America's Gorbachev Moment?
The Epstein Files could be the catalyst for the implosion of both parties
I mean it in this sense: The Soviet system was permanently changed once Brezhnev and the rest of the gerontocracy died. Because the Epstein case dates back 30 years, we could see the remaining Boomers in both parties facing an existential threat.
Mikhail Gorbachev was, at best, an idealist who underestimated the American Empire, but at worst, “an idiot” (quoth China’s Deng Xiaoping).
Gorbachev and Deng emerged after their respective national economies were brought to the brink by a multiplicity of factors, including the structural inefficiencies of Stalin’s model of socialism (ie the command structure operated by state with no market system allowed). These were the market socialist ideas that were originally formulated by Nikolai Bukharin, a moderate Bolshevik who had admiration for elements of Nordic socialism (or, more precisely, a special kind of Nordic socialism circa 1925 that ceased to exist after World War II when the Nordic socialists traded Marx and Bernstein for John Maynard Keynes and the Bretton Woods world).
The Chinese Communist Party and the Soviet Communist Party made absolute opposite decisions about implementing Market Socialism. Gorbachev eliminated censorship laws while legalizing free markets. Deng maintained censorship laws and operated a harsh police apparatus to target opposition forces. In 1989, he crushed the Tiananmen Square demonstrations and ruthlessly prosecuted the leading organizers and activists in the protest cells (they had organized themselves into student and worker unions in order to create a free Soviet system). Two years later, because he had refused to censor and jail the opposition, Gorbachev was ousted by an attempted coup that caused the entire system to implode in the following four months.
History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme. The most relevant insights from the collapse of the Soviet Union and contrast with Deng’s China?
1-Capital is going to win the contest with democracy. In both China and Russia, the absolute opposite set of circumstances still resulted in world financial capitalism thriving and expanding. Because China gave the US the cheapest labor workforce pool available, every major manufacturing firm in the US offshored operations to China, raking in billions in profits. Meanwhile in Russia, Wall Street pirate operatives teamed up with the Gorbachev-era ex-Communists to privatize and strip-mine the economy, causing Russian male life expectancy to drop five years within a decade of the Soviet collapse. The country devolved into a Mafia Wild West for a decade. The only positive outcome of democracy being eliminated comes from China’s poverty elimination program. They have actually succeeded at eliminating the most dire and extreme forms of poverty that can be seen next-door in India. The Chinese no longer allow for the kind of peasant landlordism that still exists in capitalist Asia. This comes about directly because of Deng’s censorship. They were not ignoring the “dictator” part of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and they were brutal when they wanted to be. But they also made zero poverty a political goal post to reach as a 50-year plan. We switch governments every two years now because of the midterms and how consequential Congress has become in the past 25 years. There is no way for us to set a 50-year government policy goal in this country. Get real. That can only happen in a dictatorship. Maybe the standard of living and development level of our economy makes this a little less consequential, but I honestly doubt that given how terrible things have been allowed to get. Our living standards have regressed in the last 25 years and the current system is imploding. But we know our elections are bought and sold, which returns to my point that capital will beat democracy.
2-External mediating factors. The Americans wanted to “divide and conquer” the (supposed) worldwide Communist conspiracy of the Soviet Union and Red China trying to conquer the world by way of Korea, Vietnam, et al. (In reality, Stalin hated Mao because he couldn’t control him, the Chinese Revolution was unexpected and un-welcomed by anyone). If the Americans had never existed, Russia and China would have been dealing still with their border squabbling that caused them to develop bad relations. The Epstein document cache, at this point, fits this description. It is deeply ironic that we first came to know about the Epstein files, then went through a government shutdown over them at the expense of millions in people’s healthcare, and now find ourselves in the midst of this political scandal, but it is an extenuating circumstance that, just incidentally, provided a vivid demonstration of the system’s failure to the everyday American. The attempt to cover up the Epstein documents is the Chernobyl atomic power plant disaster in this story. Remember, the disaster wasn’t the actual meltdown, it was the refusal of the people and government to evacuate the entire city. Procrastination led to a bigger disaster. Ken Silverstein was writing about Epstein for his excellent Substack Washington Babylon years ago. Both parties didn’t want to deal with Epstein because he had tremendous influence and impact. Both Chernobyl and everything that we have seen in the past year over these documents revealed a system that was imploding and failing in maintaining a quality standard of living.
The Soviets had scarcity and lined up outside grocery stores to buy their ration of sugar or bread; by contrast, our pensioners are lining up at the Food Bank. The parallels are evident; scarcity is a common denominator, only the scarcity is in terms of the money commodity as opposed to the other commodities.
3-Things can get worse. We never truly acknowledge just how tremendously dangerous, fascistic, and militant our Pentagon-police-prison industrial complex truly is. Let’s be clear: From the top brass in the Pentagon to the local police station exists a pipeline of humanpower trained and groomed for service in the most brutal and violent imperial project in recorded human history. We covered the globe with military bases. We created alliances like NATO and have used them to destroy countries like Serbia, Libya, and Iraq. Service members join this large labor pool via a multiplicity of entry points. Some enlist as privates at a recruiting station. Some enroll in police academy. Some are recruited for agencies like the FBI, CIA, or the military special operations teams like the Navy SEALS or Special Forces. Some are hired to work at independent contractors that deploy their analysts to combat zones in order to serve in an advisory capacity. And top-to-bottom of that entire labor pool has existed, in the past 45 years, a concerted and coordinated campaign of evangelism to convert as many of these people into the theology that we today call Christian Nationalism. Michael L. Weinstein is an American attorney, and former Air Force officer. He is the founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, which opposes this kind of evangelism in the ranks. He initially engaged with this when his sons enrolled in the Air Force Academy only to confront constant antisemitism from other cadets. He’s made it absolutely clear, the Military Chaplain system has been infiltrated for decades by the forces that have been labeled as Christian Nationalists. Which is to say, if we quote Dickens, we are still in the “It was the best of times…” part of A TALE OF TWO CITIES. The other side has a level of militarization, organization, and strategy that is not even mimicked by the Progressive caucus of the Democratic Party.
4-Be as radical as reality itself. -Lenin
I cribbed this from Alex Cockburn shamelessly because it speaks to me as someone with chronic illnesses. We people with these struggles know what “good days” are like. Isn’t that being as radical as reality will allow us? Put otherwise, if I get a killer sinus headache one day, there is only so much radical I can be that day. When you’re sick in bed, you have limitations placed on your radicalism by reality.
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Essential listening.
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My own take on Epstein:
Epstein was a money manager with the ability to take advantage of Israeli financial and investment institutions. He was allied with Netanyahu, whose major financial goal has been the complete deregulation of the domestic economy, dismantling the entirety of the old welfare state to benefit the rich. If you think about imperialism like Dante, you understand that the Devil you know is at the center ring. The motivation here is not Putin, it is the convergence of several groups:
-Wall Street financial interests, which then of course means
-The politicians in both parties these firms bought off, meaning
-The various police and legal agencies that were bribed by these Wall Street financial interests and politicians to stay quiet about the next group, meaning
-The small army of decrepit sex crime perps who just so happen to have more money than God and trusted
-Jeffrey Epstein with their piles of unregulated and un-taxed cash that he could pile into his airplane so to deposit in Israeli or Caribbean monetary institutions, who in turn
-Worked the slickest-as-shit deal with Bibi Netanyahu, who is the most belligerent Sephardi supremacist to walk the earth, where Epstein would film the pervs secretly so as to create legit blackmail compro-mat that includes Clinton, Trump, Larry Summers (a racist and sexist pig who was president of Harvard), Steven Pinker (also a notable lunatic), and Alan Dershowitz (the sleaziest lawyer in recorded human history). The trade-off? Israel doesn’t deport Epstein if he ever gets indicted in a US court.
It was absolutely obvious what happened when he died: Plan B.
The crackpots and weirdos who insist there was a wild Oliver Stone conspiracy are refusing to see what is right in front of their nose: A billionaire in lockup created an external intermediary device with his lawyer to deliver bribe cash to the COs monitoring the billionaire in pretrial lockup.
Epstein knew what awaited him on Riker’s Island. He paid off the guards for a little privacy and checked out. Riker’s is no place for a guy with a repeat offender record. This guy had shaken up the 2016 election, if you don’t remember. In 2016, the Trump organization used Roger Stone to promote the “Bill Clinton Sex Assailant” angle with Alex Jones. (Who remembers when Cenk from Young Turks nearly punched Alex Jones out at the DNC over this? Good times!)
Locally, Josh Fenton of GoLocal decided to publicize that Seth Magaziner’s father was listed on the travel manifest as a passenger, alongside President Clinton, in a trip to Africa on Epstein’s plane.
People knew what kind of scum Jeffrey Epstein was and he would never have survived to trial at Riker’s. DUH!
Ergo, quid pro quo. It’s the most transparently obvious mafia hustle in years.