Although I didn’t coin the phrase, I think we can all agree the “Epstein Class” is comprised of the extremely wealthy, arrogant, and privileged elites who don’t live by the same rules the rest of us do. In particular, Trump’s little band of kleptocrats come to mind, regardless of whether their names show up in the long-awaited “Epstein files.” The president’s kleptocracy continues to remind this humble spirit of the “slavocracy” that created the Southern Confederacy in 1861. It’s easy to forget, but it wasn’t a crime to kill or rape one of your slaves because they were considered property with no rights of their own, and therefore you could do with them as you pleased.
Hopefully all the ugly details of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes will be revealed in time, but the overwhelming picture of audacious entitlement is already clear; his clients were men who think anything and everything is theirs for the taking. Incredibly, they think they should have even more power and privilege than they do already; the greedy status quo they’ve already created for themselves isn’t enough; nothing is ever enough for their ilk.
The Slave Power already had great wealth (in 1861 approx. two thirds of the country’s millionaires were Southern slaveholders, the lords of the “Cotton Kingdom”), but it wasn’t enough to satisfy their boundless greed. They wanted to spread their slave empire across the west, down through Mexico into Central America and across the Caribbean. (My slave-mongering brother, who pretty much took over the family cotton farm when I went off to West Point in 1856, was consumed by such dreams of glory.) If cotton couldn’t grow in places that were too hot, wet, dry, or mountainous, well heck, they’d put their slaves to work cultivating crops like sugar, coffee, or cocoa. The Slave Power would have been a lot better off just hanging on to the wealth and power they already had, but human nature being what it is, the lords of the Cotton Kingdom wanted more.
While Pete Hegseth was Attacking Alleged Drug Boats, Trump Pardoned the Former President of Honduras, a Convicted (Mega!) Cocaine Smuggler.
President Trump’s interest in Latin America, Venezuela in particular, is based on similar boundless, shameless ambition. He claims he’s protecting the American people from fentanyl, but most fentanyl is manufactured in China and comes into the country from Mexico, not Venezuela. Drugs come in from other Latin American countries, including Ecuador, Colombia and Peru, but they aren’t the target of Trump’s ire. Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro, is a murderous dictator who’s destroyed the country, but there are a lot of his type in the world (think Vladimir Putin) who don’t seem to bother Trump one bit. It seems more than coincidence, however, that Venezuela is sitting on one of the largest oil reserves in the world. Afterall, Trump’s 2024 campaign received almost $100m from the fossil fuel industry and the president has proven himself loyal to their cause, climate change be damned.
It’s not just oil that’s there for the taking, but all the resources that can be extracted throughout Latin America and around the world, including all the rare earth minerals the tech industry is clamoring for. It sounds an awful lot like Iraq, doesn’t it? Dick Cheney and the rest of the Republican establishment were convinced America would be greeted as liberators and get all the oil—after it paid for the country’s reconstruction, of course. Well, we all know how that turned out, don’t we? Is there any question that a land invasion of Venezuela and America’s next failed attempt at regime change is coming soon? So, what do you think will come first, Maduro’s overthrow or making the Epstein files public?