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When It Comes to Plutocrats Like Epstein and Trump, Always Assume the Worst
In the age of Trump, the wrongdoing has become so blatant, the attitude towards the rest of us so contemptuous, that a presumption of guilt may be the only realistic attitude
Jul 17, 2019
By now, everyone not vacationing in a sensory-deprivation tank knows the outlines of the sordid tale of self-proclaimed hedge fund magnate Jeffrey Epstein. In the fallout from his July 6 arrest, the implications of the case, especially considering the plutocrats, politicians and other elites who knew him, cast doubt on one of the bedrock assumptions of American public life.
The whole tenor of Anglo-Saxon law, of the prestige media covering legal proceedings--the entire apparatus of the go-along-to-get along culture that pervades corporate business, the government, foundations and think tanks, celebrity entertainers, and the commanding heights of American society--says "innocent until proven guilty beyond the shadow of a doubt," or maybe innocent even if proven guilty. After all, they say, Epstein's one of us.
Naturally, this solicitous benefit of the doubt does not apply to lesser mortals who brush up against the legal system. For them, plea agreements, rather than sweetheart deals such as Epstein received, are sometimes coerced decrees that induce declarations of guilt by defendants who may be innocent but who wish to avoid the crushing expense of competent representation, or who otherwise would have to roll the dice and face a possible draconian sentence. The situation is not improved by cops who plant evidence.
In the rarified world at the intersection of oligarchy and celebrity, the rules are different. Trump's presidency and Epstein's arrest have pulled back the curtain--ever so slightly--on this twisted world. It is a black pit of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), codes of omerta, sending batteries of lawyers and sleazy detectives to harass people who saw things they shouldn't have, lining up character witnesses, setting up fake charities both as attestation of beneficence and tax dodge.
The whole interconnected web of secrets, obligations, and guilty knowledge leads inevitably to a genteel kind of mutual blackmail within this charmed circle, even if Jeffrey Epstein doesn't actually have your photo in his safe.
And more: the "work" these people do, for all their preening as being hard-driving moguls, isn't work as most of us would recognize it. As we learned with Trump and are learning with Epstein, they put almost all their time into fabricating and maintaining fake personas that are smarter, richer, and even better connected than they really are. So much effort is spent in this enterprise (like Trump, pretending to be "John Barron" telling credulous journalists over the phone that The Donald walked on water), there's virtually no time left to run a legitimate business.
Bizarre, but how could it be otherwise? These are people who on principle never fly commercial with the despised proles or drive themselves anywhere, much less change a light bulb or make themselves a sandwich. There is always hired help--who have signed the requisite NDAs, of course--available to freshen drinks or discreetly supply cocaine, with no fingerprints. They are a species as much apart from us as gray wolves from grazing lambs.
But let us not insult canis lupus. Epstein and his well-connected legal team exhibited a vicious malevolence unknown in the animal world. Detectives investigating his case said in depositions that "their trash was stolen by private investigators and that people falsely claiming to be police officers approached victims' families. Adam Horowitz, a lawyer who represented seven of the girls who accused Epstein, said private investigators hired by Epstein followed and intimidated the victims, who reported strange cars parked in front of their homes."
According to The Washington Post, it appears the legal team was enterprising enough to intimidate Alex Acosta, the U.S. attorney and later cabinet secretary whose head has now rolled over the affair, into granting Epstein his 2008 plea deal. That in itself boggles the mind: defense lawyers intimidating a presidential appointee confirmed by the Senate? Was it a mafia trial in Sicily?
Or was it just more seemly for Acosta or those around him to say he was intimidated, as opposed to happily rolling over, especially in view of the fact that virtually every U.S. attorney itches to gain higher office in the Senate or the cabinet, and thus must remain in the good graces of "our crowd?" Or perhaps the defense team wasn't only digging for dirt on the victims, and engaged in a little chantage against the prosecutor? In any case, Acosta granted a secret plea deal a court later declared illegal.
It is worth lingering over the legal support structure that keeps its exalted clients out of prison and on the A-list. One of Epstein's lawyers was Ken Starr.
Yes, that Ken Starr, independent counsel of Bill Clinton-era fame, that half Eagle Scout, half Cotton Mather for whom, apparently, all sex was illicit. Despite his ostentatious revulsion toward the White House malefaction that he investigated with merciless thoroughness, he managed to be much more broad-minded defending pedophilia and sex trafficking charges when, in 2007, Epstein offered him a big payday.
Starr's subsequent presidency of Baylor (the largest Baptist university campus in the world), from which he was fired for doing nothing about reports of campus rape later sustained in court, shows a similar moral relativism. It appears our high-level criminal class needs a sanctimonious front man or two to keep the Bible thumpers in line.
Another member of the group was Alan Dershowitz, the greatest legal scholar since Blackstone. Just ask him. This storied civil libertarian's career is noteworthy for his tenacious defense of the civil liberties of rich, entitled, well-connected misogynists, whether the accusation is harassment, rape, or pedophilia against women (Epstein, Harvey Weinstein), or murdering women or attempting to murder them (O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bulow,).
Thus it is not entirely surprising that in the political arena, Dershowitz is vociferously defending our sexual predator-in-chief. There must be something to explain his slavish support for Trump, to the point where this supposedly top-drawer Harvard law professor is making legal pronouncements that a first-year law student might laugh at: claiming impeachment in Trump's case is somehow unconstitutional, despite being a provision of the Constitution, or that the Supreme Court could nullify a Senate conviction (the chief justice in fact presides over the Senate trial, but the court of which he is a member has declared it has no power of review in impeachments).
It will be seen that to all appearances we have put the worst possible construction on the events, eschewing the benefit of the doubt: after all, we are all flawed human beings and nobody has to prove their innocence to anybody else.
But in the age of Trump, the wrongdoing has become so blatant, the attitude towards the rest of us so contemptuous, that a presumption of guilt may be the only realistic attitude. Admittedly, there was never a golden age of probity, public spiritedness, and integrity in public life. But at least most of the time, our rulers sought to maintain an aw-shucks demeanor and uphold the pretense, however threadbare, that they were just like us and subject to the same laws.
The code of omerta and impunity has moved from the cocaine and sex parties of Greenwich, the Hamptons, and Palm Beach into the White House and cabinet. Not only is Dershowitz making claims of Trump's impunity, but a squad of government lawyers, paid for by you, has argued before a federal court that there is virtually no conceivable circumstance in which Congress can legitimately even inquire into the president's conduct in office.
Ordinary, law-abiding people do not coerce everyone in sight into signing NDAs, or harass them with lawsuits and injunctions, or send goons with law degrees to threaten them, or, in general, use the law like a fly swatter against the less powerful. Nor, as in Trump's case, do they benefit from a battalion of overseas Internet trolls to drown out opposition, create misdirection, and plant rumors against his enemies. One is entitled to assume illicit intent underlies all these actions.
How deeply is Trump mixed up with Epstein, whom in 2002 he called a great guy he'd known for fifteen years? In light of the Stormy Daniels payoff, the Access Hollywood tape, and abundant other evidence--including this latest video footage from 1992--the suspicion cannot be stilled, especially in light of his coy observation that Epstein liked women "on the younger side."
Put not your trust in princes, sayeth Scripture.
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Top 5 Trump Officials Who Resigned Because of Shocking Scandals
Jul 14, 2019
The resignation of Trump's Labor secretary, Alex Acosta, is only the most recent in a string of such scandals for Trump. In fact, what with all the things Trump himself has done plus those around him, his is surely the most scandal-ridden presidency in history. Let us just review the record, because it gets hard to remember them all after a while.
1. Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta resigned because when he was a South Florida federal prosecutor, he gave accused pedophile and Trump party-buddy Jeffrey Epstein an incredibly soft plea deal in 2008. Also a scandal: he was no friend of labor.
2. Scott Pruitt is former secretary of the EPA (which in the age of Trump does not stand for Environmental Protection Agency but for Environmental Protection Abolition). He accepted a $50 a night sweet condo deal from an oil and gas lobbyist for his pied-a-terre when he was occasionally in DC, and charged taxpayers $4.8 million for his security detail and made it a point always to fly first class on the taxpayer dime, amid other financial irregularities too numerous to mention. Oh, and the real scandal was that he destroyed the environment, including allowing the pesticide chlorpyrifos, even small amounts of which can damage babies' brains.
3. Former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke is under scrutiny for a Montana land deal and fully 17 other possibly illegal activities while in office. Oh, and he also helped destroy the environment.
4. Nominee to be secretary of defense, Patrick Shanahan, withdrew over a 2010 domestic abuse investigation launched by the FBI. But the real scandal was that Shanahan had been a career high executive of Boeing and so would have been running the US government agency that buys all those shiny weapons Boeing produces.
5. Not a cabinet secretary, but former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn had to resign over repeated calls before Trump was sworn in to the Russian ambassador to the US, Sergey Kislyak, which he lied about. But Flynn's security company also developed a harebrained scheme to kidnap Turkish religious figure Fethullah Gulen, who was granted asylum in the US in 1998, and render him back to Turkey. Flynn may also have been an agent of Turkish influence in Ankara's attempt to help elect Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.
There is so much more, I just have to go to bed sometime and this subject of Trump administration scandals is fit for a multi-volume book set, not a little blog entry.
And we haven't even gotten into Trump himself.
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Trump's POS Labor Secretary, Acosta, Out. POS Number 2, Linked to Abramoff, to Fill Role
Deputy Labor Secretary Patrick Pizzella will now serve as acting secretary
Jul 12, 2019
After Labor Secretary Alex Acosta announcing his resignation on Friday in the wake of outrage over the deal he brokered for alleged child rapist Jeffrey Epstein, President Donald Trump said the department's number two, Deputy Labor Secretary Patrick Pizzella, would now serve as the acting secretary.
Pizzella, a former member of the Federal Labor Relations Authority and one of Trump's many anti-labor appointees, had previously come under fire for his links to lobbyist and convicted felon Jack Abramoff and their work in the 1990s to foster worker abuses on the Northern Mariana Islands.
As the New York Times reported over a decade ago, the commonwealth hired Abramoff in 1995 to help keep out U.S. minimum wage and other labor protections, allowing for the island chain to foster an environment ripe for slave-like labor where clothes can be stamped with a made-in-the U.S.A. label.
Pizzella, as Mother Jones laid out in 2017, played a key role in the operation.
The centerpiece of Pizzella's work was organizing all-inclusive junkets for members of Congress and their wives, congressional staffers, and conservative influencers such as pollster Kellyanne Fitzpatrick--who now goes by her married name, Kellyanne Conway, and advises President Donald Trump--with first-class airfare and lodging at the beachfront Hyatt Regency on Saipan.
The influential group could then report back on their carefully-curated trips--visits that did not include the horrific conditions at sweatshops and garment manufacturers, where workers were brought from other countries, predominately Bangladesh, China, and the Philippines. Having been hoodwinked into believing they were coming to the U.S. mainland, the workers were subjected to abuses including forced abortions.
In a letter to lawmakers ahead of Pizzella's Senate confirmation, Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, expressed her coalition's opposition to Pizzella as Labor's deputy secretary given his past.
Gupta wrote, in part:
As we previously noted, Mr. Pizzella worked closely with Jack Abramoff to lobby for policies on the Commonwealth of Northern Mariana Islands that essentially allowed for unchecked slave labor to be performed with the imprimatur of the "Made in the U.S.A." label on goods and clothing. At his hearing, Mr. Pizzella repeatedly refused to offer straightforward answers to simple questions posed by senators and provided no real assurances that he is committed to protecting the rights of workers.
Mr. Pizzella, if confirmed, would essentially be the Chief Operating Officer of the department tasked with protecting a wide range of core labor rights, including proper payment under the wage and hour laws, the civil rights of federal contract workers, the Family and Medical Leave Act, and the Occupational Safety and Health Act, and more. Yet he has not done enough to repudiate his past record of defending companies that routinely ignored these rights, and he has not given workers adequate reason to believe that he will defend their rights in the future.
"By any reasonable standard," wrote Care2 contributor Kevin Matthews, "aiding in worker 'exploitation' should preclude Pizzella from overseeing fair labor standards, not put him in line to become the Secretary of Labor's right-hand man."
Acosta, in his resignation letter (pdf), does not mention where he will head to next. Epstein, meanwhile, was charged this week with sex trafficking. And Abramoff is free after four years in prison and has returned to lobbying, with his efforts now including trying to defeat the Green New deal.
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UltraViolet Says Acosta Departure Shows 'Need to Hold All the Powerful People,' Like Trump, Accountable
Resignation of labor department secretary "should only be the beginning"
Jul 12, 2019
Secretary of Labor Alexander Acosta's resignation announcement on Friday sparked demands from progressive groups for Congress to "hold abusers and their enablers"--including President Donald Trump--"accountable."
Acosta faced calls for his ouster over his role in securing a sweat deal for multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein over a decade ago when Epstein faced possible federal child sex trafficking charges. Those demands were amplified this month after Epstein was arrested. He faces federal charges of sex trafficking and sex trafficking conspiracy.
While Acosta this week defended the deal, progressive groups did not let up in their criticism. They projected messages onto the Department of Labor building including "Acosta endangers women and girls," and "Acosta enables child sex trafficking."
Shaunna Thomas, executive director and co-founder of UltraViolet, one of the groups involved in the projection, said Friday, "Acosta's resignation is good news, and demonstrates that people who enable sexual predators like Jeffrey Epstein can be held accountable."
Still, she said, "It is especially outrageous that Acosta remained in his job for as long as he did."
Acosta's departure, continued Thomas, "should only be the beginning: we need to hold all the powerful people that engage in or enable sexual abuse accountable."
That includes Trump.
Trump was chummy with Epstein in the past, and the president has been publicly accused by over 20 women of sexual assault.
Epstein has been accused of not only abusing the underage girls himself but also of pimping them out to other wealthy and powerful men. Trump
Given that background, UltraViolet's Thomas said, "Congress should open a full investigation into President Trump, who was directly implicated as an enabler of Epstein, and is self-confessed serial sexual predator with nearly two dozen accusations against him. It is long past time that Congress do its job and hold abusers and their enablers accountable."
Journalist Jessica Mason Pieklo, on Twitter, echoed the call.
The Communications Workers of America (CWA) also shed no tears over Acosta's departure.
"It is the job of the Labor Department to enforce laws that protect all workers," the union said in a statement. "The facts that have emerged about Alex Acosta's role in reducing Jeffrey Epstein's sentence for his vile crimes have made it clear that he thinks there is one set of rules for the rich and powerful, and another set for everyone else."
"This double standard has no role in the Labor Department or any other part of our government," said CWA, "and we welcome his resignation."
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'Acosta Enables Sex Trafficking' Projected Onto Department of Labor Building as Resignation Demands Grow
"Acosta must step down as Labor Secretary immediately. His actions make clear he would rather protect a billionaire pedophile and sex offender than stand up for innocent children."
Jul 11, 2019
Hours after Labor Secretary Alex Acosta held a press conference defending his decision in 2008 to offer what critics described as a "sweetheart" plea deal to billionaire Jeffrey Epstein--who was charged this week with sex trafficking--a coalition of progressive advocacy groups Wednesday night projected messages onto the Department of Labor building condemning Acosta as an enabler of sexual predation and urging him to resign.
"Acosta endangers women and girls," "Acosta enables child sex trafficking," and "Acosta must go" read the projections, which were planned by the American Federation of Teachers, CREDO Action, MoveOn, and UltraViolet.
Heidi Hess, co-director of CREDO Action, said in a statement that Acosta "must step down as Labor Secretary immediately."
"His actions," Hess said, "make clear he would rather protect a billionaire pedophile and sex offender than stand up for innocent children."
Hess went on to urge the House Democratic majority to launch an investigation into Acosta and President Donald Trump's relationship with Epstein.
As Common Dreams reported Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) sparked outrage by saying it is "up to the president" to probe Acosta.
" House Democrats should... use all power at their disposal to hold Acosta accountable and investigate Donald Trump's involvement with Jeffrey Epstein," said Hess.
Shauna Thomas, executive director of UltraViolet, echoed Hess's demand, calling on Congress to "open a full investigation into why child sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein was protected over the survivors of his abuse."
"That means investigating every single enabler of Epstein's abuse, from Labor Secretary Alex Acosta to President Donald Trump, and every celebrity and business mogul in between, and includes starting impeachment proceedings into Acosta, who broke the law to hand a serial pedophile a sweetheart deal."
"The American people cannot afford a president and Labor Secretary who would rather shield wealthy sexual abusers from prosecution than protect sexually trafficked children," said Thomas.
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Pelosi Joins McConnell in Deferring to Trump on Acosta's Future Amid Growing Calls for Labor Secretary to Resign
"The man currently running the Department of Labor knowingly enabled a sex trafficking pedophile, preventing his victims from seeking justice."
Jul 09, 2019
In spite of growing public calls for Labor Secretary Alex Acosta to resign or be fired over a sweetheart plea deal he granted registered sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein while serving as a federal prosecutor in Florida, Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday both deferred to President Donald Trump to decide his cabinet member's future.
"Acosta shielded Epstein from the justice he deserved and kept victims voiceless for over a decade. I've said it before and I'm saying it again: it's time for Acosta to go."
--Rep. Barbara Lee
Renewed scrutiny of Acosta and the widely decried deal, which shielded Epstein from federal charges more than a decade ago, comes after the financier was arrested Saturday. In a federal indictment (pdf) unsealed Monday, prosecutors allege that over several years, "Epstein created a vast network of underage victims for him to sexually exploit in locations including New York and Palm Beach." Epstein pleaded not guilty to the charges--one count of sex trafficking and one count of sex-trafficking conspiracy.
In a televised statement Tuesday, McConnell said that "there's no question that the accusations against Epstein are horrendous and I think it's good news that they're being pursued further. As to Secretary Acosta's continued service, he serves at the pleasure of the president, and I'm inclined to defer to the president to make that decision."
Pelosi, for her part, turned to Twitter Monday night to denounce the "unconscionable agreement" that Acosta negotiated with Epstein's attorneys and call on Acosta to resign from his current position in the Trump administration. However, the speaker suggested in comments to reporters Tuesday that she does not intend to take any steps to force out the labor secretary.
According to Politico's Heather Caygle, Pelosi dismissed the possibility of House Democrats launching an investigation or impeachment proceedings, saying that: "It's up to the president, it's his cabinet. We have a great deal of work to do here for the good of the American people and we have to focus on that."
Pelosi's comments on the issue left progressive political observers flummoxed:
Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday that Acosta has "done a fantastic job" as labor secretary. Referencing the controversial deal, he said, "The rest of it, we'll have to look at, we'll have to look at it very carefully."
Though the president is one of several well known, wealthy individuals who has been tied to Epstein, Trump tried to distance himself from the financier on Tuesday, adding:
I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him. People in Palm Beach knew him. He was a fixture in Palm Beach. I had a falling-out with him a long time ago. I don't think I've spoken to him for 15 years. I wasn't a fan. ...I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you. I was not a fan of his. So, I feel very badly actually for Secretary Acosta because I've known him as being somebody that worked so hard and has done such a good job.
Meanwhile, in a series of tweets, Acosta on Tuesday publicly defend himself on the issue.
"The crimes committed by Epstein are horrific, and I am pleased that NY prosecutors are moving forward with a case based on new evidence. With the evidence available more than a decade ago, federal prosecutors insisted that Epstein go to jail, register as a sex offender, and put the world on notice that he was a sexual predator," Acosta wrote. "Now that new evidence and additional testimony is available, the NY prosecution offers an important opportunity to more fully bring him to justice."
The labor secretary's comments sparked immediate backlash--including from Miami Herald journalist Julie K. Brown, who has reported extensively on the evidence that Acosta's office was faced with when it struck a deal with Esptein's lawyers and co-authored the newspaper's Monday night editorial that argued Acosta "has to go."
In the first piece for the Herald's "Perversion of Justice" series last November, Brown wrote, "This is the story of how Epstein, bolstered by unlimited funds and represented by a powerhouse legal team, was able to manipulate the criminal justice system, and how his accusers, still traumatized by their pasts, believe they were betrayed by the very prosecutors who pledged to protect them."
Read more here: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html#storylink=..."
In an article for Splinter Tuesday, Rafi Schwartz referenced the Herald's reporting on the agreement and accused Acosta of "scrambling to cover his ass." Schwartz wrote that "Acosta is willfully ignoring the fact that, by negotiating a non-prosecution agreement in which the terms of the deal were kept secret from the victims, he likely violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act. That Epstein was not 'more fully' brought to justice in 2008 was, in other words, the direct result of Acosta's deliberate and potentially criminal actions."
Schwartz also highlighted the mounting demands for Acosta's swift exit from the administration. Democratic Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) said in a floor speech Tuesday that Acosta should resign or Trump should fire him. Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), and Kamala Harris (Calif.) --who are all seeking their party's nomination for president--also called on the labor secretary to step down.
Several other Democrats in Congress added their voices to that chorus:
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Fresh Demands for Labor Secretary Alex Acosta's Resignation Mount After Jeffrey Epstein Arrested for Child Sex Trafficking Charges
Acosta has long faced intense public criticism for helping Epstein secure a "sweetheart plea deal" while serving as Miami's top federal prosecutor
Jul 07, 2019
The arrest of financier and registered sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on federal child sex trafficking charges elicited fresh demands for the resignation of Trump Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, who helped Epstein secure a "sweetheart plea deal" for previous allegations while serving as Miami's top federal prosecutor over a decade ago.
Following news of Epstein's arrest late Saturday, reporters, politicians, and other observers called on Acosta to immediately step down--bolstering demands that have mounted in recent months amid a legal challenge to Epstein's deal filed by survivors.
CNN opinion contributor Raul A. Reyes wrote Sunday that "Acosta's actions are worthy of bipartisan outrage and should offend every American father and mother. Acosta betrayed the vulnerable to benefit the powerful. His deal for Epstein shows a disregard for child welfare, victims' rights and Justice Department procedures. Ironically, as secretary of labor, Acosta is responsible for monitoring human trafficking."
Over the years, Epstein has been tied to various high-profile individuals, including retired Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz and the U.K.'s Prince Andrew as well as former President Bill Clinton and current President Donald Trump.
According to the Daily Beast, which first reported on the financier's arrest late Saturday:
Epstein was arrested for allegedly sex trafficking dozens of minors in New York and Florida between 2002 and 2005, and will appear in court in New York on Monday, according to three law enforcement sources. Epstein, who owns a New York City mansion and an island in the Caribbean, was being held at the federal lockup in Manhattan ahead of his court date.
Saturday's arrest by the FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force comes about 12 years after the 66-year-old financier essentially got a slap on the wrist for allegedly molesting dozens of underage girls in Florida.
For more than a decade, Epstein's alleged abuse of minors has been the subject of lawsuits brought by victims, investigations by local and federal authorities, and exposes in the press. But despite the attention cast on his alleged sex crimes, the hedge-funder has managed to avoid any meaningful jail time, let alone federal charges.
The new indictment--which, according to two sources, will be unsealed Monday in Manhattan federal court--will reportedly allege that Epstein sexually exploited dozens of underage girls in a now-familiar scheme: paying them cash for "massages" and then molesting or sexually abusing them in his Upper East Side mansion or his palatial residence in Palm Beach. Epstein will be charged with one count of sex trafficking of minors and one count of conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking of minors--which could put him away for a maximum of 45 years. The case is being handled by the Public Corruption Unit of the Southern District of New York, with assistance from the district's human-trafficking officials and the FBI.
Sources told the Miami Herald that Epstein was arrested at New Jersey's Teterboro Airport and "around 5:30 p.m. Saturday, about a dozen federal agents broke down the door to Epstein's Manhattan townhouse to execute search warrants." A source in New York told the Florida newspaper that Monday's bail hearing "will be critical because if they grant him bail, he has enough money that he will disappear and they will never get him."
In a series of stories from last November titled "Perversion of Justice," Herald reporter Julie K. Brown detailed how Acosta, then U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, worked with Epstein's attorneys to craft an agreement that was kept secret from Epstein's victims.
Epstein "was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls--with the help of young female recruiters--to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day," Brown reported in November. "Facing a 53-page federal indictment, Epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life."
Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal--called a non-prosecution agreement--essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein's sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.
The pact required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to "any potential co-conspirators" who were also involved in Epstein's crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein's various homes or on his plane.
As Common Dreams reported in December--amid previous calls for Acosta to resign, which were sparked by the Herald's series--National Organization for Women (NOW) president Toni Van Pelt said that "Epstein plays by the same rule book as Donald Trump, Les Moonves, Harvey Weinstein, Eric Schneiderman, and other powerful men who have been revealed as serial abusers of women."
"Epstein's scant 13-month stay in a county jail--where he was even allowed to spend twelve hours a day, six days a week, at his office," Van Pelt said, "was made possible by a culture of powerful men, enabling each other, while dismissing, excusing, or demeaning the women and children they brutalize with physical and sexual violence."
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Of Course College Admissions Rigged for the Rich. The Whole Economic System Is
The college admissions scandal is just the tip of the inequality iceberg
Mar 14, 2019
The children of working stiffs learned a brutal lesson this week as federal prosecutors criminally charged rich people with buying admission to elite universities for their less-than-stellar children.
The lesson is that no matter how hard you work, no matter how smart or talented you are, a dumb, lazy rich kid is going to beat you.
It's crucial that everyone who is not a wealthy movie star, hedge fund executive, or corporate CEO--that is, 99 percent of all Americans--sees this college admissions scandal for what it really is: a microcosm of the larger, corrupt system that works against working people, squashing their chances for advancement.
This system is the reason that rich people and corporations got massive tax breaks last year while the 99 percent got paltry ones. It is the reason the federal minimum wage and the overtime threshold are stuck at poverty levels. It is the reason labor unions have dwindled over the past four decades.
This system is the reason we cannot have nice things. Despite all that land-of-equal-opportunity crap, the rich ensure that only they can have nice things, starting with what they can buy legally and illegally for their children and rising through what they can buy legally and illegally from politicians who make the rules that withdraw money from the pockets of working people and deposit it into the bulging bank accounts of the fabulously rich.
When the mastermind of the elite university admissions scheme, William Singer, pleaded guilty this week, he exposed the launching pad available to the well-heeled to guarantee that their children will be well-heeled. Even after the wealthy pay for their heirs to attend prohibitively expensive private preparatory academies, their grades, test scores and extracurricular activities may not add up to enough to gain them entrance to Ivy League universities, from which a degree virtually assures an overpaid position on Wall Street, and with it, another generation of wealth accumulation.
Singer admitted he developed a work-around for the wealthy. The indictment revealed that, through Singer, parents handed between $15,000 and $75,000 to college entrance exam administrators to fabricate top-notch test scores for low-achieving offspring.
That lower amount--$15,000--paid by the rich to pad SAT and ACT scores is a good example. It's a figure of trifling import to a one-percenter. It is, however, the entire year's earnings of a parent working full-time at the federal $7.25 minimum wage. That parent may have a child who received a perfect SAT score--without cheating--who has earned straight As, even in advanced placement classes, who excelled in soccer and served as class president. But that child of a minimum-wage worker won't get into Harvard because the rich kid took his place with falsified test scores and faked athletic achievements.
And the rich kid and his parents have the means to ensure that members of the next generation of the family have the same opportunity to cheat their way to the top and remain there. They have the money to buy just the right politicians, something that the perverse Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court facilitated. The right-wing court ruled that rich people and corporations could give unlimited money to elect politicians of their choice.
Politicians chosen by the wealthy won't support labor unions, minimum wage increases or higher overtime thresholds. They won't cultivate opportunity for the 99 percent. They won't require corporations to treat workers as humans with dignity.
Politicians chosen by the rich have passed legislation in state after state intended to bankrupt labor unions, the very organizations that were so crucial to creating the middle class in America. Under the legislation, labor unions are forbidden to collect small fees from people who choose not to join. This weakens unions because they are required by federal regulations to provide services for all those who labor in a unionized workplace, whether they join the union or not. So what these politicians are doing is requiring unions to represent nonmembers for free. It has devastated labor organizations in some places, including Wisconsin. The result is lower wages and worse benefits for all workers because higher union-bargained pay pulls up all incomes in a region.
The logic here is simple: less for workers, more for fat cats.
And, of course, politicians chosen by rich people will not raise the minimum wage. The federal minimum has remained at a painfully low $7.25 for a decade. Now, it's a poverty wage. It means a person who works full-time cannot support himself, and certainly can't provide for a family. In Washington, D.C., and other expensive cities, some full-time minimum-wage workers are homeless. The substandard minimum wage pulls down all wages.
Similarly, politicians chosen by the rich will not significantly increase the $23,660 overtime threshold under which all workers must be paid time-and-a-half for hours beyond 40 in a week. Former Labor Secretary Tom Perez, now chair of the Democratic National Committee, proposed in 2016 doubling the threshold to $47,476, which would have enabled an additional 4 million workers to qualify for overtime pay.
Often these are workers given fancy titles like assistant night manager and paid $24,000 a year so that their fast-food restaurant bosses can require them to work 50, 60, even 70 hours a week for no extra pay at all.
For these families, the overtime pay would be extremely meaningful--in ways that are incomprehensible to families that can dish out $15,000 to $75,000 to cheat on the SAT.
Fast-food corporations, including CKE, owner of Carl's Jr. and Hardee's, opposed the proposed overtime threshold increase. The CEO of CKE at the time, Andrew F. Puzder, worth $45 million, wrote an essay condemning the increase and explaining how millions of low-paid workers with fancy titles should love to work extra time without extra pay because it gave all of them the opportunity to work their way to the top like one guy at CKE did one time.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a lobby group for rich corporations, filed suit against the increase and scuttled it. So now it hasn't increased in 15 years.
A new labor secretary last week offered a much stingier increase. Alexander Acosta proposed $35,308 as the threshold. Only about 1 million additional workers would benefit if the number were that low. And instead of automatic increases every three years, the Labor Department would consider whether to raise it only every four years, no guarantees.
This is not good policy for working people. It is, however, great policy for rich people, who, as a result, keep more of the profits produced by the labor of underpaid people.
It means continuing the cycle of 1 percent staying rich and 99 percent denied opportunity. And that means the wealthy can continue to bribe university officials to admit their unqualified scion.
There's no reason to take heart from the fact that prosecutors stymied one specific college admission scam. It is illegal to pay an SAT proctor to alter test scores. It is not illegal, though, to buy a science lab for Harvard or a humanities building for Yale with the hope that the family name prominently engraved on the edifice will sway admission officers when they see the same moniker on an application.
It's no shock college admissions are rigged for the rich. The whole economic system is rigged by the rich. Until working people change that, their opportunities and those of their children will continue to diminish.
This article was produced by the Independent Media Institute.
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'Time for Acosta to Resign': Judge Rules Labor Secretary's Plea Deal for Billionaire Sex Offender Broke Federal Law
"The president who ran for office complaining that the system is rigged has a Cabinet secretary who as a prosecutor rigged the system in favor of a sex offender."
Feb 20, 2019
A U.S. District judge ruled Thursday that U.S. Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta committed a crime in 2007 when, as a U.S. prosecutor at the time, secretly gave a lenient plea deal to a politically-connected billionaire accused of sex trafficking underage girls.
In a case brought by victims of billionaire and Trump associate Jeffrey Epstein, Judge Kenneth Marra found that Acosta and other federal prosecutors violated the Crime Victims' Rights Act by brokering a plea deal with Epstein, allowing him to serve only 13 months in a county jail for his crimes, and then sealing the agreement.
The ruling came nearly three months after the Miami Herald's explosive report on the plea deal, which prompted the Justice Department to begin investigation into the prosecutors' conduct.
Marra's decision led to renewed calls for Acosta--who was appointed by President Donald Trump and who as head of the Labor Department is responsible for combating sex trafficking--to resign.
By sealing Epstein's plea agreement, Acosta stole from more than 30 of Epstein's victims--some of whom were as young as 13 when they were recruited by his paid employees and then coerced into sex acts by him--the chance to attend Epstein's sentencing and demand a harsher punishment.
"While the government spent untold hours negotiating the terms and implications of the [agreement] with Epstein's attorneys, scant information was shared with victims," Marra found.
"The government aligned themselves with Epstein, working against his victims, for 11 years," Brad Edwards, the attorney representing the women who survived Epstein's abuse, told the Herald. "Yes, this is a huge victory, but to make his victims suffer for 11 years, this should not have happened. Instead of admitting what they did, and doing the right thing, they spent 11 years fighting these girls."
Epstein's victims and the U.S. government now have 15 days to come to a resolution following Marra's ruling.
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Cyntoia Brown Shows Us That Justice Is Not Blind
Is a system broken when it works as designed?
Dec 18, 2018
Cyntoia Brown was a victim of child sex trafficking who killed her abuser. Jeffrey Epstein was a billionaire serial child sex abuser. Both were convicted and sentenced - in ways that demonstrate the profound inequities of our criminal justice system.
On December 6, the Tennessee Supreme Court ruled that Brown must serve 51 years in prison for the shooting death of Johnny Mitchell Allen in 2004. Allen had paid to have sex with the then-16-year-old girl; she purportedly killed him while in fear for her life. She appealed her sentence as unconstitutionally harsh. The justices unanimously disagreed.
Brown, who is black, was the subject of a 2011 PBS documentary, Me Facing Life. It described how she was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, suffered from a childhood of trauma, abuse and sexual and physical violence, and was forced into prostitution.
Epstein, a friend of President Donald Trump, served just 13 months in a county jail work release program after being accused of raping or molesting dozens of underage girls. He allegedly recruited one of his victims, age 16, when she worked as a towel girl at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Epstein's prosecutor, then-U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta, crafted Epstein's inexplicably lenient 2008 deal, which has made news recently because Acosta went on to become Trump's secretary of labor.
As a former law clerk for two federal judges who has advocated for victims of police violence, prison abuse, and wrongful convictions, I have viewed the inner workings of the justice system. While people like to claim that Lady Justice is blind, in reality her vision is clouded by racism and class privilege.
While people like to claim that Lady Justice is blind, in reality her vision is clouded by racism and class privilege.
Consider the mostly white, male targets of the ongoing Mueller investigation, accused of criminal activity involving corruption, election meddling, money laundering and more. All enjoy resources, legal representation and bargaining power that is wholly unavailable to, say, a young black kid accused of dealing drugs. Even when other factors are constant, studies show that prosecutors give better deals to white defendants.
Often, white-collar crimes are perceived as less serious than street crimes, even though the former costs America $1 trillion annually, compared to $15 billion for the latter. In a country where the poor are criminalized and viewed as dangerous, the wealthy and powerful are often shielded from prosecution and punishment.
Sixty percent of the prisoners in the U.S. are people of color, most of whom are poor. They must contend with such policies as stop-and-frisk, money bail as a condition of pretrial release, court-appointed lawyers, and racially unequal sentencing.
The education and justice systems view children of color as culpable adults and deny them the presumption of innocence. Black girls as young as five are perceived as more grown up, less in need of protection and less innocent than white girls. Black boys as young as 10 are regarded as older and guilty, with dehumanizing racial stereotypes placing them at risk of police violence if they are accused of a crime.
A virtual life sentence for former child sex slave Cyntoia Brown stands in marked contrast to the light slap on the wrist for billionaire serial abuser Jeffrey Epstein. But it is not surprising in a society that treats people differently based on race, class and gender.
America fails to protect society's most vulnerable, silences women and criminalizes children of color, while letting abusive men of privilege off the hook. Some point to these different outcomes and say we are governed by a broken justice system. But is a system broken when it works as designed?
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