What Epstein, the Great Recession, and the Opiod Crisis have in common
Wealth Privilege: The ability to leverage a nexus of connections facilitated by vast quantities of money, AND close proximity to the high and mighty, to reduce the chances to a bare minimum of ever personally being held accountable, let alone doing significant prison time, for actions that advanced selfish interests through means that predictably would and did destroy the lives of hundreds, thousands, and sometimes even millions of lives.
Wealth Privilege is almost always bestowed on white men in America, but it is only available to the wealthy. Being white or male alone is not enough. A token female or person of color wealthy person sometimes benefits from Wealth Privilege, but the poor never do. the working Class never do. Neither does the middle class.
It is impossible to commit the heinous barely veiled crimes that Jeffrey Epstein subjected hundreds to for decades without having Wealth Privilege. It is impossible to to giddily play roulette with the world economy, pocketing all the winnings with the regulators disarmed, without having Wealth Privilege. It is impossible to flood the nation with highly addictive prescription drugs for years while hundreds of thousands died, without having Wealth Privilege. In all of these cases some besides the direct perpetrators saw what was actually going on. But they were ridiculed, threatened, fired, fastidiously ignored, overruled, or simply bought off.
It goes far deeper than the term white collar crime implies. Wealth Privilege allows a few to custom order the laws they need to allow them to operate unimpeded. And when their greed and gluttony violates even those lax standards, they can hire an army of the most highly trained and connected lawyers in America to bargain down their pleas (if having political figures in their pocket was not good enough protection), paying large fines if need be rather than spending decades locked up in jail. Fines that they pay with a portion of the money that they looted to begin with, in those cases where their crimes were financial to begin with.
The Republican Party, for the last century in America, has always catered to the high and mighty.They have remained at their beck and call. But Republicans never have and never will occupy all of the political seats of power in this nation. So those with Wealth Privilege seek Democrats to influence also, sometimes in ways that are corrupt, sometimes in ways that seem far more innocent. As long as Democrats routinely travel in circles (or even just in private planes) of those who possess Wealth Privilege, however innocently they do so, a large swath of the voting public will see evidence that politicians are for the most part all alike, with few if an of them truly having their backs.
The New Deal, and later the Great Society, bestowed on the Democratic Party a legacy of fighting for the "common man". Far far more than with Republicans, that remains the truth But the perception of that once bold legacy has faded with the intervening decades.We are seldom thought of today as the party of Labor. Whether or not the time is now right to nominate a presidential candidate from the wing of our Party most associated with Elizabeth Warren and/or Bernie Sanders; whether or not they are pitching the right prescriptions for the challenges now facing us, there are valid political reasons for why an economic message that steps outside the bounds of celebrating "the free market" and all the wealth accumulating at the top of it, has been resonating increasingly in recent years.
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