The Epstein Island of Everyday Capitalist Reality

Nancy O'Brien Simpson

Photo: Generated by AI by DALL·E 3 by OpenAI is licensed under Free for commercial use

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There is a missing thread in the public narrative of the Epstein scandal, one that hovers like a ghost in the archive but rarely enters polite conversation. We have heard about the money, the models, the private jets, the island. We have examined the transactional rot of a man who believed that teenage girls were merely amenities in the portfolio of the powerful. But folded into the corners of this story is a parallel truth: Epstein’s long-standing, mutually beneficial ties to the Israeli political and intelligence sphere—an element American media tiptoes around as if pointing it out is itself an act of sedition.

This is not rumor. It is documented in reporting from The Miami Herald, The New York Times, and former Israeli intelligence officials, including Ari Ben-Menashe, who told multiple outlets that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell worked as intelligence “assets” in the 1980s and 1990s. Even Ehud Barak—former Israeli Prime Minister and Defense Minister—acknowledged his financial partnership with Epstein, an association he later called “a mistake.” When Maxwell’s father, Robert Maxwell, drowned mysteriously off his yacht in 1991, British investigators uncovered his decades-long work for Mossad. The web was always there. We just preferred not to see it.

Why does this matter?

Because when we strip away the specifics, we find the same psychological architecture that undergirds Israel’s ongoing occupation and siege of Gaza. It is the mindset of a certain tier of global decision-makers—wealthy financiers, political elites, intelligence operatives, and the businessmen who glide between all three worlds—who share an unexamined assumption: that everything they desire is theirs by birthright.

We are told that “sex sells.” Every ad agency knows this. Every political operative knows this. But genocide does not sell, and so it must be narrated. It must be softened, reframed, hidden beneath the euphemism of security and self-defense. It must be sold through moral misdirection.

There is a structural link between the private exploitation of girls and the public devastation of Gaza. Not a conspiracy, but a worldview.

To a certain kind of powerful man, a female body and a piece of land serve the same function: they are resources to be acquired, controlled, and consumed.

Historical Patterns of Elite Entitlement

This attitude has deep roots.
In the late 19th century, King Leopold II of Belgium engineered the genocide of the Congolese people in order to extract rubber and ivory profits—an atrocity that killed an estimated 10 million Africans. Business interests masked as “civilizing missions.” In the early 20th century, American corporations overthrew Latin American governments that threatened fruit or mining profits, giving us the term “banana republic.” Today, U.S. defense contractors earn more from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than from most other foreign engagements; in 2023 alone, the Pentagon approved over $20 billion in weapons sales to Israel.

In each era, human beings became a means to an end.
Bodies were resources.
Land was a resource.
Life was a resource.

The same moral logic that fueled Epstein’s empire fuels the global systems that devastate the powerless.

The Economics of Devaluation

Consider the numbers:

Ecocide: The world’s richest 1% produce more carbon emissions than the poorest two-thirds of humanity combined (Oxfam, 2023).
Perpetual War: The United States has spent over $8 trillion on post-9/11 wars, with defense contractors earning historic profits, while American veterans struggle with homelessness and suicide.
Housing Crisis: In 2024, median rent in major U.S. cities topped $2,000—an all-time high—while corporate landlords like Blackstone and Invitation Homes bought tens of thousands of properties, driving prices up.
For-Profit Medicine: Americans spent $4.5 trillion on healthcare in 2023, yet medical debt remains the No. 1 cause of personal bankruptcy.
Wages: Nearly 45% of American workers earn less than $20 an hour, a wage that cannot support a one-bedroom apartment in most cities.
These statistics are not accidental. They reveal a system designed to extract life from those with the least leverage.

Epstein was not a glitch in the system.
He was the system—stripped of its polite language.

A Structural Mirror

What we see in Epstein’s rise is an x-ray of modern neoliberal power:
A man with no clear talent other than social manipulation becomes a billionaire-level operator, protected by intelligence agencies, bankers, diplomats, and corporate titans. When he is caught, the institutions responsible for justice buckle under the weight of his connections. When he dies—if that is even the correct verb—those same institutions fall silent.

No single nation or ideology owns this corruption. Rather, it is the natural outgrowth of a world economy that prizes extraction over dignity and power over truth. It is a system in which the boundary between capitalist oligarchy and the political-military state becomes porous, and where old-fashioned words like exploitation and domination are brushed aside in favor of cleaner phrases like market efficiency or security priorities.

Thus we arrive at the uncomfortable conclusion:

We are all living on The Epstein Island of Everyday Capitalist Reality—a world where the powerful feed on the weak, where the cost of elite ambition is measured in human suffering, and where the public is asked to swallow the narrative while the private deals take place offshore.

Epstein’s island was small.
The one we inhabit is planetary.

The question is no longer “How did this happen?”
The question is: “How long will we endure a world built this way?”