could have a sexual interaction between a white and a black person, adding all of that drama to it all.
And he would tell me there’s a whole procedure. They would not. If the police were involved like him, and he had to go and rescue somebody or break up something, how he was to handle it. And the whole rigmarole, the whole procedure was to maximize the probability that nothing would get into the newspaper if an arrest was made.
It had to be done in such a way. If there would be a police record, it had to be managed in such a way. Because the number one thing was not to allow it to become common knowledge that if you sent a child of 18 years of age or whatever to Yale University, male or female, they could get caught up in what.
In fact, they could get caught up in this had to be hidden, and there was an unspoken commitment to keep it hidden. And so there were both hetero and homosexual events all the time that many of us knew about because a friend was involved or we happened to be there, or it was a party that got out of control.
And we all learned very quickly how the university handles this, which is what event? So, yeah, I think it’s easy to show you. I could show you that a young man, or for that matter, a young woman who comes to Yale and goes through that, or Harvard or Stanford, it’s all the same, is literally trained, without knowing it, in how to manage this part of life quietly, silently.
In other words, they become complicit in making believe it isn’t the norm, even though they personally know that it is.
Richard Eskow: And that is a microcosm of the society of power at large. Right. Because we now have a system where you don’t get to the upper ranks of power without going 99 times out of 100 without going through exactly this type of social as well as educational indoctrination. So I guess my closing thought for this is that if all of this is reflective of a new era of transparency, even if the depravity is or isn’t accelerating, the depravity I’m sorry.
The transparency itself may lead to a rejection of the elite structure that this all reflects, which can only, in my view, be good for society. But that’s my closing thought. What’s yours?
Richard Wolff: Yeah, no, I agree. I think that’s partly why you and I just spent this time talking about it, that there is an important lesson in pulling aside the curtain and saying, look here, because what we’re doing, whether we understood it when we started this conversation or not, we are saying this is what the peak of power in late capitalism in the United States looks like.
Don’t fool yourself. You know, just like we would have otherwise, perhaps discussed what goes into the mentality of a president and of an administration that wants to reduce the food stamp program for 52 million. What? You know, what are you telling the whole world you’re doing? You know, as you organize a war against Venezuela, you’re squeezing the food stamp.
I mean, it is so grotesque that it has to be spoken because of what you just said, that it’s showing people something and that needs they need to confront it.
Richard Eskow: Well, on that note, which is oddly optimistic, I would say positive after all this sordid stuff. Richard Wolff, economist, host of Economic Update as always, thanks for coming on the program and sharing your thoughts.
Richard Wolff: And as always, thank you for having and maintaining this program where we can do exactly this.