Photo by Edward Lich from Pixabay
This Epstein thing, in all its horror, has the possibility of empowering people in the US to look at some harsh elements in our country that we’d rather not see. We can grow from this experience.
Only recently has the US started to acknowledge the possibility that we have an oligarchy in our own country. In this piece, let’s look at classism, oligarchy, and how the Epstein criminal ring just might make the rich and powerful more vulnerable, and could bring in much-needed change.
CLASSISM?
The ISMs — including racism, sexism, and classism — do not reside only in the hearts and minds of those who are on the “winning” side. For the ISMs to persist even people on the wrong end of them must be carefully taught — conditioned, trained, programmed — to at least live with the ISMs, or even to accept and believe them.
There are many reasons that classism is very hard to struggle against in America.
- Not long ago I clearly remember spell-checker underlining classism as not even a real word, let alone a valid concept.
- Unlike the targets of racism and sexism, you can’t necessarily tell the “class” of a person when they walk in the door. Years ago I realized that what “women and minorities” (the phrase at the time) had in common was that you could identify people who were easily exploitable simply based on how they looked when they walked through the door.
- In the US if someone talks about class being a big problem, people on the wrong end of all the other ISMs will think their important issues are being belittled, especially if the speakers are white men, even if these white men have been advocating for justice for everyone all their lives.
- In the past it was easy enough to make people believe they could enter the rich class themselves. And if they didn’t make it, in this “land of opportunity”, they were told it was their own dang fault.
How is it that people seem to admire billionaires? People read books about the rich and powerful, watch shows about them. And yet, you cannot become a billionaire without taking a whole lot more than you give. To build up a billion dollars in a regular job, you’d have to earn $10,000 each working hour for 50 years, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, from age 20 to age 70 and — tighten your belt — get by on only $800,000 a year for those 50 years. Do the math! Who is “worth” $10,000 an hour every working hour from age 20 to age 70? More info in this post.
Now, however, it’s important to recognize that with classism the tiny “minority” are the rich and powerful, and although they’ve got resources to try to shut us down, we’ve got the vast majority of people, when we act in solidarity.
OLIGARCHY?
Oligarchy is more and more acknowledged as a phenomenon — not only in other countries — but also in the USA. The elements include:
- The leadership of the Democratic and Republican parties, that do everything they can to make it very difficult for other political parties like the Green Party or the Libertarians, two of the largest national parties, to participate in, or even have an effect on, decisions made in Washington.
- Mainstream media outlets, like TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines, which went from being locally owned and operated to having a huge percentage of them owned by half a dozen mega-corporations. Same for social media.
- Billionaire individuals and corporations — and this definitely includes the devastating war industry — that own and/or fund the mainstream media and both Democratic and Republican parties.
The US oligarchy has a sweet deal: anything outside of the information spread by the two parties and mainstream media is called “conspiracy theory”, and it has been easy to push those “theories” aside, without ever doing real investigation.
THIS BRINGS US TO EPSTEIN
To my surprise, I have become focused on news about Epstein.
This was a decades-long criminal ring of sex trafficking and pedophilia where probably more than 1000 young girls and women were entrapped, exploited, abused, and raped. The testimonies and evidence look as if it cannot be shut up, or covered up.
With the sex trafficking operation, along with tax evasion advice, Epstein collected secrets about the rich and powerful that could easily be used as blackmail to influence their decisions. It would also explain how Epstein got his billions and his mansions.
Will this bring Trump down? His Make America Great Again base has a lot of parents — and non-parents also — who care deeply about the welfare of children. Also, Americans across the political spectrum hate the idea of the rich and powerful getting away with truly terrible acts.
But it’s not just Trump. It’s the concentrated power of the oligarchy: the two political parties, the media, and the system that favors billionaires and corporations over ordinary folks and small enterprise. This Epstein matter might be what it takes to cause the sleeping giant of America to wake up to the corruption at its core, and to do something about it.
Already in 2016 Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were described as the two most disliked presidential candidates in history, making the voting question (in this aberrant locked-down two-party system), “Which of the two do you dislike the most?”
By 2024 more than half of the voters were not registered as either Democrat or Republican. Sooner or later — despite the wishes of the oligarchy — I predict a groundswell of people will again register with a political party, one that never takes corporate money and cannot be bought by billionaires … like the Green Party.
Where do I place my hope? Among my favorite sources are the books by young Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, especially Humankind: A Hopeful History. Based on research into history, economics, science, and literature, Bregman asserts that “most people are decent” and he argues against ideas of humankind’s essential egotism and malevolence. True, not all people are decent, as we can see, but most are.
The ones who benefit from having us believe that most people are not basically decent, are the oligarchs who would concentrate power and wealth in their own hands, and work diligently to divide and conquer the rest of us. We don’t need to believe them.