The case of Jeffrey Epstein and the depravity of America’s financial elite
▻https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/07/13/epst-j13.html
Ils sont tous bien plus corrompus qu’on pensait. Le problème pour nous est que leur actes scandaleux cachent les crimes encore plus graves commis par les membres les plus vertueux de leur classe sociale.
Acosta was forced out of office because of his role in 2007, as US attorney for Southern Florida, in organizing a sweetheart deal for Epstein, then facing a 53-page indictment and the possibility of a 45-year sentence in federal prison on sex trafficking charges involving dozens of underage girls. Federal authorities accused Epstein, according to the Miami Herald in November 2018, 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.”
“The eccentric hedge fund manager,” the Herald observed, “whose friends included former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew, was also suspected of trafficking minor girls, often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean, FBI and court records show.”
The deal agreed to by Acosta provided for Epstein to plead guilty to only two prostitution charges in state court. The plea deal included granting the multi-millionaire, along with several named co-conspirators and any unnamed “potential co-conspirators,” immunity from all federal charges. The agreement, “called a non-prosecution agreement,” reported the Herald, “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.”
Moreover, despite a federal law banning such an action, Acosta agreed that information about the agreement would be kept secret from the alleged victims. As a result, the deal was sealed “until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls—or anyone else—might show up in court and try to derail it.”
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Helaine Olen makes a stronger case in the Washington Post that the Epstein scandal tells us something more far-reaching and important about “how our current age of wealth excess might come to an end.” She suggests that the affair “will come to be viewed in future years as one of the defining events that brings our age of excess to a close,” and that people will study it in years to come as they now do the conduct of Marie Antoinette and Rasputin on the eve of the French and Russian revolutions.
“Our era is one of exploding and all but unpunished crime by the wealthy and connected,” she writes. “The Epstein scandal blows holes through the foundational myths of our time, revealing them for the empty and sickening bromides used to justify obscene wealth and power and privilege that they really are.”