The Epstein Files do not warrant shock and horror. A quiet nod of the head along with maybe a lopsided, very restrained smile might suffice. I will consider my most cynical smirk – the one conveying a sort of fatalistic disgust normally employed for train delays, and added charges to my cell phone bill. These redacted millions of pages contain just enough information to let us know two things: 1) the rich pukes who run our lives with godly, bored indifference, have been raping, torturing and maybe sometimes murdering trafficked children, and 2) absolutely nothing will be done about it.

The Epstein Files are not a revelation, but a reminder. Why feign horror when the feral dog shits on the rug? Do some of us accept that capitalism performs epic acts of mass murder and torture, yet blanche in utter disbelief at the sadistic hobbies that elites enjoy in private? Did anyone imagine that Larry Summers and Peter Thiel spent their down time delivering blankets to the nearest tent city?

We know the names – Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Howard Lutnick, this prince and that lord, and so forth – people who unwind from the hard labor of plundering the planet, or strutting and prancing in the glow of celebrity, with Jeffrey Epstein’s commodities. The child sex slaves, disposable as plastic straws, bought off, threatened into silence (murdered if need be), will be forgotten in a matter of weeks. Justice follows the contours of Darwinian power. The rule of law, seldom more than a ruse to placate our restless longing for a national soul, has been mockingly shattered in these Epstein File dumps.

What about Noam Chomsky? How does his illustrious career as a critic of capitalism resolve into a deeply sexist apology for Jeffrey Epstein? Maybe the subtle cultural strands of profit have a more universal toxic reach than most of us thought. In any case, the Epstein Files clarifies (for those who need it) just how unfairly “the system” operates.

As an outreach mental health worker, I quickly became accustomed to see my poor clients do hard time for, say, stealing a bicycle that appeared to be abandoned, or for getting patted down with a dime bag of heroin in their coat pocket. The balance sheet of capitalism requires that every few thousand or so people rotting in prison for the crime of desperate poverty be counterweighted by rapists and extortionists who live lives of complete freedom and sensational excess. The Epstein Files celebrate the names (redacted or not), of people too privileged to ever suffer justice. The “long arm of the law” never reaches the mansion on the hill.

Of course, Trump is the star of the Epstein files – his name appears more frequently in said files than does Jesus’ name get ink in the New Testament (not my line, I can’t recall where I stole it). The sexual criminality of Donald Trump enjoys no secrecy. Trump boasted about his ability to skate unannounced into beauty pageant dressing rooms. He bragged joyously about having free reign to “grab ‘em by the pussy,” and the political system and mass media smiled along as if he had confessed to snatching an extra handful of after dinner mints at Appleby’s.

We Americans have always been a forgiving people. We let bygones be bygones like no other country on earth. Take the case of Lt, William Calley, a forgotten footnote of the Vietnam War, who, somewhat “regrettably,” lead a group of US soldiers from “Charlie Company” into a “battle” against over 500 unarmed civilians in the remote village of My Lai. According to Calley’s Wikipedia page, the members of Charlie Company gunned down or bayonetted 504 Vietnamese unfortunates. If you want a statistical breakdown, the murdered victims included 60 elderly men, 282 women, 17 being pregnant. 120 children and 53 infants died from bayonet thrusts. Many of the women were raped before being shot.

The members of Charlie Company, unlike the names in the Epstein files, did not belong to the ruling class. These men were tools of elite colonial intentions who, therefore, enjoyed abridged, refracted privileges to violate human life. War is never more than a strategy on behalf of profits, and its practitioners have temporary immunity from the bonds of moral restraint. Therefore, the authorities offered Calley, and all the tangentially and explicitly involved killers at Mai Lai, a modified pass. Calley wound up serving three and a half years of “house arrest” for the massacre, rape and torture of 504 people. The “liberal” luminary, Georgia governor, and future president, Jimmy Carter, was outraged at Calley’s punishment – politicians across the nation demanded a full pardon. Calley’s superior, Captain Earnest Medina was acquitted for giving the order to kill. If the richest men on earth can freely rape and abuse children for fun and pleasure, we also have a very tender spot in our national heart for rapists and murderers who commit acts that are incidental to the patriotic cause of war.

The rapist/pardoner-in-chief, Donald Trump himself, gave a full pardon to Eddie Gallagher in 2019. Gallagher had been convicted in a military trial of stabbing a teenage Iraqi prisoner to death and triumphantly posing with the corpse. Trump knows first-hand what it feels like to be self-righteously held in contempt for harming defenseless adolescents. Now, Eddie Gallagher walks about as freely as Donald Trump himself.

But my favorite example of all American forgiveness involves the cases of Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering – respectively, the executive director and director of research at General Motors a century ago. Sloan and Kettering, who you might associate with the “Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center,” are the two greatest mass murderers in the history of planet earth. These guys realized that tetraethyl leaded gasoline (invented by Kettering’s underling, Thomas Midgely) offered GM the patent rights to each gallon of gasoline pumped in every corner of the globe. They had been warned that lead is a deadly poison, and responded by hiring the chemist and lead denier, Robert Kehoe to confuse the public. Across the past century, leaded gasoline (phased out via Richard Nixon’s 1971 “Clean Air Act”) proceeded to decimate life on earth. Approximately 100 million lives have been foreshortened via atmospheric lead, and every living being whose life spans intersected with the leaded gasoline era became stupider and psychologically less resilient. Those living in densely packed urban centers (poor people) adjacent to highways, suffered disproportionate neurological wounds. Indeed, it is not outrageous to propose that leaded gasoline’s degradation of the human mind has contributed significantly to our crumbling political systems and to the outstanding political feature of our times – fascism (a system wholly founded on human confusion).

What consequences did Alfred Sloan and Charles Kettering receive for committing the most catastrophic crime of all time? If you guessed none at all you win a prize. They were never charged, never investigated, never made to squirm in a courtroom like Lt. William Calley and Earnest Medina. Had Sloan and Kettering lived in our times, it is reasonable to imagine that they might have been regular visitors to Jeffrey Epstein’s Island. I don’t mean to ignore the pain of childhood victims of human trafficking, but the brutal rapes of under-aged girls might be among the least deadly sins committed by the ruling class.

If raping, beating, abusing and even murdering a few hundred children abducted by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell represents just a minor side-bar in the US assault on human well-being, how do we put the sexual crimes of oligarchs into a larger perspective? Should we pause from our social media binge of the Epstein spectacle to consider that poor children are 12 times more likely to be raped than those living above the poverty line? Might we also meditate on the fact that people living in poverty have a 200% increased risk to be victimized by violent crime? The names of the wealthy predators listed in the Epstein files might be taken as a who’s who of those driving the poverty industry. The Epstein Files, a family portrait, an unretouched (albeit, redacted) snapshot of the ruling class caught in the spontaneous act of being itself, ought not to be mistaken for something anomalous – an act of mere corruption. The Epstein Files shows the public the private face of societal suicide. When psychopaths seize control of governmental and corporate institutions, they gain the cover needed to act out the most predatory sexual fantasies, but that is nothing compared to what corporate and political policy inflicts upon countless millions of victims. If we are horrified at the private evils committed by Epstein’s clients, we ought to be far more distraught over the public crimes of these morally castrated pillars of capitalism – war, colonialism, privatized prisons, privatized hospitals, privatized armies and the unmitigated project of environmental ruin and mass extinction. If end stage capitalism tinkers with the “doomsday clock” should we be surprised by the noxious personal habits of those who engineer the potential mother of mass extinctions?

The centrist Democratic Party mindset aspires to create a retreat into the past, before Trump tore everything to shreds. But Epstein had no particular affinity for fascist Republicans, and operated across bipartisan spheres and multiple presidential administrations. He had deep ties to Israel and has been labeled as a Jewish supremacist, but I doubt that ideology or religion drove his operations. He was, above all else, a creature of capitalism, a model of self-interest and amoral pursuit of wealth and power. Epstein had, so he thought, the ability to blackmail the people who run planet earth. He had, we imagine, videos of kings, presidents and CEOs caught in the act of raping children. But Epstein overestimated the power of blackmail. The Epstein debacle serves as a reminder of corporate savagery – psychopaths have the combination to the safe, and every conflict hinges on the power of violence.

We have voted and revoted. The ballot box leads inevitably to Trump. We can’t vote our way out of this. It will take massive resistance – Minneapolis writ across the face of the country. I believe that the goal of resistance ought to be the end of electoral politics, the end of parties, the end of super-PACs, the end of politics as mass spectacle. The biggest challenge involves massive, organized, committed civil disobedience – but that will yield nothing without a vision of renewal.

The solution is in plain sight. I got my usual weekly Email from Alastair Binnie-Lubbock of the “Sortition Foundation” – an organization out of the UK that aspires to replace electoral bodies with “citizens’ assemblies.” I have been writing about sortition for a while – here, here and here – for example.

I apologize to my readers for taking so long to get to the point, but so-called electoral democracy created Jeffrey Epstein, Donald Trump and fascism. Electoral democracy, as I have repeatedly argued, is a front for capitalism. Corporate goons select your candidates and howl with laughter as you vote for one or the other of the two handpicked psychopaths who lie to you with all the conviction of a battery powered parrot. The Sortition Foundation has picked up on The Epstein Files because House Of Lords icon, Lord Peter Mandelson’s name, along with Prince Andrew’s, has turned up in the files. The Sortition Foundation has initiated The 858 Project that aspires to replace The House of Lords with a “Citizen’s Assembly” selected via sortition.

The Epstein Files might be seen as being a perfect publicity stunt sent by fate to bolster the cause of “direct democracy.” The only way to prevent ambitious psychopaths from “Bogarting” power, is to replace them with randomly chosen citizens. Once you allow people to “seek power” you open the floodgates of oligarchy, autocracy and fascism. Sortition inverts the process of governance – rather than having people seek power, power seeks people. Members of citizen’s assemblies are drafted at random, thereby destroying identity politics – statistical chance balances the face of power. Half of the members of a citizens assembly will be women, very few will be wealthy, Ivy League grads will all but disappear from the halls of power. Nurses, teachers, palm readers and mechanics will serve terms – not many lawyers will gum up the works. Racial and sexual discrimination have no effect on citizen’s assemblies. Random chance gently empowers everyone.

I believe that sortition will lead to socialism. If corporations lose the ability to fund campaigns, the magical grip that capitalism has over our contrived schemas will all but evaporate. Ordinary people. left to their own devices, will discover socialism with wide-eyed-wonder.

The most enormous obstacle to sortition is the obliviousness of the leftwing alternative media sphere. Who is talking about sortition? Nobody! And yet we feign shock and horror when capitalist electoral politics deliver clients to Jeffrey Epstein. Until the people hold power we will have colonial crimes, inequity, climate ruin, war and the faux meritocratic con-artists that spend their down time molesting children.

Phil Wilson writes at Nobody’s Voice.Email