To become properly indignant about what the Epstein case represents, read the Miami Herald’s investigative reporting regarding the way the legal system handled the case.  It should be hard to stomach and upsetting to anyone who gives a fuck about justice under the law.

Nude Photos of Underage Girls Seized From Jeffrey Epstein Mansion

 “Accusations of pedophilia and sexual predation have dogged Mr. Epstein for decades. And now, in the #MeToo era, his case has been held up as a prime example of insulated, powerful men avoiding accountability.”

“Mr. Epstein’s social circle is filled with other high-profile connections, including to former President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew of Britain and a host of others.”

In 2002, Mr. Trump described Mr. Epstein as “a terrific guy.”

“He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Mr. Trump told New York Magazine. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

This is a story about how far privilege goes in this goes and, too, it should be about who knows who and how those who know the “right people” can do terrible wrong and twist the law and twist the hands of those who are trusted with enforcing the law. In the United States of America today, those with power and money do not deserve to be trusted no matter how philanthropic they try to show themselves to be.  Give some money to the Clinton Foundation, buy friendship with an ex-president who, it has to be obvious, has many powerful friends who, in a pinch, can help out in important ways.  Donate bigly to the Met and build wings at the museums and you can distribute potent addictive drugs rather freely and live the life of a good person even though your actions do harm to others.

Come on America! Elections will not touch corruption anywhere nearly enough to affect its effects.  Corruption, balled up with the advertising that makes susceptible people believe that the criminal behavior taking place before their eyes —crimes against real people, crimes against the principles of good democracy, crimes against the earth, crimes against children—are not relevant to the broader conceptualization that the United States of America is a corrupt state but instead to a few among the good and generous of the wealthy class acting abhorrently.

Crimes against children and the earth and democracy and decency and the whole of humanity are what the United States of America is about and has been about for a long time, crimes without penalty except on rare occasions because those who benefit by such crimes are those who own the political system and, in turn, are the people who ultimately make decisions about how the American people will think, this through ownership of the media and the school system from top to bottom.  The privatization of schools is only an extant reality brought into the open because it is now unlikely that many of the many will resist.  It is through the media—corporately controlled, yes, “public” radio and TV now corporatized too—that the people get their information.  Not only information but, as should be obvious from the cable news format, their opinions, the public’s opinion shaped by the opinion of those who dominate the “news” stations.

Epstein and Acosta have, for the most part, gone on with their prestigious and self-enriching lives while others whose lives they helped to ruin suffer greatly. George Bush lives well and with dignity despite having killed near millions for reasons that the American public accepted but did not understand.  If they had, they would have understood that the motives were criminal. George Bush is now good friends with the Obamas.  The Clintons were a part of the Trump social scene.  Epstein and Trump and Clinton had fun together.  Hillary gave not so innocent speeches to the people at Goldman Sacks.

Think about it! We have voted many times and sometimes elected the people we were allowed to elect from the candidates made available.  In the best of times, under the best of our selections the powerful by wealth have used their connections to insure that they remain powerful and wealthy, “legally,” because they control the process by which laws are made.

Perhaps in the near future, under the right regime, so that Jeffery and his ilk can have all the fun and whatever kinds of fun they want with the blessings of the law, the law will be rewritten to suit their desires. Look at who is now going about a major remodeling of the court system.