Prof. Wolff— Epstein's Depravity is the System

This is The Zero Hour with Richard R.J. Eskow, produced by the WEAC Radio Network and broadcasting from the banks of the Anacostia directly into the halls of power. And now your host, Richard R.J. Eskow. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to the program. In this hour, why Gavin Newsom is not the answer, no matter what your question is, he's not the answer, why a billionaire tax in California and across the country is a great idea. And then Professor Richard Wolfe and I will explore the horrors of the latest tranche of Jeffrey Epstein emails and what they tell us about our society, our economy, and our lust not only to promote predators to powerful positions in our society, but to compete at all costs, to win at all costs, what this pathology means for us as a nation, and hopefully how to get out of it. So please, suck around. Hopefully you'll find the hour interesting.

And we are back on the zero hour. Joining me once again is our senior correspondent and so much more. A good friend Sonali called Hotcar. Sonali, all of her work, I think, she'll correct me if I'm wrong, could be found it, or directions too can be found at Rising Up with Sonali.com. She publishes for a number of other. publications as well and broadcasts. And she is, among other things, back from last week's one day strike on Friday and has been hearing some talk about something she wrote about, which is a billionaire's tax in California. So with all that out of the way in terms of an introduction, Sonali, welcome back to the program. Hi, Richard. Thanks so much for having me. Always a pleasure. And let's start with this. Let's start with the Friday March. I did not go out to any of the events. Surprisingly enough, and maybe this was because it was done quickly, I couldn't find any in D.C. or in suburban Maryland. There were some in Virginia, suburban Virginia, but, you know, I probably just didn't look in the wrong places or whatever, or the right places, rather. But how was it? I understand there was a lot of action in L.A. There was a lot of action. I chose to go to the action in downtown Los Angeles on Friday, January 30th. It was called a national shutdown. But there were local actions happening all over Southern California. I had friends who were asking, hey, are you going to in front of City Hall in Pasadena, where I live at 6.30 p.m. and then in South Pasadena. And it was supposed to be spread out over two days, January 30th and 31st. In general, there were just a lot of events. And so if you go to the website of the National Shutdown, I believe it's just national shutdown.org, they gave a recap of the way in which things went down. 50 states, 300 actions, 1,000-plus organizations. You know, they say millions standing up. I don't know if that means that millions of people showed up on the streets or that they think millions of people went on strike because the idea was it was on a weekday. And people were being asked to skip school, skip work to make a statement, to make an economic statement about their power. You know, there have been calls for many years about a general strike of the kind that we see playing out in countries. very successfully around the world, the US has often struggled to draw those same numbers because we're so connected to work in this country. And I think that's a cultural thing. we define ourselves by what we do for a living. But still, in spite of that, I do feel that it was quite effective. And of course, this was all linked to the ongoing ice raids. It was linked to the action specifically in Minneapolis. It was meant to be a solidarity action with those people in Minneapolis and the Twin Cities who are under siege by federal agents. I saw a lot of signs that referenced Alex Preti and Renee Good, some clever signage around.

a pretty good reason for a national strike, for example. So that was really interesting. But I also saw people, excuse me, gathering signatures for this proposed billionaires tax in California, union members wearing buttons saying, ask me about the overpaid CEO's tax bill, tax proposal, which I thought was just really interesting because it was heartening to see people. giving attendees of such protest actions something very concrete to do, which sometimes has been lacking in our movements. And I can talk more about the billionaire's tax. Yeah, I definitely want to do that just to kind of close off the chapter on the strike. I've been a big believer. general strikes and the power of strikes for broader political causes. And yeah, I think you're right that culturally we were wedded to we've tended to identify ourselves with our right. I had a friend Jimmy who was a bartender and he was dating somebody pretty famous. And when he went to parties with her, people would say, what do you do? And he'd say about what?

But I think also, you know, the Taft-Hartley, you know, the unions don't want to get too involved in certain unions, you know, on being political. I think you should be political. They represent. Yeah, I mean, like, if you look at the long-show workers union, those are unions that are very, like, militant and have a history of like work stoppages. But other unions, you know, yeah, they, there's often no strike clauses in their bargaining and collective bargaining agreements, et cetera. So it's a mixed bag. Yeah, yeah. I think independent organizing is the way to go. And again, before we leave it, do we have any sense how successful it was? I mean, I think it was pretty in Minneapolis. I think it had a impact. A lot of businesses, I think, closed and so on. But what about nationwide? I had the sense that maybe it was a little diffused, but I could be. It's hard to say. There was a lot of local coverage. So, for example, for Los Angeles, it was a lot of coverage. you know, in the LA Times and some local news media outlets. But you're right, we're not seeing as much. It's hard to tell what the true scope of it is. In part, this is our failing media system, but also in part it may be that people are feeling overwhelmed. And also I think people are kind of doing a lot of ongoing actions. So, for example, where I went, there were a ton of high school students from LAUSD public schools that were present that had walked out of schools. But my kids who go to Pasadena Unified School District. are walking out on Friday, February 6th, the week later. And so things, the actions are many, but they're a little bit diffused. And maybe that's even better because people are gumming up the works. People are, you know, really. making it clear that this is not business as usual. It's not just one day and done. But yeah, the website, National Shutdown.org, says millions stood up on January 30th. I don't know what they mean exactly by that. I mean, it might be that people RSVPed and they calculated or, you know, the RSVPs. It's not clear. Uh-huh. Okay. And it was interesting. You wrote a piece. I think before last Friday's event, why won't Gavin Newsom, Gavin Newsom tax billionaire as a union-backed ballot measure? And you said you saw some street-level activism for that at the Friday event, didn't you? Yeah, people were gathering signatures. And, you know, I love that you and I have, I think, an ongoing tradition now of trying to... prove why Gavin Newsom trying to prove for the audience why Gavin Newsom would be the absolute worst Democratic Party choice. So, you know, in large part, because he wants it so badly, and he makes, like, it's so obvious that he wants it so badly, but he's effectively standing for nothing in this moment other than like, I'm not Trump. But yeah, there were people gathering signatures because essentially what has happened is with the

If you can't get by on $209 billion, you're probably not a good money manager. And I think the point you make about Massachusetts is great. I wasn't aware of that. I knew that other taxes on the wealthy did not result in the terms of context, the discussion for New York. But that's an important piece of information. And I was excited when I heard from you that people were organizing around this, handing out leaflets and... communicating about it because the other thing about a billionaire tax is you don't have to already be a lefty to be for it you know i i think correct me if i'm wrong but all the polls i've seen say yeah people think you know the the billionaire should be paying more they're not paying their fair share uh you know a Gavin Newsom in the abstract who does want it so badly at quick divergence since we talked about our habit of saying what Gavin would be a disaster. You know, initially I thought, wow, this guy's a really great communicator. I don't know what he stands for. Now, unfortunately, I know, which is nothing, but, you know, Democrats have not had a good record of, we haven't had good experiences of Democrats who are great communicators, quote, unquote, once they get into office. But if he really cared about voters, he'd be for this, right? So it's got to be about, because this is popular. So this got to be about donors, isn't it? Exactly. He wants to make very clear whose side he is on. What's really shocking is that there are some billionaires in California. were very openly, and this is rare for billionaire. They don't like to get involved overtly in politics. They like to do things behind the scenes. But the road red, there's a couple of billionaires that I cited, Tom Steyer, Jensen Huang of the CEO of Navidia, who are basically like, yeah, okay, if such a thing were to pass, I would pay the tax and move on, like, what's the big deal? They are basically saying it would not be a deal breaker for them. California is a fantastic state. Are we saying that Mark Zuckerberg would suddenly leave his beautiful estate or whatever he, you know, wherever he lives in California? Because he would be worth 5% less as one of the world's richest men. I highly doubt that they're going to do that. So this is ideological. And it's really pathetic because if Gavin Newsom feels that he stands any chance of becoming the Democratic nominee and then winning the presidency in 2028, and he is missing this. critical issue that really should be, you know, an issue that he should have his finger on the pulse of Americans, not just Democrats, but a majority of Americans. They are pro-union and they're pro-billionaire tax and, you know, pro-taxing the rich. Majorities of them. I don't know how he thinks that he is going to actually get by, but already we're seeing the media pundits saying,

Oh, Gavin Newsom's running for president. I think it was, I don't remember which story it was, which outlet it was, but there was one article that was basically saying, the problem with Gavin Newsom is his own record. It's now a little too late to tack to the center, implying that Gavin Newsom has been far to the left of issues that would allow him to run for a successful election. Already the pundits are coming out and saying, Gavin Newsom, you're not centrist enough. And that is the losing formula, as you and I know, over and over again. Democrats have tried so much to run on this and have more often than not failed. And that's the old definition of centrism in the center as being way to the right of voters in both parties. That's across the political spectrum on an issue. So, yeah, that's so frustrating to hear. I mean, not at all surprising given. By the way, if I recall correctly, you said something about where Mark Zuckerberg lives. I think it's... Los Gatos or Palo Alto's or one of those cities. And I read an article about how he was buying all these homes in this neighborhood, sort of like metastasizing his property all over and really upsetting the few remaining relatively wealthy people who live around there. And he can because he has so much money. He has more money than any individual should ever have. Yeah, absolutely. He can do whatever he wants with it and he is. And the only other thing I would say, you said, you know, it's ideological that billionaires oppose this. Yeah, I think that's right. But I also think it's psychological. They, you know, they take every suggestion that maybe they have too much money or aren't wonderful personally. And they want more and more, more and more. It's just like, good. I agree. I agree. And Gavin Newsom is buying that, that audacity of calling billionaires job creators, you know, like, oh, we're job creators. No, you are getting rich off the backs of most of your workers. So, for example, if you look at Jeff Bezos, right, again, one of the world's richest men who just this week alone, and this was such a great... there was a Bernie Sanders host. And I wish I could- Oh, yeah, yeah, about it was a play on democracy dies in darkness, right? Yeah, he said, he wrote democracy dies and oligarchy. And he started out saying, The same man who spent, you know, $55 million on his wedding or on his yacht to spend, you know, to give his bride a $5 million ring who spent, you know, this many hundreds of millions of dollars, et cetera. We're supposed to believe that there's not enough money to pay Washington Post journalists and they had to lay off one third of the staff. As we know that Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. And this week...

hundreds of reporters and journalists were laid off. And of course, the ones who many of them, reporters of color who were hired after 2020 as part of the media's push to. do some reparation, we're the first, we're among those, you know, among the first to be let go. And so, yeah, you know, these are men who mostly, of course, almost all men. Right. With the exception of women like McKenzie Scott and Abigail Disney, who are doing their darndest to give away their money, these men are quite remarkably. excited about and clueless and tone depth about just how awful they sound when they claim that they are job creators and that they deserve everything that they have and that they've gathered up. It's just really disgusting. To hear the rest of this conversation with Sonali Cole Hotcar, please go to zero hour report.com slash the zero hour. We'll be right back after this. I'm Richard R.J. Escal and you're listening to The Zero Hour.

You are listening to the We Act Radio Network produced in Washington, D.C. Visit us online at weactradio.com or at YouTube.com slash weactradio, D.C. And we are back on the Zero Hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. Escal, joining me once again is my good friend Professor Richard Wolfe, whose insights on topics timely and timeless. I always look forward to hearing and discussing with him. And we're going to talk about a timely and perhaps timeless as well topic right now. But first of all, Richard Wolfe, welcome back to the program. Thank you very much, RJ. I'm very pleased, as always, to be doing this with you. Likewise. And, of course, the story I was alluding to is, rather, I should say, the release of more Jeffrey Epstein documents and the sort of ever-widening gyre of people. Men, pretty much, all, virtually all, getting drawn into his orbit and getting their reputations tired along with him, a surprise, sometimes surprising collection of men. And I know you and I talked about... the Epstein files a couple months ago, but there seems to be a shift in consciousness, I would say, public consciousness, even more so than last time on this one. And it seems to me that, you know, it's like, it's also like watching a pointless painting come together. More dots get filled in, you know, the shape of what you're looking at, the details of what you're looking at becomes clearer. And it seems to me that... what we're looking at is something both very characteristic of our time, you could call it the zeitgeist, and also very characteristic of our economy and of our human relationships on any number of scales. But I mean, that's my, I'm not really being very specific with that description, but what are your thoughts? Well, I start by being horrified. I just, and I suspect that, you know, it's a bit of naivete on my part as well. I've been a critic of capitalism all my life. I am horrified every day. living in New York City, as I do, by the gap between rich and poor, which is screaming at me literally every time I leave my home. And in my home, it's not there because, in a way, I've excluded it from the internal of my house. But I go out and, you know.

Whether it's a beggar, whether it's a poor person talking to themselves, walking down the street, whether it's the way I watch police people dealing with others. It's an endless display, if you're open to it, of the inequalities of our system. I talk to other people in the apartment complex where I live. Everybody's afraid to go out at night. The fear is largely irrational in the sense that there's not that much happening at night that you have to be afraid of. But on the other hand, it's also rational because it isn't crazy to think it might, because it happens often enough. For me, that's what I'm watching. I am watching that rich people who have so much money that they actually can slither out of accountability for things they do that are immoral, illegal, unethical, outrageous, really beyond words. will do so. That there's something in the system that not only gives them the means, but breathes in them the appetite that somehow goes with the means. There's some sort of process here. And I'm thinking particularly of the advertising industry. You know, the job of the advertising industry. is to get you to spend money on whatever the client of the advertiser is paying the advertiser to advertise. So the point is to get you to open your wallet and spend money on the car, on the drink, on the clothing item, whatever it is. And it begins to create... particularly in people who have a lot of money and can therefore indulge what the advertiser is doing. Most of us can't do much of that because we're limited by the funds that we have. But now imagine the world of advertising imploding on a person like Jeffrey Epstein with hundreds of millions of dollars. So there is no limit. Well, if there is no limit, then those things that might limit you become almost challenges. It becomes a kind of a contest. And the one who goes the furthest, Jeffrey Epstein, you know, goes beyond buying sex. to literally buying an entire island where away from any political authority other than himself, he can indulge, he can find someone who goes and lures teenage girls to come to this island. You know, it's so ugly. You don't really know where to start with the horror of it.

And yet it seems rooted in the particular system that we have. There oughtn to be people that are that rich. It produces weird behavior. Behavior that shouldn't be possible. And one last point. I'm going to link it to something that isn't about Jeffrey Epstein for a moment. It isn't about an island. It isn't about raping and all the rest. I read this morning about the firing of one-third or one-half of the reporting staff of the Washington Post. Jeff Bezos is in a bizarre position. He's in the same position towards journalism that Jeffrey Epstein was towards sexuality. What is Mr. Jeff Bezos doing? For reasons of his own, he's in a position to buy one of the most important media institutions in the country. Right off the back, there's something wrong here. It's at least as horrible as buying someone else's sexual services. We make that an illegal act buying a sexual. That's prostitution. That's against the law. Mr. Jeff Bezos doesn't have to worry about that. That law has been fixed. He can buy the Washington Post. He can fire one third. And the goal that this is to make the newspaper more efficient, the man has just spent. publicly, he didn't deny it, $55 million to promote the movie Melania, which everyone who's not paid has said is a large waste of time. But whatever you think, he had $55 million to promote that movie rather than to maintain the integrity of the Washington Post. And when, at a time when the events in Minneapolis scream we need more independent journalism looking over the shoulder of the government than we have ever needed it. So we're going to cut. How is it possible that there is a man like Jeff Bezos who's in a position to do all of this horrific damage? Well, it's the same with me. It's absolutely ruining the lives of all these young people, corrupting the legal system so that he could slither out of it. Mr. Acosta, who was the first minister of labor under the first presidency of Mr. Trump, we find out was the local legal authority who looked the other way so that Epstein could get out of being properly dealt with for what he was caught and convicted of doing. It is a testimony if you needed it, that allowing inequality like this.

becomes an invitation, a goad, if you like, to these wealthy people to literally push the boundaries, like an out-of-control child who has to test how far can I go in throwing food before mommy and daddy tell me, you know, you're not going to get your dinner if you keep throwing the food. Nobody's there to do that. for these gentlemen. And so they have sex slavery on a hidden island for decades before anybody does anything about it. You know, that's interesting. It's a very interesting take. Thank you for that, Richard Wolfe. And it's interesting to me because I think in terms of the chain of effect, you know, the causal relationships, I look at it a little differently. And I think the two views are complementary. But to me, this one of the things this illustrates. starkly, because many other things illustrated as well, is that the system we have now, the capitalist so-called competitive, really anti-competitive, as soon as people can arrange that, but the system is, it, It self-selects, you know, sociologists say some things are self-selecting groups. It self-selects for psychopathy, for psychopaths. The way, it's as if we created a system of economic governance and political governance where, you know, you don't take a task like the Mandarin system and Imperial China, you know, advance through elections or whatever. The most... sociopathically obsessive competitor and accumulator of personal power and wealth, whatever the cost, wins. And when they win, they get to be Jeff Bezos. They get to be Bill Gates. They get to be all these other people who are implicated in it. They get to be Jeffrey Epstein. And Hello, they do horrible things. Well, you just, Elon Musk and whomever. Well, you've been defending a system, you all, not you, well, you've been defending a system that encourages that, you know, back in the 1980s, you know, I've mentioned this before, the director, Oliver Stone, when he made the character of Gordon Gecko in Wall Street saying, greed is good. He was a villain. Stone was amazed that people treat, young Wall Street guys treated Gordon Gecko as their hero. He said, you know, he's like, he's like the devil. I mean, what do you? But.

Of course, but that's what you've been celebrating. That's what you've been encouraging. And then you're right, and there's studies about this too, that people as they, you know, not, I mean, there are exceptions, but people as they move up a certain income ladder and live a more insulated life, you know, their empathy may wane and so on to say the least. But we have a system. And the other thing that strikes me in my other view of the Epstein, horrible saga that we're seeing now is it almost, it's starting to feel to me like a hologram where it's got these different dimensions and layers. And when you move around it, you see, because you see the real, really billionaire people like Bill Gates, okay, who's now, you know, implicated. I can't say it's proven, but, you know, the suggestion in the emails that he had sex with Russia women and got a disease. Jeffrey Epstein claimed that anyway. His wife. ex-wife now is who was very upset about his association with the epstein we hear that she's uh you know she's not denying those stories so um So you have those guys, and they are guys, of course, which is a big part of the story. Then you have the Epstein's for the sort of grand viziers to these people, right, where Epstein made hundreds of not billions, but hundreds of millions by managing their money and making connections for them. And he's almost... He's a combination of, you know, the sociologist Stanley Milgram talked about connectors, right? People who just put people together. Epstein seems to have been partly that. And partially, I think in Yiddish, the word was, Hanloman, a Hanloman. You know, guy, you know, you worked it out for you. You needed to get our private plane to the Caribbean. Jeffrey will get you on, you know, so this kind of grand vizier slash handloman to the real billionists. Rich as hell compared to the rest of us. And then you have the mere multimillionaires like Deepak Chopra, the, you know, sort of self-help alternate spirituality guru, physician, and, you know, who's most memorable quote, perhaps the most memorable quote from this latest tranche of emails. He wrote, I believe I've got this correctly, that he wrote to Jeffrey Epstein, God is a construct period. Pretty girls are real. And obvious, you know, it seems obvious anyway that he was joking, quote unquote, but he was also toadying. You know, it's just a sequence to the point of repulsive. And, of course, the victims and all this. these women who were treated like things uh like objects because these men knew they could do it and that is a part of you know the same i'm going to call it psychopathy that leads people to like you know cheat and lie and you know go behind people's backs and break deals and do whatever they have to to get ahead um

But I could tell you stories from my own career, about not from myself, but from people I worked with or a four and observed and so on, that that and the rush they get off of that, well, you can get that too off of like breaking the spirit of a young girl for your own sexual satisfaction. It's just so lonesome, so disgusting. But to me, it's all of a peace. And it's this sort of capitalist. hyper-capitalist monkey house where, you know, the big apes are being served by the medium-sized apes and the little one, and then down to the frail ones that they just beat and batter and then throw away. And it to me is the lowest, represents the lowest of human existence of my only prayer for this, if I may use that theological word, is that people come to understand that this is what our system does. This is what it is. This is the real thing, right? You're getting to see the beating heart of it now. If you don't like it and you're sick if you don't hate it, if you don't like it, you might want to change the whole system to put these people in charge of everything. I agree, I agree. I also think that's something here that we have to face. And it's sexism. These are men. The vast majority of the people being caught up here are men. Jeffrey Epstein didn't bring adult women. He brought men and he brought children. And he put those two things together, the children and the adult men, the adult men whose sexuality. has to at the very least be deeply questioned. These are not people who've been able to have an adequate sexual connection to an adult female or male, for that matter, that could be a partner and could satisfy the complexities that life is about. No, these are people who live in another world. It's the world of pornography, of watching somebody else's. sexual activity, only it's one better than that. It's one you can control. It's one that, because you're an adult, surrounded by male adults on an island that the young girls cannot escape, you know, because they got there by an airplane, etc. This is a fantasy life of people who have the money to do such a thing, but who also have... a twisted sexual, repressive, you know, I understand our culture is sick about sex, right? My parents were Europeans and...

Lord knows, Europeans have a lot of problems. But when my mother was a teenager in Germany, she was sent at age 13 or 14 to the beach in the summer with other young teenagers, and these were nude beaches. And it was explained to them, look so you know what this is all about, so you're not intimidated, you're not frightened. No one's going to tell you get your fill of what you need to see. And the implication was you make some experiment. You do what young people do one way or another anyway. But no one is pretending that it isn't there, that it isn't normal, that it isn't that. We don't do that in our culture. We have no way of doing that. To hear the rest of this conversation with Richard Wolfe, please go to zero hour report.com slash the zero hour. We'll be right back after this on Richard. RJ Eskow and you're listening to The Zero Hour. This is The Zero Hour. Check out our free video archives at YouTube.com slash The Zero Hour.

we are back on the Zero Hour. I'm your host, Richard R.J. Escal. In talking about Jeffrey Epstein, as we did with Professor Wolfe this week, of course there were topics we didn't get to. And those topics include the open questions about his death, about his relationship with Israel and other government entities, about how exactly he escaped more severe punishment in Florida for his... initial crimes about the involvement of progressive heroes like uh well at least noam chomsky we can't get to all those topics but what we can do and will do is continue to cover this story and every story that represents the pathologies we face as a society. So I hope you'll support us in that effort at zero hour report.com and patreon.com slash the zero hour. We'll see you same time, same place next week. I'm Richard R.J. Eskow, and this is The Zero Hour.