The Friends of Jeffrey Epstein

I generally have little patience for the news media's hastening to lavish breathless coverage on scandals of the more "personal" type--their doing so almost always an obvious effort to block attention to what is important using what is trivial, with the seediness of the particular trivia they use to this end making it the more distasteful. And certainly we have had even more than the usual of this dreck in the decade since #MeToo hit the scene with its particular version of "the personal is political." The revelations regarding Jeffrey Epstein and his innumerable low friends in high places is no exception--making it the easier for that media to, for example, not report on such matters as the hunger crisis in the country and how an historic interruption of Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program benefits worsened it, or the continuing-bloodbath-that-may-mean-it-is-already-World-War-Three in Ukraine it seems to forget is even happening for long periods of time, or the way in which just about every major Western government is doing its utmost to crush all hope in any meaningful address of the climate crisis we feel the more viscerally with the record-breaking heat of every new year. Still, many of the Epstein revelations--not the ones the mainstream media cares to attend to, but evidenced in the material released all the same--show that loathsome figure to have been personally involved in high politics in ways that those who care about such matters cannot ignore. Meanwhile, rather more than is the case with a Monica Lewinsky-style indiscretion, the involvement of a rogue's gallery of senior politicians, business executives and other such Establishment figures is a window into exactly the kind of people they are--and what is far more important than that, the character of the social stratum and the system of which they are examples, representatives, servants. The best and brightest, as the courtiers of these figures tell us? Hardly. Indeed, far from being best and brightest they are by any reasonable measure pretty execrable and dull, perhaps as much so as a human being can get, with their conduct in their personal lives relevant not because it is at odds with their public conduct but because it is exactly in line with it, these "men of affairs," as "men of affairs," living down to a standard in every area of their existences that makes it impossible to speak of anything but kakistocracy as the order of the day.

Take, for example, Lawrence "Larry" Summers. The pseudo-intellectual idiots and bullies of the "But He's So Smart!" brigade invariably rush to his defense when anyone asks the basis of his admirers' high estimate of his intellect--but never have anything to say that would mean much to an intelligent layperson, or for that matter, a professional economist capable of speaking forthrightly about the discipline. After all, can they point to any achievements in his field of economics whose significance they would recognize as meriting the accolades? Of course not. This is partly a matter of Summers' actual career as an economics professor having been so brief before he moved on to "bigger and better" things--but also a matter of the ultra-specialized how-many-entrepreneurs-can-found-a-startup-on-the-head-of-a-pin Scholasticism that characterizes academic economics in our time. (Have you seen the inanities that the Swedish central bank hands out its pseudo-Nobel Prizes for? Yikes.) One can more easily make a judgment on the basis of his career as a policymaker. As it happens, this has consisted mainly of displays of contempt for working people (whose deteriorating living standard is in his view a matter of their being "treated closer to the way that they're supposed to be treated"), his ostentatious groveling before Wall Street at even the most inopportune moments (consider what his colleague Joseph Stiglitz had to say about his conduct--and his mentor Robert Rubin's conduct--in White House conferences), and consistent issuance of neoliberal prescriptions whenever it counted as he proved himself wrong on any and every issue of consequence (as Greg Palast shows, backing financial deregulation that paved the way for the financial apocalypse of 2007-2008, then undermining government rescue of the economy amid the crisis). Indeed, what we see in Summers is a beneficiary of nepotism which has likely seen him not only derive enormous direct advantages from his "choice of parents" (the son of two Ivy League economists, one the brother of Paul Samuelson, the other the sister of Kenneth Arrow, Summers was born the economics profession's equivalent of a prince of the blood), but very likely some of the "reflected glory" of relations rightly or wrongly thought illustrious within their particular academic community; and building on that foundation, unswerving deference to higher-ups generally and elite interests as the elites themselves see them particularly, such that they can count on his judgments being exactly those that they would want the individual in his position to make (as, of course, the record described above testifies). It is all exactly in line with what, a C. Wright Mills made perfectly clear, makes for a member of "the power elite"--a mediocrity who got the breaks and made the most of them from a careerist standpoint in that way that Mills characterized as the "higher immorality," which attitude toward career is of course apt to be paralleled in the attitudes of those in such strata toward not just other elites "having a good time," but "having a good time" oneself, as revealed in those e-mails he exchanged with Monsieur Epstein. That Larry Summers, not as a callow young man, or coming apart at the seams in mid-life, but a man in his autumn years, endeavoring to pursue an extramarital affair with a "protégé," turned for "dating advice" to his "wingman" Epstein (Summers' term--not mine), seems to me relevant not because it is a shocker but rather because it is, for someone who can see things as they are, the absolute opposite of a shocker, being so entirely consistent with what we have seen of Summers' morality, character, intelligence, judgment (and even discretion)--or lack thereof.

Yet that, of course, is not the story the media tells. Indeed, all things considered it has treated Summers rather gently through the affair compared to how it might have done (for instance, digging into just how far Summers' association with his "wingman" went), with this, too, entirely consistent with what we have seen of their record. By and large the media never hold such figures accountable for "bad calls," or even outright corruption, certainly not for long, and not when they have been supporters of right-wing policies. (Thus Summers' protection of Andrei Shleifer in his time as President of Harvard, his role in the financial deregulation that led to the 2008 crisis, his role in Harvard's losing billions in endowment money in said crisis, did not in their eyes any more than those of the folks of the Beltway and their "campaign contributors" disbar him from his role in the Obama administration as Director of the National Economic Council in the early days of the "Great Recession." Equally his conduct in that capacity--his hostility to counter-cyclical action, and more generally anything that would help working people, in the face of economic downturn, which proved another "bad call" at best--did not keep him from having been in the running for that highest of offices in the financial priesthood, the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve) Relevant to this, too, is how averse that media is to connecting the dots, as seen when one considers how, after in line with its measure of sensitivity to certain forms of identity politics, eagerly reporting the storm Summers raised when explaining the comparative scarcity of female scientists in terms of "innate" differences in "aptitude" he held to be scientifically evidenced, it did not bother to remember this to its viewers, readers, listeners as being of significance for his larger view of the world as a place where people are generally getting what they "deserve," and his brushing off the troubles of the less privileged in those terms, his attitude toward women, in this case, seeming very reflective of his attitude to working people ("treated closer to the way that they're supposed to be treated"), and in general everyone outside the all-sure-they-are-there-because-they-are-so-much-better-than-everyone-else-in-every-way "superclass" comprised of the ultra-privileged 0.0001 percent of humanity that considers itself to be the true population of the planet. And of course, for all the hubbub about personal indiscretions of a certain nature, those on journalism's commanding heights are rather less ardent about going after the Friends of Epstein than it is, say, Harvey Weinstein (or even smaller fry like a Justin Baldoni), the figures involved being far more consequential individually, and from the standpoint of what looking at them closely would reveal about things as they are, than is the case with some mid-level (or lower) Hollywood player. Thus have they, for years, respectfully convey the denials of those with which Epstein kept company as they say over and over again "Yes, when I went to his island and flew on his plane there were girls around, but I didn't have anything to do with them. I didn't even have any idea what that was all about. Honest! I was there to raise money for my charity! Charity! Because I'm a philanthropist. PHILANTHROPIST!" (I have never had anything but contempt for the insistence that these people are "the smartest guys in the room" and the people who keep repeating it, but such utterances now convince me that they must be the dumbest guys in any room.) Meanwhile, of course, the fearless reporters of the mainstream media studiously ignore the more substantive of the recent revelations, like the recently released e-mails, precisely because those, again, happen to show that Epstein was involved with much more than "girls." Indeed, given how that media has lionized Summers in the past (exemplary of which good press is how one issue of TIME Magazine back in 1999 had his face on the cover with those of Rubin and Alan Greenspan as the "Committee to Save the World," practically making of him a superhero member of a superhero team, a Justice League of Superfriends--where so many would see instead a Legion of Doom), they will, when all this blows over, doubtless be doing so again, and likely before long. Indeed, Summers may get his crack at the Federal Reserve chairmanship just yet--and precisely because he can be counted on to be the same old Larry while holding that office.