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alexander acosta
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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