I think our disagreement here is pretty narrow, about how covert the coverup really is. But when you say you "have a pretty good picture of how it works," I have to ask if you know anything about who is currently supplying children for the ultra-wealthy's sexual entertainment. If you don't know, if it's not generally known, then I think that means there is a covert network that does its best to stay hidden.
If you think that's somehow no longer happening any more, then I think you really don't understand how the world works. People like that do not give up their indulgences easily.
You may simply think I'm ascribing more planning and coordination than I really am, and that would just be a miscommunication. However, I do think there are definitely some small number of people who put a lot of thought into how to get away with this, and they've largely succeeded for decades.
A journalist could get to the bottom of the coltan mining trade and expose one chain there, but how do you think they'd fare exposing the latest Epstein-style network? Do you think they'd live through it?
Honestly even that’s ambitious.
Yeah, that's true, but my point was even in the worst-case scenario that consequences really did happen to someone, it would be a middleman, and that's by design. Epstein was no different in that respect.
Sure, it scares them, but do they really viscerally believe it’s not just a thing on TV?
There was a guy on some news network around 2020 when people were panicking about Bernie Sanders and his nefarious communist plot to destroy America, and one guy was talking about how there was a time when he was really scared the communists would come in and kill all the rich people and he might've been one of those people strung up in Times Square. He certainly sounded terrified to me. Like I'm sure it was partly crocodile tears, but also you don't pull that story from nowhere. That's obviously something he thinks about.
I mean, I wouldn't say I'm always actively terrified of being hit by a train, but I take steps to avoid it. That's what I mean - they know it's a threat.
If you want poor countries to get on the development path, this is the deal basically, and slavery and other awful things tend to slip in along with that.
This is tangential, but it's my biggest issue with what you've said. Poor countries all over the globe are made and kept poor by colonialism which rolled into modern capitalist imperialism. Africa in particular has been particularly brutally invaded, pillaged and oppressed for centuries. The most recent mechanisms by which this is done have been the World Bank and the IMF sucking them into predatory loans with structural adjustment policies that are calculated to keep them poor and strip them of vital infrastructure.
The cheap labour isn't some natural transitional state between "undeveloped" and "developed". It is an imposed condition, and the only time such countries "develop" and improve their station is when the working class organises and forces change to happen. It is never handed down from above or a natural outworking of wealth flowing in from the market. The market is structured to ensure that any wealth that flows in from the exploitation of cheap labour is kept in the hands of a few and siphoned back out as quickly as possible.
This is very similar to the way that the working class is kept in a state of poverty by capitalists within their own countries, and oppressed by the state and the legal system. This is the situation that allows wealthy people to prey upon the children of poorer people with relative immunity. The girls are often plied with money, and if they do go to the police, what do they say? "Trump raped me on Epstein's private jet?" The cops won't touch that, and the wealthy know they won't touch it. We know it because that testimony exists and it hasn't gone anywhere. Even if a detective took the case, he'd wind up at the bottom of a river before too long.
I'm not saying this is a "conspiracy" in the sense that this entire situation is engineered just to get young girls, it's evolved over centuries to maintain power, and the powerful will take advantage of it every way they can.
