This Time We've Got Him For Sure! Plus

Stupid press tricks, plus music

Let a thousand blossoms bloom (Weldon Berger/Bad Crow Review)

Apologies for the light posting this week. Headaches and fatigue at play. I even had to skip my esketamine treatment—dire straits.

This Time We’ve Got Him For Sure!

We’re asked to believe that one of the world’s most rotten and morally corrupt humans had actionable material on another of the world’s most rotten and morally corrupt humans but he didn’t use it before he died even after being arrested and charged during Trump’s first term.

Maybe that’s what happened. But so far what the Epstein emails show is that Trump knew Epstein was a pedophile, that he enjoyed watching and spending time around the young girls Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were trafficking, and that he seems to have told Maxwell to stop grooming them, presumably at Mar-a-Lago.

The guy is an adjudicated rapist, a convicted felon, an adjudicated charity fraud perpetrator, and a serial adulterer who has been credibly accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women, including at least one at-the-time minor, in addition to the woman, E. Jean Carroll, to whom he lost not one but two expensive lawsuits during which the judge told jurors and the rest of us that Trump is a rapist. And still he got elected president twice, the second time after much of his criminal activity was successfully litigated.

So the emails seem unlikely to bring him down or break the hold he has on GOP legislators or the cult. Granted it’s early days yet, and reporters and others have a massive trove of emails to search through. And maybe the Democrats who released a few of what with any other politician would be career-ending messages are releasing them strategically, starting with the least damaging first. Or maybe not.

The emails aren’t the files, though; they came from Epstein’s estate, not from the FBI or any of our spy agencies, which one has to think also maintained fat Epstein dossiers. And those files have been accumulating in the hands of the FBI for a long time—certainly before his 2019 arrest, and probably well before his 2006 arrest. Is it feasible that everybody involved has been sitting on something extreme enough to do in even Trump for all this time? That nobody in the FBI or any of the spy agencies Trump has savaged would leak something to retaliate, or just from disgust?

Or is it more likely that if ever there was anything on Trump, it’s been long since destroyed either by the agencies under his control or by Epstein’s caretakers before making it to law enforcement?

Obviously I don’t know the answer. Maybe a pleasant/unspeakably horrifying surprise awaits us all. What seems most likely to me, indulging my conspiratorial side, is that Trump has been threatening powerful people with the files and doesn’t want those people to find out that there’s less there there than everybody thinks—he’s an expert in the ways of pro wrestling and TV narratives—or they do contain things he can use to blackmail powerful people and he doesn’t want to give them up.

Meanwhile, the regime and congressional Republicans continue perpetrating the most massive heist in history, stealing trillions from the poor and working classes and giving to corporations and the grotesquely rich. A war of sorts is looming in South America. Our elections are under more stress, in more outright danger, than has happened since the end of Jim Crow. Our press is increasingly owned by right-wing billionaires. Tens of millions of people are about to lose the option of getting medical care without sacrificing some other necessity. Our pathetic social welfare system is going from at best indifferent about its beneficiaries to outright hostile toward them.

All that, and this week’s betrayal by senate Democrats, just got overshadowed, at least in the online world, by the Epstein tsunami. And unless something weird happens in the Senate and enough Republican senators both pass the measure which now seems certain to pass the House and provide enough votes to overcome a potential Trump veto, we’ll not be seeing those files unless Trump for some reason has a change of heart.

All the stories I’ve seen indicate that the MAGA/Q-Anon cultists are putting a lot of pressure on their federal legislators to get the files released, but not that they think Trump is personally involved in heinous shit. I mean they’ve seen a ton of evidence already that he’s involved in a ton of heinous shit and they either don’t believe it or they think he’s an impure vessel wielded as a sword by the lord. Some of them have all along been taking the ephebophile-versus-pedophile route, as though child rape isn’t child rape if the victims are pubescent.

Anyhow. Who knows. Maybe this time we’ve got him for sure, although what exactly “got” would look like is a mystery. To this point, among the people coming off worst in the emails are reporters and editors and publishers.

Stupid press tricks

Speaking of the latter of which: Warren Buffett has long been held up as the ideal billionaire, who lives modestly and gives huge amounts of money to charity. He’s remembered as the guy who demanded that he be taxed at least as much as his secretary—did you know you can just send a check to the treasury if you’re feeling undertaxed?—and people forget that at the same time, he was demanding that the U.S. cut back on its social welfare commitments. He’s smart enough not to explicitly name social security, medicaid and medicare, but that, along with the little constellation of other programs benefiting the non-billionaires among us, is what he meant. The country has to cut back on “future promises” that we cannot afford, is what he said, in a 2011 NY Times editorial titled “Stop Coddling the Super-Rich.”

It’s no surprise that the Washington Post editorial board had, with one exception, nothing but kind words for Buffett, and his “super-rich” compadres generally, in a column they wrote to coincide with his annual Thanksgiving letter to investors, which this year also serves as a retirement letter and mini-memoir. After all, the board serve at the pleasure of an even wealthier man; they’re hardly going to slag a guy who is almost as rich, which is a meaningless distinction at that altitude, who also has a history with The Post, and who is widely regarded as the least predatory centi-billionaire ever.

Buffett is humble. He took over a struggling textile manufacturer 60 years ago and turned it into a more than $1 trillion conglomerate that owns such iconic American brands as Dairy Queen, Duracell and Fruit of the Loom. Berkshire also has a nearly $320 billion stock portfolio, which includes sizable holdings in blue chips such as Apple, American Express and Coca-Cola. Combined, these enterprises create millions of jobs globally and help generate immense wealth for shareholders and customers.

Considered one of the best investors of all time, Buffett is retiring with a net worth of around $150 billion. He is the all-American entrepreneur: proud of his achievements, grateful to the systems that allowed them and acutely aware of his ethical responsibilities to give back. Buffett has already donated more than $60 billion to his philanthropic causes and plans to “step up” his donations by giving away nearly his entire net worth over what remains of his lifetime.

Buffett credits American capitalism with being able to create and generate this kind of wealth. He likened it earlier this year to a “magnificent cathedral” combined with “a casino”: where risks are taken and money is made, but where the basic needs of everyone are still cared for [emphasis mine].

Basic needs! People are struggling to keep groceries on the table and a roof over their heads, choosing between medical care and other necessities because they can’t afford both—or either—and every bit of that is poised to get even worse—because we must cut back on those future promises, as Buffett said—but their basic needs are being met. We just got done with a record government shutdown precipitated by those issues but the news evidently didn’t penetrate the Post’s editorial suite battlements.

Capitalism is grand, just grand.

The one issue on which the editors found within themselves the strength to criticize Buffett is the one most people laud him for—his call for higher taxes on people like him.

Not all Buffett-isms are created equal. The “Buffett Rule,” a tax proposal which became a passion of President Barack Obama’s during the 2012 campaign, risked discouraging investment. His complaints that he paid a lower effective tax rate than his secretary made too many people incorrectly think the rich don’t pay much in taxes.

But that’s just a minor quibble because no matter how thin-skinned your average multi-billionaire may be on the issue, at the end of the day they’re still wealthy beyond meaning, with personal servants, federal legislators, federal regulators, and press outlets catering to their every need. The Post editors have certainly not neglected their obligations on that score.

Economist and devout press critic Dean Baker has identified some examples of that media kowtowing, although mostly through the lens of the legislators who do the heavy lifting on behalf of the billionaires and corporations who want to screw us all out of what they’ve always seen as their money.

I have followed economic reporting for many decades. I don’t generally give it high marks. Maybe I’m just stupid for thinking the purpose of reporting is to provide information to the audience. By that standard the media fail horribly.

The most obvious and painful way is that, as standard practice, they print huge budget numbers that they know are almost meaningless to their entire audience. They refuse to take the ten seconds that would be needed to, for example, tell readers that the $100 billion annual SNAP budget is 1.4 percent of total spending.
. . .
I can and have given many other examples of ways in which economic reporting fails to inform readers, or misinforms them, but the New York Times and Vox took this failure to another level this week. Both of them told their audience that Trump’s outright lies about the economy were the same thing as Biden’s alleged tone-deafness in discussing economic data.

I wouldn’t say the Biden tone-deafness was “alleged;” the economy improved markedly coming out of the Covid recession, but it still left more than 20% of workers either unemployed, or working part-time when they wanted to work full-time, or working for less than a living wage. That percentage was lower than at any point in the last three decades, but that’s more a measure of how shitty our post-Reagan economy has historically been for workers than it is how great it was under Biden.

Nevertheless, the unbalanced (in every sense) both-sidesing carries water for Trump and Republicans, just as does the deliberate failure to bring into focus what the costs of social welfare programs and foreign aid are relative to the overall budget. And it serves the cause of the billionaires, including cuddly Unca Warren, who think those programs are hijacking funds that could be better spent on, for instance, government investments in corporations controlled by billionaires.

So long, of course, as the underclasses’ basic needs continue to be fulfilled.

Elsewhere, Mehdi Hassan’s Zeteo is taking a gander at the Epstein emails and finding some significant journalism names, along with billionaires and remora we already sort of knew about, among his fond correspondents.

Landon Thomas Jr. wrote a 2002 New York Magazine article on Epstein, in which Trump was famously quoted as calling Epstein a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

In January 2015, Thomas, for some reason, advised Epstein on how to respond to one of his many alleged victims. “you do need to fight back some how. Present evidence that she is lying AND Show the world that you are no longer that guy. You have made changes -- and that this is the past. My sense is that its TV type thing where you just talk honestly about this/present evidence that its not true/ and focus on what you have been doing for past five years,” Thomas wrote. “But you cant just sit there taking punches like this ... Call me any time.”
. . .
In March 2017, emails show the New York Times reporter seeking to facilitate a connection between a Japanese businessman and Epstein.

In a January 2018 back-and-forth, Epstein openly mused that Trump has “early dementia” based on a recent “goofy” statement he made. In March 2018, Thomas wrote that Trump is “scaring the shit out of me now.”

“Can Barrack (Tom Barrack, billionaire hedge fund operator and now the ambassador to Turkey) to talk sense to him anymore? Maybe it’s time for you to jump in now. Given how he is throwing caution to wind in such epic fashion, why wouldn’t he take your call? Give it a shot!” the journalist urged Epstein.
. . .
In June 2018, emails show Epstein sharing edits he made to (Michael) Wolff’s book with Brad Karp, a lawyer from white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss.

“Thanks. It’s still quite challenging. Will speak shortly to Michael,” Karp wrote back, before Epstein responded with assurances that Wolff was cooperating.

In November 2018, Epstein asks Wolff about how he envisioned framing him in his book. “I was thinking of opening with you and Bannon talking about Trump. Would let you sound smart and offer what I think would be a crowd-pleasing perspective, and make you seem like a credible player--former friend of Trump, advisor to world leaders, sought after person, etc--without having to too much rehash old stuff,” Wolff writes back.

“​​thnks for letting me sound smart :)” Epstein replied.

No need to rehash old stuff. Because he’s changed.

No doubt other media-related stuff will turn up as well, probably along similar lines to having learned how chummy our scummy former treasury chief Larry Summers was with Epstein long after he’d publicly distanced himself from the pedophile. Already we’re seeing that the regime is riddled with advisors and supporters, like billionaire and JD Vance proprietor Peter Thiel, and Steve Bannon, who were close to Epstein pretty much up to the point he was arrested in 2019.

Zeteo preserved all the email typos as they appear.

Music

King Hannah, “John Prine On the Radio” and more

Gurriers, “Top of the Bill”

Geese, “100 Horses” and more

The National, “Your Mind Is Not Your Friend”

Sprints, “Better”

Gilla Band, “Shoulderblades”

Aldous Harding, “The Barrel”

Sharon Van Etten & The Attachment Theory, “Trouble”

Gretel, “Unbloom”

And that, Comrades in We Got Him This Time, is all I got. If you like what I do, please share it around and, if you’ve not already, please consider a free or paid subscription.