Thailand is unique among the nations of South East Asia in that it avoided being conquered by the European powers during their period of colonial expansion. I knew about this and had been mildly curious about how Thailand maintained its independence while the countries around it were falling but had never really followed up the question until I happened to meet a Thai socially recently and posed the question to her.
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As I had hoped, many more news outlets have started digging into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s financial background. In my ongoing attempts attempt to try to understand the financial elements of this saga, I found an informative time line of his life that appeared in the Sunday, July 14, 2019 edition of the Plain Dealer that they had created using Vanity Fair and the Miami Herald as their sources.
1953: Born to middle-class parents in Brooklyn.
1969-71: He attends Cooper Union School of Engineering but never attains a degree.
1973: He’s hired to teach math and physics at The Dalton School in Manhattan. Donald Barr, father of current Attorney General William Barr, is the school’s headmaster at the time.
1976: He joins Investment banking company Bear Stearns at the urging of chairman Alan Greenberg, whose son was a Dalton student.
1982: Epstein launches J. Epstein & Co., managing the finances of clients with $1 billion or more.
1990: He purchases a secluded Palm Beach, Florida, mansion, the site of several alleged assaults.
1996: He relocates his company, which he’s renamed Financial Trust Co., to the U.S. Virgin Islands.
1996: Epstein declares a Manhattan mansion at 9 E. 71st St. to be his, but the details are unclear. It’s mentioned by several accusers as the location where they were assaulted.
1998: He buys Little St. James Island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. ”Everybody called it ‘Pedophile Island,”’ said Kevin Goodrich, who is from St. Thomas and operates boat charters. ”It’s our dark corner.”
2005: A 14-year-old girl says she was paid to give Epstein a massage. The police investigation uncovers that he is in contact with many girls.
2006: In May, Epstein is charged with multiple counts of unlawful sex acts with a minor. In July, the investigation is referred to the FBI.
2007-08: Epstein receives a plea deal with Alex Acosta, who was then U.S. attorney for Southern Florida. Epstein receives 18 months in jail but serves only 12. The Miami Herald has since reported that Acosta signed off on a nonprosecution agreement that was ”negotiated, signed and sealed so that no one would know the full scope of Epstein’s crimes.” Acosta went on to become secretary of Labor in April 2017; he resigned Friday amid the growing scandal.
2011: Epstein fails to report as a sex offender to New York.
2015: Virginia Roberts states in a sworn affidavit that he began abusing her at the age of 15 in 1999 while she was employed at Mar-a-Lago.
2018: Beginning in November, the Miami Herald publishes a series outlining Epstein’s sexual misconduct and judicial leniency.
2019: Jennifer Araoz alleges that a woman recruited her outside high school in 2001, and that Epstein later raped her. She was 14.
July 2019: Epstein is arrested July 6 on charges of child sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. He’s accused of paying more than a dozen women and girls to engage in sex acts. Epstein’s lawyers claim that at worst, it was akin to soliciting prostitution.
The idea of Medicare for All has been steadily increasing in popularity, so much so that pretty much all the Democratic candidates for the presidency have endorsed it, a far cry from when Bernie Sanders advocated for it in his 2016 campaign, when it was seen as some kind of unrealistic Utopian goal. As a result, the right wing attacks on it have intensified and they have made all manner of misleading statements about it.
This ad from the Sanders campaign nicely sets the record straight.
Trump is lying again about Medicare for All. Here is what it really means for Americans:
-No premiums
-No co-pays
-No deductibles
-No losing coverage
-No "out of network" doctors
-No surprise bills pic.twitter.com/UbYfCiHAOy— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) July 13, 2019
A group of Republican lawmakers went to an immigrant detention facility in Texas. Donald Trump had sent them there, supposedly to dispel reports of awful conditions that had been coming from so many different sources. The video below shows vice president Mike Pence, and senators Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, Marsha Blackburn, John Cornyn, and Thom Tillis and possibly other senators visiting a detention center where men were housed in severely overcrowded cages and the guard wear masks to presumably avoid the stench of a large mass of people who have been denied basic sanitary facilities.
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Another leaked memo from the departing UK ambassador to the US Kim Darroch says that Donald Trump withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal in order to spite his predecessor Barack Obama who had negotiated the deal.
Donald Trump abandoned the Iran nuclear deal to spite Barack Obama, according to a leaked memo written by the UK’s former ambassador to the US.
Sir Kim Darroch described the move as an act of “diplomatic vandalism”, according to the Mail on Sunday.
It says the memo was written after the then Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson appealed to the US in 2018 to stick with the nuclear deal.
…The newspaper reports that after Mr Johnson returned to the UK from the US, Sir Kim wrote that President Trump appeared to be abandoning the nuclear deal for “personality reasons” because the pact had been agreed by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
…The paper reports that Sir Kim wrote a memo to Mr Johnson, saying: “The outcome illustrated the paradox of this White House: you got exceptional access, seeing everyone short of the president; but on the substance, the administration is set upon an act of diplomatic vandalism, seemingly for ideological and personality reasons – it was Obama’s deal.”
We knew this. The insecure and petulant man-child president’s main agenda has always been to reverse anything that was done by Obama.
Readers of this blog may be concerned that it has become all Jeffrey Epstein, all the time. The reason for my spending so much time on it is that the money aspects of this story might blow the lid off the seedy underbelly of the wealthy class in the US who have got so used to thinking of themselves as immune to any consequences of their actions, however awful. Anything that strips the veneer off them and shows them as they really are is something I am going to help move along in any way I can.
Let’s review what we know about the facts of the case. Epstein lived the life of a very wealthy person but it is murky as to exactly how wealthy he is and good reason to suspect that he was exaggerating it. Although he claims to be a hedge fund manager, it is not known how he earned his money and he has only one named client. Celebrities were constantly in his presence and attending his parties and otherwise socializing with him. Epstein is clearly a pervert who preys on young, underage, girls and seems to have them around all the time. And yet, these same celebrities claim to have not been aware of his perversions, with some even claiming not to have noticed any young girls around, despite their constant presence. And even after he was convicted in a sweetheart plea deal in 2008 and the scandal blew wide open recently, many of these celebrity friends not only did not condemn him, they only mildly distanced themselves from him, with some even claiming that they did not believe the charges against him.
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The first casualty of the new Jeffrey Epstein prosecution came about when labor secretary Alexander Acosta resigned this morning. The resignation followed the usual pattern in the Donald Trump administration, first of defiance and great expressions of support from Trump, to a resignation a couple of days later. Apparently Trump told Acosta on Tuesday to hold a press conference on Wednesday and get ahead of this story. Acosta duly obliged and gave a conference where he stated that rather than giving Epstein an unbelievably generous sweetheart deal in his earlier prosecution in 2008, he had actually got the severest sentence he thought possible. Trump then expressed his great confidence in Acosta. But that did not end the controversy and this morning, with Acosta at his side, Trump announced his resignation.
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After blathering on for a few days that, by golly, he was going to get the citizenship question on the census form somehow despite the US Supreme Court ruling that he could not, and that he would announce the method today, he said that he was giving up on the effort and the forms would be printed without asking the question. To save face, he said that he would get the information by other means.
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My favorite fake British journalist Jonathan Pie says that after being given an extension by the EU until October 31 and advised not to waste that time but to come up with a workable plan because there would be no more extensions, the country has done nothing really about what to do next on Brexit. Instead they have been spending much of their time choosing between whether foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt or former foreign secretary Boris Johnson will replace Theresa May as Conservative party leader and hence become the next prime minister. (Language advisory because it is after all Jonathan Pie.)
Writer Jesse Kornbluth at one time moved around in the same social circles as Jeffrey Epstein and he describes his personal experiences with Epstein and his entourage and the rich people who enabled his behavior.
My wife-to-be was then a military historian, with a book about to be published. Interview Magazine photographed her in a buttoned-up military shirt, with a taut khaki tie. A witty photo of an attractive woman. But not a sexy look. Jeffrey Epstein had chatted her up at a few parties. The military look fooled him not at all.
The night before our marriage, Epstein called. “It’s your last free night,” he told my wife-to-be. “Why don’t you come over and fuck me?”
That was how, in June of 1987, Jeffrey Epstein became dead to me.
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