Epstein survivors issue urgent plea to Congress, Trump now wants materials released, and the ultimate corruption of money.

Hmmm. . . that's interesting.  Trump's now okay with it.

Trump and his acolytes went from demanding their release, to absolutely opposing it.  Now they're in favor of it again.

What gives?

Well one thing may simply be that so much time has gone by, these files are now scrubbed.  Sounds conspiratorial, I know, but files can be scrubbed, or lost.

The problem here is that the whole thing sounds so, well, all over the place that an effective scrubbing might be impossible.

Another one is that Trump might already know it won't get past the Senate.  Just yesterday loyal flunky John Barrasso stated he wasn't sure if they'd vote on it or not.  Figures like Barrasso figure their Senate seats are so safe that they're untouchable.  They aren't, and he was running pretty scared last time, but they tend to think that way.

Or it just isn't worth the political capital that it was burning up.  That would suggest that whoever is getting protected just isn't worth this level of damage, particularly that some formerly loyal MAGA's have gone overboard into the lifeboats.  The Republicans only barely control the House now and are set to lose them in the midterms.  If only two or three more Republicans in the House abandoned ship, Mike Smarmy Johnson is done for and the GOP would start to break free of King Donny.  Two Republican House members, including amazingly Marjorie Taylor Greene, are openly poking the king and he's been able to do nothing about it.

Yet another is that, related to above, Trump just intends to lie his way out of whatever they say, if they're damaging to him, and so far we have no reason to believe that in spite of his personally gross behavior towards women, that he's implicated in kiddy diddling.  At the worst, it's possible that he knew what was going on and didn't do anything about it,  and there's likely a lot of rich and powerful people in that boat.  Or maybe he actually didn't.  Epstein was a creep, but just having young bikini wearing women on the premises doesn't necessarily mean that diddling is going on.  So whatever is in there, he may be confident won't touch him directly, and whomever it does, well he can always say it includes Democrats too, which it probably does.

Which may be, after all is said and done, the biggest lesson.  Since Ronald Reagan this country has followed the absurd notion that's what's good for the wealthy is good for everyone.  As Oliver Bullough has stated; "All money corrupts, and big money corrupts bigly".   

Businessmen plotted to take over the government and install fascism in the 1930s.  The plot failed, and nobody was prosecuted.  Reagan sold the American public the idea that vast wealth trickles down.

Epstein hung out with the rich and powerful. Some of them he supplied with teenage girls.  The money didn't trickle down, and its not trickling down.  Rather, it's morally corrosive and effectively the Business Plot ultimately won out with the election of Donald Trump, aided by the Democrats prime strategy being a judicial coup rather than an oligarchic one.  

There's still time to reverse that. This might be a good place to start.

A New Business Plot?

In the early 1930s, upset with President Franklin Roosevelt, some well-placed businessmen plotted to stage a coup and install Gen. Smedley Butler (an odd choice, given Butler's independent character) as a fascist "President", or at least there's reason to believe they were plotting that.

Butler wouldn't go along with it, the plot failed, and FDR, thinking it best to not disrupt the country too much, never brought it out in the open, if in fact he did not outright encourage a general belief that the whole thing had never happened.

Read the recent Robert Reich item here:

The dangerous anti-democracy coalition

American oligarchs are joining Trump and his faux working-class MAGA movement

Reich reports that Elon Must recently held a billionair's gathering with the tehme of defeating Biden in which he invited; well. . . :

The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s Treasury secretary.

You've heard of Murdoch, of course, the Australian-born billionaire who owns newspapers of a certain type, and who has recently been opposed to Trump.  And you've heard of Michael Milken.  Certainly you've heard of South African born Elon Musk.¹

Consider this quote by billionaire Peter Theil.

The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron. ² 

Consider that somewhat alarming?  Well consider this, from the same individual:

But I must confess that over the last two decades, I have changed radically on the question of how to achieve these goals. Most importantly, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.

Theil contributed $15,000,000 to J.D. Vance's campaign.  And according to Reich:

Just 50 families have already injected more than $600 million into the 2024 election cycle, according to a new report from Americans for Tax Fairness. Most of it is going to the Trump Republican Party.

One of the really remarkable things about politics of the last 20 or so years has been the swamping of right wing money into it.  Rank and file Republicans like to worry about George Soros, but it's really the far right that's getting the cash infusion, and it's showing.  It had a major impact on altering Wyoming's politics existentially, taking a more or less "leave me alone, and I'll leave you alone" brand of local Republicanism into far right populism.  Early on, that was accompanied by lots of money. So much so that one frustrated legislature told me that those forces were "buying the legislature".  

The amazing thing to see is the degree to which those who have radically different economic interests simply follow along.  Again, the far right likes to call everyone else "sheep", but the analogy actually applies to Republican voters far more, who vote against their own economic interests continually.  

The extremely wealthy can use their wealth in any number of ways.  It's notable that Warren Buffett and Bill Gates weren't on the list.  But that this occurs at all is troubling, to say the least.  

Capitalist may believe that their interests serve everyone else, and that "freedom" would be "preserved" in an odd sort of Pax Capitalismus with a Cesarean Trump at its head, and probably as a figurehead but wealth, business and capital doesn't exist for the wealthy, but for everyone.  

Panem et circenses, hatred and discontent, and false internal enemies.  Sadly, the trend is well-developed, helped on by a Democratic Party beholding to its own blood soaked, genitals obsessed left wing.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

Footnotes:

1. There's something concerning here that two really rich guys who were not impoverished when they showed up here are now messing with American politics in some fashion.  This, as much as anything, shows how screwed up our immigration policies are. Both Murdoch and Musk ought not to be in the US at all.

2.  It's getting impossible not to note the real rise of misogynistic commentary by the far right.  

It's not the comments of people like Harrison Butker so much, as the comments by other characters on the far right.  Butker's comments have to be taken from the position of traditional Catholic thought.  In some Evangelical corners of Christianity, however, there are now some really beyond hostile views of the current roles of women.  Interestingly, these same forces seemingly have no problems with conduct well outside the Christian norm, ranging from Trump's serial polygamy to Theil's homosexuality.

All this should give the far right pause.  People like Trump, or Theil, clearly aren't in the traditional Christian camp if their own conduct is observed.