By Blox Content Management
Copyright berkshireeagle
To the editor: On Sept. 8, The New York Times published an impressively detailed 8,000-word headlined “How JPMorgan Enabled the Crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.”
The article establishes in damning detail how one of the world’s largest and most famous banks enabled Mr. Epstein’s crimes for many years, even after his conviction as a sex offender. This, despite multiple warnings by several of its own internal watchdogs that his huge withdrawals of cash were red-flag indicators of probable criminal activity and that the bank should drop him as a client.
I am encouraged to see a mainstream corporate news outlet do this kind of old-fashioned muckraking journalism about one of its corporate cousins. Such reporting is reminiscent in spirit of the work of early 20th-century journalists like Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell. Too often during my 60 years as an addicted reader of the Times and other newspapers has our corporate media treated powerful corporate enablers of crime with journalistic kid gloves.
I hope that the Times and other large news operations will now bring the same degree of detailed investigative diligence to bear on the flow of the billions of dollars, from all sources over many decades under the aegis of both Democratic and Republican administrations, that have enabled the crimes of the state of Israel against people in Gaza, Lebanon and elsewhere. Ditto for the flow of campaign contributions from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to candidates for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
John Breasted, Great Barrington
