Epstein, Summers … and Trump:
The Capitalist Class After Dark

Nov 24, 2025

When a U.S. House committee released 20,000 emails of convicted sex offender and human trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, one of the most prominent names that popped up was that of Larry Summers, the former Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton.

It turns out that Epstein and Summers regularly communicated in hundreds of messages between 2013 and 2019. Those emails revealed just how much Summers and Epstein, the convicted sex offender, had in common. After the emails were published, a contrite Summers was forced to resign from all of his important positions in academia and business.

None of this was a surprise. The kinds of bigoted statements Summers wrote in private to Epstein, he occasionally let slip out in public. In 1991, as chief economist of the World Bank, for example, Summers circulated a memo advocating shipping toxic waste produced in the richer countries to Africa. “I’ve always thought that underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted,” wrote Summers. He claimed that it wouldn’t be a problem, since people die younger in Africa, anyway!

This might have sounded shocking. But it was little more than a justification for what the big capitalists in the imperialist countries were doing anyway. It certainly was not a problem for President Bill Clinton, who soon afterwards appointed Summers to his economic team, where Summers eventually became Secretary of the Treasury.

During his tenure, Summers was praised by the capitalists for pushing through bailouts of the U.S. banks during the financial meltdowns in Mexico and East Asia, bailouts that were paid for by the working class and poor through harsh austerity programs.

His role in those bailouts helped Summers land the job of president of Harvard University, another plum job, in the year 2000. In 2005, while occupying that position, Summers defended the fact that there were many fewer women holding important positions in the sciences, by claiming that women have less “innate” ability than men. An outcry this caused forced Summers to resign. But he remained at Harvard, holding one of the most prestigious faculty positions at the most prestigious university in the country.

In reality, Summers was just giving the usual justification for the rampant discrimination against women in academia and business.

Certainly, Barack Obama didn’t let any of that stop him from tapping Summers to head his economic team in the wake of the financial collapse of 2008 and deep economic recession. Once again, Summers was called upon to help push through the massive taxpayer-funded bailout of the banks, insurance companies and auto companies, while millions of workers lost their jobs and millions of homeowners their homes.

After leaving the Obama administration, Summers continued to gain great stature and wealth by loyally serving the rich and powerful. He was connected to some of the richest companies in finance and business, which rewarded him with compensation packages worth tens of millions of dollars.

And, as a regular paid commentator for The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post and Bloomberg News, Summers was always ready to call for more sacrifices from the working class. Thus, over the last few years, Summers advocated mass layoffs of millions of workers, supposedly to fight inflation.

In fact, Summers’ contemptuous attitude toward workers and women and his racist innuendos are simply the important everyday tools that the capitalists use to divide the working class and poor.

No wonder that Summers found in the sex trafficker Epstein a kindred degenerate, laughing at the same lewd jokes, confiding in each other over the latest gossip. In reality, it was just like Donald Trump was besties with Epstein in his own degradation of women and all of humanity.