Wouldn't it be a supreme irony if it turned that one of the Neoliberal Era's most notorious and hedonistic symbols died as an indirect result of the very austerity agenda that his pluto-political cohort have been ramming down our throats for the last four decades?
The latest twist in the Jeffrey Epstein saga is that he died because both the guards who were supposed to be checking his cell at a Manhattan federal jail every thirty minutes fell asleep on the job, apparently simultaneously. And thus was Epstein, rank opportunist to the last, allowed to enter into his own eternal rest unimpeded. At a jail nicknamed The Tombs, no less.
The question is not why the jailers nodded off - one or both were working double shifts on top of several days of previous "severe overtime" - but why there were only two guards on duty to monitor some of the country's most dangerous criminal defendants in the first place.
The obvious reason is the severe budget-cutting in our neoliberal age of deficit hawkery. Prisoners, along with other perceived dregs of society, are a low priority when our corrupt political class has only so many trillions of dollars to allocate to war and weapons and corporate welfare for their wealthy benefactors. Their time is also severely limited, what with endless meetings with corporate lobbyists, the counting of their donors' weighted votes, and decisions about which low-priority groups to punish next. Should it be old people, sick people, hungry people, indebted students, prisoners?
Yep. All the above.
And the Trump administration, to help cover the cost of the massive tax cuts rewarding Jeffrey Epstein's class of tycoons, proposed in February that 1,000 more workers be cut from the federal prison system and that 6,000 additional jobs be eliminated through attrition.
"This isn't right, and this isn't safe for America. This isn't good policy, especially when you have a president of the United States that says he supports law and order," said Eric Young, president of the American Federation of Government Employees' Council of Prison Locals.
Jeffrey Epstein was a true anomaly, a near-billionaire Member of the Club who tragically got caught up in a carceral justice system which is usually reserved for the poor and the powerless and, occasionally, a notorious criminal like El Chapo. The Mexican drug lord was held accountable because he symbolized the Duopoly's War On Drugs, which is code for its war on poor drug-users. The drug-trafficking roles of the US Military and the CIA are thus more easily ignored or forgotten.
El Chapo, who spent two years in the same jail as Epstein until his conviction, had already been notorious for escaping from prison in Mexico. It thus seems highly unlikely that he was ever guarded by only two sleep-deprived staffers during his stay in a facility renowned for its ultra-tight security.
So my own conspiracy theory is that nobody had to directly murder Jeffrey Epstein in order to keep him quiet about all the important people he had dirt on for their participation in his various financial scams and global sex trafficking ring. All that some higher-up had to do was approve a whole bunch of vacations at the same time, and then force the remaining skeleton crew to work punishing overtime shifts. And as an added insurance policy, they assigned one staffer to the Epstein detail who wasn't even a trained guard.
Oops. Nobody could ever have predicted.... A full investigation will be launched.... Heads will roll - as long as they're unimportant heads.
Another unanswered question is why Epstein was even arrested and charged again, a full decade after completing his sweetheart deal of a sentence. I doubt very much that it was sudden concern for his victims in the Me Too era, mainly because the Trump administration and its Department of Justice are not exactly known for their empathy or altruism or sense of justice for all.
It could have been public pressure on the somewhat liberal Southern District of New York branch of the federal justice system after Julie K. Brown's blockbuster series about the sweetheart deal appeared in the Miami Herald.
But my suspicion is that Epstein's arrest, coming at this belated moment in time, was mainly done for political reasons. It could have been a way for Trump to get revenge on his former pals, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and a whole slew of other important Democratic politicians, celebrities and wealthy donor class liberals in Epstein's social circle. If the cache of documents released on the eve of Epstein's apparent suicide had implicated Trump in any major way, would they have been released?
It does kind of reek of oligarchic intra-class warfare, with Epstein's victims still being treated a bit like afterthoughts as the pundits argue about how many times Bill Clinton boarded the Lolita Express. Was it four, or 24, or even more?
The rumors of Epstein's possible double life as a Mossad agent or FBI informant certainly add to the intrigue and conspiracy-theorizing that's taken the country by storm. There has even sprung up a whole new media sub-genre of conspiracy-theorizing about the genesis of Epstein conspiracy theories. A sub-sub-genre is the narrative that if Donald Trump tweets out a conspiracy theory, it automatically makes everybody else proffering a similar theory a prima facie idiot by association. The churnalism being committed about the Epstein matter is even more deranged than usual.
The passive-aggressive drugging by sleep deprivation of Epstein's minders to effect Epstein's suicide makes perfect sense, because sleep deprivation of the masses is a primary form of socially controlling the masses. Chronically tired people don't think as critically, they tend to get sick a lot and eat poor diets, and they tend to die prematurely of such things as heart disease and diabetes.
Sleeping also eats into the profits of the owners and bosses. Sleeping is for slackers and losers. Those prison guards should have had better control over their brains and their circadian rhythms. Shame on them for sleeping on the job! They were members of a union, for crying out loud, plus they have taxpayer-funded pensions. What we need now, my friends, is the complete privatization-for-profit of our federal prisons to avoid any more Jeff-like tragedies in the future and to bring closure and justice to the future victims of predators that we prosecute whenever it's convenient or profitable to us to feign concern for lesser mortals.
As Jonathan Crary writes in 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep:
Sleep is the irrational and intolerable affirmation that there might be limits to the compatibility of living beings with the allegedly irresistible forces of modernization. One of the familiar truisms of contemporary critical thought is that there are no unalterable givens of nature - not even death, according to those who predict we will all soon be downloading our minds into digital immortality. To believe that there are any essential features that distinguish living beings from machines is, we are told by celebrated critics, naive and delusional. Why should anyone object, they would counter, if new drugs could allow someone to work at their job 100 hours straight?
According to press reports, at least one of Epstein's guards had put in about a hundred hours in the preceding week. He or she apparently was not imbibing sufficient amounts of caffeine or other stimulants to stay awake. So what the plutocrats need is not a War on Drugs but a War for Drugs. Telling workers to sleep on their own time is meaningless, given that there is little to no free time for people to sleep, let alone enjoy themselves. More and more people can survive only by working several jobs or putting in double overtime shifts.
Rich people think they're immune from what they themselves have wrought, but by damaging their employees they are only hurting themselves and their partners in crime - including, as it turns out, Jeffrey Epstein.
Lack of sleep is deadly. Just days after Epstein offed himself, a New York City firefighter dropped dead of a heart attack after working a 24-hour shift.
Heads will roll. But only little, tortured, sleep-deprived heads.
It keeps on getting worse. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who as a US attorney signed off on the infamous secret sweetheart deal that protected convicted child molester Jeffrey Epstein as well as his entire network of plutocratic predators and enablers, continues to double down on his contempt for non-wealthy women and children.
As The Guardian reports, Acosta wants to destroy one of the few remaining agencies tasked with protecting the victims of global sex trafficking. He has recommended cutting funding for the International Labor Affairs Bureau by a whopping 80 percent, or from its current budget of $68 million to only $18.5 billion. In so doing, he is helping to protect all the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world from legal accountability.
The Department of Labor is widely respected for its vital role in investigating, prosecuting and preventing human trafficking worldwide. Experts say any major cut to ILAB would be a direct threat to the US government’s ability to combat the sexual exploitation of children.
“A huge cut of this sort is bound to expose children to more risk of sexual trafficking,” said Kathleen Kim, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who co-authored California’s law on human trafficking.
“An 80% reduction at ILAB will undoubtedly eliminate many of the US government’s anti-human trafficking efforts that have been critical in encouraging action by law enforcement.”
Kim said Acosta having granted the lenient plea deal to Epstein, combined with the proposed cuts to ILAB, made it entirely inappropriate that he continued in his current role.
“He should step down,” she said.
Whether or not Trump fires Acosta or he resigns voluntarily, the neoliberalized economy which fuels the sex slavery and other human rights abuses will continue to thrive, absent a complete counter-revolution against neoliberalism itself.
It is no accident that the victims of Epstein's human trafficking enterprise were poor and/or vulnerable, and that their poverty and vulnerability and that of their parents and caregivers are the direct results of a 40-year-long project of dispossession by the lords of capital. To amoral men like Epstein and Acosta, human flesh is just one more commodity, there for plunder by the wealthy few. The exploitation and trafficking of women and children is no longer just a third world phenomenon. It happens whenever and wherever the global oligarchs administer their economic shock therapies to remedy the very financial crises which they themselves create.
Anthropologist David Harvey explains the process in A Brief History of Neoliberalism:
"The loss of social protections in advanced capitalist countries has had particularly negative effects on lower-class women. and in many of the ex-communist countries like the Soviet bloc, the loss of women's rights through neoliberalization has been nothing short of catastrophic.
So how, then, do disposable workers - women in particular - survive both socially and affectively in a world of flexible labor markets and short-term contracts, chronic job insecurities, lost social protections and often debilitating labor, amongst the wreckage of collective institutions that once gave them a modicum of dignity and support? For some, the increased flexibility in labor markets is a boon and even when it does not lead to material gains the simple right to change jobs relatively easily and free of the traditional social restraints of patriarchy and family has intangible benefits. For those who successfully negotiate the labor market there are seemingly abundant rewards in the world of a capitalist consumer culture. Unfortunately, that culture, however spectacular, glamorous, and beguiling, perpetually plays with desires without every conferring satisfactions beyond the limited identity of the shopping mall and the anxieties of status by way of good looks... or of material possessions.
"For those who have lost their jobs or who have never managed to move out of the informal economies that now provide a parlous refuge for most of the world's disposable workers, the story is entirely different. With some 2 billion people condemned to live on less that $2 a day, the taunting world of capitalist consumer culture, the huge bonuses earned in financial services, and the self-congratulatory polemics as to the emancipatory potential of neoliberalization, privatization and personal responsibility must seem like a cruel joke."
The reported scores of young girls who were lured by Epstein and his paid adult associates to sexually serve him as well as his circle of acquaintances were further victimized by their additional work assignment of procuring other victims, thus doubling their subsequent feelings of guilt from the victimization of their own peers. But at the time, the payments to them of hundreds of dollars by Epstein for services rendered must have seemed like winning the lottery, a means to enter the capitalistic consumer culture that had previously been way out of their reach. Becoming their own entrepreneurs in the Sharing Economy was a goal which had been drummed into them from birth. Now they know better. Their shamed silence was precisely what Epstein and Acosta were no doubt counting on. Non-disclosure agreements and other legally corrupt methods for the wealthy to avoid justice also probably factored into the longevity of this vast protection racket.
The main reason that Epstein got away with his crime spree for as long as he did, and why his initial "punishment" was so ridiculously light, is that his victims were specifically selected for their lack of clout and money and education. The relatively well-heeled victims of Harvey Weinstein, on the other hand, already had the built-in media platforms from which to articulately expose their ordeals. Many if not most are celebrities or well-educated professionals. Epstein's victims had and probably still have nothing.
The widespread orchestrated abuse of women and children is made possible by unregulated, financialized capital and record inequality. As the Epstein case illustrates, this abuse is not at its core just a gender issue or a question of misogyny. The social and economic maltreatment and exploitation of non-wealthy women and children is a major front in the class war being constantly waged by the powerful greedy few against the desperate many.
Before you get too happy about the news that the two-tiered American justice system is finally (maybe) holding wrist-slapped billionaire predator Jeffrey Epstein to legal account, please face reality first.
It's still a two-tiered system, where the rich get off and the poor get screwed.
Take the case of Lenise Lloyd Martin III, 36 and unemployed, who thought he could make a few bucks by joining the latest fad of posting a Facebook video of oneself licking a carton of ice cream in a store and then putting it back inside the freezer compartment. No matter that Martin was just desperately trying to cash in on the whole postmodern Fake News Franchise, and that he then honestly purchased the carton of ice cream, even producing the receipt to prove it.
The sheriff of Assumption County, Louisiana assumed the worst anyway, and he arrested The Licker, mainly to issue a stern warning to all the other incipient Lickers lurking in the supermarkets of America. Big Brother is watching you, and he's not the benign fraternal duo known Ben and Jerry of Vermont, either. Not even close.
This is especially true if you, like Martin, go grocery shopping while black. The young white woman who started the whole fad simply got a tongue-lashing from the authorities. Martin got thrown in jail.
The public health menaces who are attacking the nation's ice cream supply are real Sicko Lickos, as Rupert Murdoch's New York Post puts it, and they must be stopped before we all die. It seems never to have occurred to the professionally disgusted media and law enforcement personnel in need of a new enemy to hate and a new fear to monger that the ice cream makers should simply add those hard-to-remove plastic collars around the lids to prevent undue licking and the need to throw out hundreds of potentially tainted containers
The cops were especially miffed because when confronted, Martin actually had the gall to claim that he hadn't done anything wrong by licking before buying. In fact, he was very cavalier about his heinous crime, said Lonny Cavalier, the sheriff's spokesman. He acted so downright disrespectful and dangerous that he's been rotting in jail since the Fourth of July - four more days than flight risk Jeffrey Epstein has been rotting in jail for running a massive child sex trafficking pyramid scheme for the past dozen or so years in the full brazen view of the entire two-tiered complicit criminal justice system and the plutocrats who own it.
As the New York Times reported in an article buried deep beneath a virtual avalanche of Epstein coverage,
Mr. Martin was charged with criminal mischief for tampering with a product before he had purchased it, and with “unlawful posting of criminal activity for notoriety and publicity,” a rarely-used Louisiana law that makes distributing a video of oneself breaking the law punishable as an additional crime.
Mr. Martin will spend at least four nights in jail awaiting his bail hearing. In Louisiana, the authorities have 72 hours to bring suspects before a judge, but because of the July 4 holiday, the clock did not start ticking until Monday. The earliest that he will be able to post bail is Wednesday.
Franz Borghardt, a defense lawyer, said that the authorities appeared to be trying to make an example out of Mr. Martin in an effort to put a stop to the flurry of ice cream licking incidents.
“This is a highly aggressive arrest based on a seldom-used statute that is constitutionally questionable,” Mr. Borghardt said.
In other Constitution news, a federal court has just ruled that Donald Trump acted very cavalierly and illegally when he blocked millions of critics from his Twitter account. But unlike his pal Jeff Epstein, he is still very much immune from legal accountability. Just ask his other pal, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
Even a constitutional amendment making it a crime not to do one's official congressional duty and impeach a criminal president probably would not sway her. After all, nobody paid much attention to that other constitutional amendment which banned liquor back in the day. And why would they? Ignoring the law made a lot of organized criminals very rich during the Depression, just as ignoring the law makes organized criminals very rich today. Congress itself is a virtual Speakeasy, operating in broad daylight. It's not a crime when drunk-on-power oligarchs do it.
Or at least, not usually. Every once in awhile, the Powerful Club does sacrifice one of its own, to give the restive populace the idea that nobody is above the law, not even Jeff Epstein.
But ask yourselves this: would Bill Clinton pal Epstein have been arrested if Hillary Clinton were the one sitting in the Oval Office today and if Donald Trump's corrupt labor secretary hadn't been the one who'd given Epstein his original slap on the wrist?
And another thing: having been rightly castigated for their abject failure to protect the caged children in the southern border's concentration camps, the Democrats are desperate for another virtue-signaling hook by which to "resist" Trump. With Epstein's belated indictment, politicians and pundits are falling all over themselves as they scramble to defend the scores of sex-trafficked young girls whose continuing victimization by Epstein had been an open secret for years. It gives them a much-needed break from pretending to care about the imprisoned and abused refugees.
And just in case championing Epstein's victims isn't enough, Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are taking the brave stance of inviting the champion US women's soccer team to drop by their Speakeasy for a splashy photo-op. If they couldn't put any distance between themselves and Trump on their mutual persecution of the imprisoned immigrant children, they can at least brag about what good sports they are about sports. In lieu of introducing any actual legislation mandating equal pay for equal work and a living wage for all women and for all people, they're making a bit of a self-serving stink about how professional women athletes should make at least as many millions of dollars as their male counterparts do. Those fashion spreads in Vogue and those lucrative product endorsement deals just don't cut it.
You go, girls! And stay away from the ice cream, unless it's the Opulence Sundae kind with the real gold leaf embellishments and the side of caviar that you pay $1,000 for. That's about $100 per lick, at least. The freedom to consume in freedom is the greatest freedom that the Neoliberal World has ever invented for those precious few who can afford it.
Meanwhile, enough with the political bickering. Let's all join together and celebrate more bipartisan cuts to the food stamp program as we celebrate Jeffrey Epstein's great legal reckoning. We will feel replete just knowing that the Ruling Class is on our side, as is God.
