Yes All Billionaires
Regardless of whether or not they literally suck blood, the case that all billionaires suck.
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To call the release of the Epstein files “news” is an understatement of mythological proportions. The scope of documentation is so extensive, it would take at least a month to read it all, and that’s if you were getting paid. After mentions of Deepak Chopra and Noam Chomsky, it’s starting to seem like we need to check the files for any men rich enough to afford multiple houses, to see whether they’ve been accused of raping and torturing teens in a multimillion dollar sex ring, or just took a ride on the guy’s plane.
Donald Trump is mentioned in the Epstein files at least thousands of times, even more than a million times, if it were ever un-redacted. To comprehend a million of anything is a bit like pondering stars in the sky, grains of sand on golf course, or what it would be like to have billions of dollars — with a “b” and an “s” — to have transcended the category of millions altogether, when you think what even half a million dollars could do for the lives of the 35.9 million people living in poverty in the United States alone.
The Epstein files is information overload, though the broad facts are nothing new. Nine or ten years ago, my parents took my brother and I on a trip to St. John’s. One afternoon, on a dive boat cruising over calm turquoise waters, our captain pointed to a looming lump of sand with a blue-and-white chamber surrounded by palms atop its great hill, and said, “That’s pedophile island.” My dad raised his eyebrows, “Pedophile Island?” The guy nodded, “Yeah, that’s Jeffrey Epstein’s island,” like he’d been pointing out a sting ray.
On the phone the other night, my parents and I commiserated across political opinion, asking the big questions of our age, like, “Do all rich people know each other? And why are so many of them pedophiles?” I asked my mom if she saw the news about Deepak Chopra, and we bonded in agreement that he seemed like he sucked before that. A few minutes after we said goodbye, my dad text me, “Opera too,” my mom said, “Oh no.” I gasped and had to Google Oprah, who I was glad to learn is not a blood-sucking monster other than, of course, the fact that she’s a billionaire.
If someone is a billionaire, or even mere triple-digit multi-millionaire, there’s some chance they’re in those files. There’s Donald Trump being mentioned hundreds of thousands of times, as well as Elon Musk trying and failing to get an invitation — a man so truly uncool, they won’t let him into hell. But surely Elon Musk sucks as much as the proven pedophiles. Elon Musk’s wealth is beyond the scope of our stratosphere. Trump has profiteered an estimated $4 billion out of the presidency, and that’s peanuts compared to Musks’s $849.3 billion estimated net worth. Ethically speaking, he’s just as much a vampire as the men who are rumored to be harvesting blood, if only by virtue of being the richest man in the world, and feeling no real need to make it any better.
Certainly, it’s not the same as entrapping, raping and torturing teenagers, but, anyone who personally has a billion dollars is an asshole, and I do apologize to fans of Taylor Swift. When one individual personally controls over a billion dollars and there are one in five children at risk for hunger in the United States alone, you don’t have to the math to figure out, at the very least, that’s rude. We could get out a calculator to determine it is unethical to hoard any dollar amount over 100 x 10 x the standard of living in New York City, and whatever that adds up to ($138 million), is already a lot more than any one person needs to have in their possession. There are billionaires, and then there the apex oligarchs, some with a history of visiting pedophile island, others just an email away, less than half a dozen men who could single-handedly end poverty, and instead they’re torturing girls on a rock in the sea, or just jerking off with more money than we can possibly imagine.
While Oprah might not be a bloodsucker on the scale of some of those named, she did bring us Dr. Phil and played a large part in popularizing Dr. Oz.
If only the billionaire were simply hoarded their wealth, things would not be nearly as bad as they actually are. They have access to rates of return unavailable to the rest of us. Their wealth grows more than 5% more like 7 to 10% per year, no matter what they do. The mountains of wealth accumulating unearned interest that already exist are enough to condemn the rest of us to penury because they will simply own everything, and not in the distant future. They must be dispossessed, while State power is still sufficient to the task.