People often wonder how our society can produce greedy, degrading and violent behaviors. Well, as the Epstein case shows, the example comes from the top!
Jeffrey Epstein made his fortune in finance. When workers spend a lifetime earning enough to buy their apartment or their house, he became incredibly rich in no time as a “wealth manager”. One of those parasites who help the super-rich speculate and pay as little tax as possible.
It's a lucrative profession because the bourgeoisie can be very generous with its henchmen, especially when they have to work around the law. Epstein thus accumulated tens, then hundreds of millions of dollars. Enough to buy a mansion in Manhattan, a villa in Palm Beach, a huge apartment on Avenue Foch in Paris, an island in the Caribbean, a private jet, enough to cozy up to a wealthy heiress and to make many other useful connections.
The bourgeois world is a very small one. On a global scale, 3,000 families make up the billionaires' club. Americans, British, French, Russians, Ukrainians, Indians, Lebanese, Israelis, Saudis… they form one single social class. They know each other, run into each other in grand hotels and luxury stores and meet up in Courchevel, on the French Riviera, in Doha, in riads in Morocco, or in Davos.
They have their regular tables in the same luxury restaurants, where those who live on their wages don't go to sit down and eat but to work in the kitchens, wash dishes and wait tables. They spend their lives doing business together, giving each other tips, returning favors and lending each other a million dollars here, a billion dollars there.
Trump, Musk, the Clintons, Bill Gates, Ariane de Rothschild, Prince Andrew, the Crown Princess of Norway, scientists and artists: the network built by Epstein is particularly revealing. Not all of them took part in the orgies he organized, but out of complacency, if not complicity, they kept quiet about them.
Epstein’s conviction for the sexual trafficking of minors in 2008 didn't even deter this elite group. In France, Jack Lang, a socialist icon of the Mitterrand years, and his daughter, a producer, continued to associate closely with him. In his defense, Lang swore he had only met a “charming man with a passion for culture’’.
Obviously, if love is blind, so is money! Because Epstein was also a walking money-fountain. And the Langs, father and daughter, dipped into it without a second thought.
In these money-driven relationships that bind the bourgeois class together, there isn't always pimping and pedocriminality, but it often occurs. As a reminder, we can mention the Weinstein affair in Hollywood, Berlusconi's “bunga-bunga'' parties, the rapist Dominique Strauss-Khan, Rafik Hariri, Chirac's friend, who made his fortune in real estate by building palaces for Saudi princes and, it's also said, by supplying them with women and whiskey…
This isn't very surprising. The bourgeoisie is used to buying everything: companies on which hundreds of thousands of employees sometimes depend, newspapers, television channels, ministers, judges and even political parties. So why not women, even if they are minors?
As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade”.
Incidentally, we learn that in 2009, British Labour Minister Peter Mandelson conspired with Epstein against a small tax that his own government wanted to impose on City bankers. Voters vote and the rich decide!
The American justice system has not released all the documents in its possession and has partially censored them. This proves that it will try to protect the most powerful to the very end. But there's no need to look for any kind of conspiracy. This is simply the banality of relationships in bourgeois circles: the unscrupulous collusion of the wealthy to enjoy their riches and power at the expense of the population.
In the past, royal dynasties mingled and intermarried. The European aristocracy formed a single social class. Many nobles came from the same families and feasted lavishly while the people starved. Some of them ended up guillotined in 1793, others were overthrown by revolutions in 1848 and again in 1917-1918. Well, that's all that class of parasites, the big bourgeoisie, deserves!
Nathalie Arthaud