Epstein and the Clintons: As Hillary Launched Presidential Campaign, Epstein Feared Exposure Since Jeffrey Epstein’s second arrest in 2019, the Clintons have spent considerable effort distancing themselves from the enigmatic financier, and they are currently fending off House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer, who threatened contempt proceedings after the political power couple refused to testify this week regarding their relationship to Epstein. Epstein first came into public view after accompanying former President Bill Clinton on a 2002 tour of Africa, aboard Epstein’s infamous Boeing 727 plane, later dubbed “Lolita Express.” Abundant photos from that Africa trip—with Kevin Spacey and Chris Tucker—have just been released by the Justice Department. Through a spokesperson, Bill Clinton has acknowledged traveling on Epstein’s jet during a humanitarian tour of Africa in 2002, but has said he knew nothing of Epstein’s crimes, never visited Epstein’s properties, and ended contact in 2005. In a Justice Department interview in July 2025, Ghislaine Maxwell downplayed Epstein’s connection to the former president, telling Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, “President Clinton was my friend, not Epstein’s friend.” Yet as Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign ramped up, it was Epstein looking to duck the Clintons. Epstein was facing increasingly dire legal consequences in South Florida, stemming from his years-long sexual exploitation of young women and girls. The glare of a presidential campaign risked unraveling what Epstein and his friend and ally Ghislaine Maxwell had so effectively constructed over the years, as they were increasingly associated with the spectacle of “Clintonworld.” In May 2007, the news media drove a scandal around the relationship between Hillary Clinton and Vinod Gupta, an Indian technology executive accused of corrupt dealings with the Clintons related to inflated consulting fees and travel on his company’s jet. In a May 26 email, four months before signing his “sweetheart deal” to avoid federal sex trafficking charges, Epstein predicted to Maxwell that Clinton’s opponents would “attack her ‘friends’ in any way they can,” and he warned her that Clinton’s presidential run could bring unwanted attention to Maxwell. He wrote to Maxwell, “you can see the papers are starting on hillary ‘friends’ Vin gupta,” he wrote, adding, “I think you are better off, not having your name associated.”
https://www.dropsitenews.com/p/jeffrey-epstein-hillary-bill-clinton-ghislaine-maxwellThe Domestic Costs of CIA Covert Action Abroad Run HighOn the evening of November 26, Andrew Wolfe and Sarah Beckstrom were stationed outside the Farragut West Metro Station in Washington, DC. Both were members of the West Virginia National Guard. As part of Donald Trump’s attempt to transform Democratic-voting cities into war zones, they had been sent to the nation’s capital. The two young West Virginians were approached by a man who opened fire, shooting both of them. Wolfe was critically injured; Beckstrom was murdered. The killing of twenty-year old Beckstrom was a heinous, senseless act of violence. Trump and his supporters, like politicians throughout US history, have cynically latched onto this tragedy to justify Trump’s decision to deploy American troops against American citizens in cities where their presence is unwelcome. And as the alleged shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, was an Afghan refugee, the Trump White House has doubled down its xenophobic policies, promising to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.” But the alleged shooter is not any ordinary immigrant. Lakanwal was brought to this country thanks to his work with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as part of what can only be described as a death squad. As horrific as the shooting was, it is not the symptom of the “American carnage” Trump falsely claims is laying siege to cities where the majority of Americans did not vote for him. Instead, the killings are part of a deep, systemic problem, one that is deeply inconvenient for political elites across the spectrum. As the CIA has waged war through covert actions across the globe, the consequences of their hubristic machinations have blown back on American shores with deadly consequences. And those consequences are seldom felt by the elites who push the wars, but rather felt by ordinary Americans.
https://jacobin.com/2025/12/cia-blowback-afghanistan-terrorism-mujahideen Karl Marx. The Poverty of Philosophy Chapter Two: The Metaphysics of Political Economy PT 3. Competition and MonopolyGood side of competition “Competition is as essential to labour as division…. It is necessary … for the advent of equality.” [I 186, 188] Bad side of competition “The principle is the negation of itself. Its most certain result is to ruin those whom it drags in its train.” [I 185] General reflection “The drawbacks which follow in its wake, just as the good it provides… both flow logically from the principle.” [I 185-86] Problem to be solved “To seek the principle of accommodation, which must be derived from a law superior to liberty itself.” [I 185] “There can, therefore, be no question here of destroying competition, a thing as impossible to destroy as liberty; we have only to find its equilibrium, I would be ready to say its police.” [I 223]
M. Proudhon begins by defending the eternal necessity of competition against those who wish to replace it by emulation [Engels: The Fourierists]. There is no “purposeless emulation,” and as “the object of every passion is necessarily analogous to the passion itself – a woman for the lover, power for the ambitious, gold for the miser, a garland for the poet – the object of industrial emulation is necessarily profit. Emulation is nothing but competition itself.” [I 187] Competition is emulation with a view to profit. Is industrial emulation necessarily emulation with a view to profit, that is, competition?? M. Proudhon proves it by affirming it. We have seen that, for him, to affirm is to prove, just as to suppose is to deny. If the immediate object of the lover is the woman, the immediate object of industrial emulation is the product and not the profit. Competition is not industrial emulation, it is commercial emulation. In our time industrial emulation exists only in view of commerce. There are even phases in the economic life of modern nations when everybody is seized with a sort of craze for making profit without producing. This speculation craze, which recurs periodically, lays bare the true character of competition, which seeks to escape the need for industrial emulation.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch02c.htm