VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump & Marjorie destroy each other as feud erupts
Brian Tyler Cohen breaks down the SPICY feud erupting between Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene over her support for releasing the Epstein files and his desperate efforts to hide them from the public eye.
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Capitalism enabled Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes
Carl Beijer, Jacobin: Jeffrey Epstein is in the news again, this time after the House Oversight Committee released a whole library of his correspondence over the years. On one hand, the rare glimpse into the world of elite power brokerage this offers is fascinating. Like most rich people, Epstein and his conspirators clearly believed that they were above the law and often talked about their blackmail schemes in perfectly blunt terms. For example, in a letter to Epstein, journalist Michael Wolff says of Donald Trump, 'If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house . . . you could save him, generating a debt.' Writing for the American Prospect, David Dayen has argued that Epstein is, at heart, a story of elite impunity for their crimes. He lays out the evidence about the human trafficking ring he ran and the endless number of rich people who were implicated in it; he then summarizes this as 'a set of crimes perpetrated by a wealthy guy [that] reached into the heights of the political and economic stratosphere, and went largely unpunished for decades.' The criminal dimension of the Epstein case is important, but I think Dayen’s focus on it misses something crucial: that much of what Epstein did was completely legal. Epstein’s human trafficking organization depended entirely on the wealth management industry (WMI). It was how he obtained the capital to build it, and it was how he hid his activities from the authorities. And none of this was an abuse of the industry; it is precisely how the WMI is designed to work. Nor is it an abuse of the law, because both American and international law has been carefully designed to accomodate the WMI. Dayen mentions in passing that 'the source of Epstein’s wealth' comes from obtaining power of attorney over the estate of Les Wexner, 'from which he appropriated bunches of money' — but this is easy to misread as a euphemism for theft. In fact, Epstein was Wexner’s personal money manager, and his 'appropriation' of Wexner’s funds is perfectly ordinary in the WMI — even expected. exner’s previous wealth manager, Harold Levin, has speculated that Epstein took control of properties that Wexner had purchased with company stocks; since banks no longer owned them, there was no paper trail showing what Epstein did with them. Another source close to Wexner, Jerry Merritt, has an even simpler explanation: Merritt recalled once asking Wexner why Epstein was so well compensated. 'Les just said, ‘Because I got more money than I can ever spend,’ said Merritt. 'Les gave him free rein over his checkbook.' But capitalism didn’t just provide seed funds for Epstein’s operation. It also provided a whole legal and financial apparatus that helped him find victims and disguise his transactions. An article in Deviant Behavior by sociologist Thomas Volscho observes that at first, 'the predominant means for gaining access to potential victims involved Epstein using philanthropy to gain access to youth-serving institutions.' In particular, Epstein seems to have leveraged immense wealth to buy influence in youth organizations that focused on financially at-risk children and then used the wealth disparity to control them. This was a natural step for Epstein, since wealth managers often work with charitable organizations for tax-avoidance purposes. As his conspiracy matured, Volscho writes, Epstein’s 'sex trafficking enterprise was funded by Epstein’s tax shelter advisory business, where he primarily helped wealthy people avoid taxation on the sale and/or bequeathing of their assets and incomes.' The venture itself was illegal, of course. But the infrastructure Epstein used to hide it — the elaborate networks of shell corporations and mysterious beneficiaries, typically located in offshore jurisdictions with lax financial reporting laws — were themselves perfectly legal. And they are, moreover, the same legal mechanisms that most of the top 0.1 percent uses to avoid taxes and other legal regulations. So while Epstein likely used blackmail and other illegal schemes to avoid prosecution for his crimes, his primary strategy — offshore wealth management — was not just legal but a central feature of modern financial capitalism. If the Left wants to use the Epstein case to talk about elite impunity, that conversation has to begin with the strategies the rich use to hide their finances that are completely legal.
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Freshman Democrat under ATTACK for standing up to the GOP
Nellie Pou for Congress: Nellie Pou has only been in Congress a few months, but she’s already facing a barrage of GOP attacks for voting against their destructive budget bill that would hand out huge tax breaks to the wealthy while RAISING taxes on working families. Just a few days ago, the NRCC issued an error-filled press release written by Big Business lobbyists that falsely smeared her with lies. She’s one of the few Democrats to win her seat in a county that voted for Trump; she’s going to need all the help she can get if we want to protect the MUST-HOLD seat and retake Congress. Will you chip in to thank her for doing the right thing and helping her weather the storm against GOP attacks?
14-year-old girl gives powerful response to Megyn Kelly for arguing that Epstein wasn't a pedophile because he preyed on teens
The disgraced Fox host made headlines this week when she argued that it was unfair to smear Epstein as a pedophile because he “liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby,” and nobody had come forward saying “I was under 10, I was under 14 when I first came within his purview.” 14-year-old Eloise deftly dissected this disgusting defense of a serial rapist that was clearly made on behalf of another serial rapist — Donald Trump.
There are two U.S. Senates—and only one knows how to get what it wants
Jason Linkins, The New Republic: "The United States Senate: Can’t live with it, can’t burn it down (or so my lawyers caution me). Recently, I’ve had cause to ruminate on the upper house’s continued existence and the way its workings threaten our own. And then, this week, liberals were given new reason to rue the 'cooling saucer of democracy,' as the Democratic Senate Surrender Subcommittee—apparently with the assent of Chuck Schumer—threw the wettest of blankets on a historically great week for the party by caving on the government shutdown, letting a bloodied Trump up off the canvas, and giving Republicans reason to exult. Those exultations, according to a report from Zeteo, were just as Trumpian as you could imagine, with anonymous White House officials said to be 'cackling' and 'gratuitously using terms such as ‘losers’ and ‘pussies’ as they reveled in the relief from a shutdown that even President Trump acknowledged was getting Republicans ‘killed’ politically.' It’s a fitting reminder that there are actually two U.S. Senates in America—one that is committed to dismantling democracy, while the other is committed to a functioning government (sometimes to a fault). It’s also worth remembering that the divergent ways that Republican and Democratic senators discharge their duties is hardly a recent development, but rather baked into the two parties’ DNA. The differences between Republican and Democratic senators are largely reflective of the two parties’ approaches to politics. On the GOP side, you see an utter ruthlessness when it comes to wielding power, no fear of breaking norms or of the stern reproaches from official D.C.’s media nannies, and a complete dedication to long-term right-wing interests. The slings and arrows of denying Obama his Supreme Court nomination are easy to bear when everyone’s eyes are fully on the prize of taking over the high court for a generation. Taken as a whole, it must be great to be a Republican voter. Their senators are advancing key ideological projects in concert with the conservative movement, pushing the envelope on what’s deemed to be polite, and training their base to expect Beltway norms to be dismantled in pursuit of their agenda. On the Democratic side, well, they’re not beating the charges that they are an insular party fully in thrall to the Iron Law of Institutions, which holds that 'the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself.' The Democratic senators’ faults shone brightly in the wake of the shutdown cave. It’s painfully obvious that the caucus maneuvered to protect its most vulnerable members from the votes to end the shutdown, instead sacrificing eight members who are not up for reelection in 2026. Schumer voted against reopening the government but is fooling nobody, multiple members are feigning anger at the result they actually sought, and no one is capable of telling the straight story of why they did what they did—probably because they are falling back on their one political idea: Let the GOP hurt people, then step in to collect the electoral winnings once the country is traumatized enough. Imagine a GOP-led Senate capable of convicting a Democratic president in an impeachment trial minutes after their being sworn in—this could be reality in some of your lifetimes. Not so much for the geriatric windbags of the Democratic caucus, but they can look into that bleak future and see a perfect arrangement: an inert superminority caucus, with cushy jobs and top-flight health care, Statler-and-Waldorfing their way into decades-long careers as stern letter writers and handwringing concern-havers. Why put up a fight when you’re getting exactly what you want?"
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Food for thought
The Sunday wrap-up
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