The late-autumn light over Harvard Yard is the color of old money—filtered through centuries of ivy, softened by the hush of endowment portfolios. Lawrence H. Summers stands just off the path, coat collar turned up against a wind that smells of leaf mold and printer ink from the nearby economics department. Behind him, the trees are a cathedral of trunks: elms and oaks that have watched generations of presidents, provosts, and Treasury secretaries come and go. They are witnesses, these trees, to the quiet choreography of power. And now, thanks to 20,000 pages of emails released by House Republicans, they stand behind a photograph that is no longer just a photograph.
It is evidence.
I have spent over a decade in conversations with workers living in the overcrowded dormitories of Singapore, sitting on plastic stools while describing the algorithmic surveillance that docks their wages for “slow movement.” I have walked the red-dirt paths of rural West Bengal, listening to women whose land was swallowed by a World Bank-funded dam. In those margins, I learned to read power not in boardroom minutes but in the tremor of a voice, the pause before a sentence, the way a body shrinks when a uniform appears.
So when I open the Epstein-Summers correspondence—March 16, 2019, 3:08 p.m.—I do not see gossip. I see the grammar of monopoly.
Summers writes: “I said what are you up to. She said ‘I’m busy.’ I said awfully coy u are.” Eleven minutes later, Epstein replies: “shes smart. making you pay for past errors. ignore the daddy im going to go out with the motorcycle guy, you reacted well.. annoyed shows caring., no whining showed strentgh.”
The typos are deliberate, a private code between predators. This is not flirtation; it is ledger-keeping. The same ledger that once priced subprime mortgages now prices a woman’s weekend. The same off-balance-sheet vehicle that hid toxic CDOs now hides a teenager on a private jet.
The trees behind Summers do not flinch, but the subaltern know this language.
It is the language of extraction.
Extraction, Power, and Neoliberal Violence
Walk with me now to the glass towers of Lower Manhattan, 1999. Inside a conference room scented with espresso and entitlement, Summers—fresh from the Treasury—leans across a mahogany table. Across from him sits Sandy Weill of Citigroup, grinning like a man who has just been handed the keys to the vault.
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act is about to erase the line between commercial banking and casino speculation. Summers signs off. No public debate. No subaltern testimony. Just a handshake and a promise of future consulting fees.
Nine years later, the same architecture collapses $14 trillion into the ether.
In Detroit, a grandmother loses her home to a foreclosure mill run by a bank Summers once regulated. In Palm Beach, a fourteen-year-old is flown to Epstein’s island on a plane registered to a shell company that shares an address with a Citigroup subsidiary.
Same monopoly, different currency.
The monopoly has three faces, and they wear the same smile.
Face one: sexual violence as financialized asset. Epstein’s black book is a balance sheet. Girls are line items, depreciated over time, written off when they age out of the market. The same algorithms that bundled subprime loans into AAA securities now bundle bodies into “experiences” for hedge-fund clients. The extraction is seamless.
Face two: technocapital as surveillance enclosure. At MIT, Joi Ito solicits Epstein for donations while the Media Lab builds facial-recognition tools later sold to ICE. The same neural networks that predict mortgage default now predict which migrant worker will miss curfew. Data is the new subprime—over-leveraged, under-regulated, toxic.
Face three: academia as reputational laundry. Harvard’s $50 billion endowment is a sovereign wealth fund with a library attached. Summers presides over it like a hedge-fund manager, courting Epstein’s millions while silencing faculty who question the ethics. Knowledge becomes IP, IP becomes monopoly rent, rent becomes offshore accounts. The circle closes.
The margins talk back
Not Harvard’s, but the cracked concrete courtyard of a Singapore dormitory at 8 p.m. Almost twenty Bangladeshi men sit in a circle, phones glowing. They are deliberating on whether to strike against a contractor who docks wages for “algorithmic inefficiency.”
Their leader, Rahman, holds up a printed copy of the Epstein-Summers emails. “This is the same system,” he says in Bengali. “They gamble with our bodies the way they gamble with houses and young girls. It's all speculative extraction in their power circles.”
The vote is unanimous. The strike begins at dawn.
This is the anti-monopoly infrastructure we need—not top-down policy, but bottom-up circuitry.
Community data trusts that own the biometric logs. Worker councils with veto power over AI deployment.
Subaltern truth commissions that subpoena university presidents and force them to read the victim impact statements aloud.
A global wealth tax—2% on $50 million, 3% on $1 billion, 8% on $10 billion—whose proceeds fund survivor-led reparations and public land trusts that decommodify housing. Lifetime bans on post-public-service finance jobs. Mandatory disclosure of all elite correspondence, FOIA extended to academia. Glass-Steagall 2.0, Big Tech breakups, AI training caps at 1% of global corpus.
Cracks in power
Summers still stands outside, trees behind him.
But the photograph is cracking. In the margins, the subaltern are writing code—literal and figurative. In Detroit, foreclosure survivors are occupying bank-owned homes and turning them into cooperative shelters.
In Bengaluru, Dalit women are building open-source menstrual health apps that refuse venture capital.
In Singapore, the dormitory strike has spread to three construction sites.
The monopoly is not invincible; it is brittle. The platforms are not omniscient; they can be dismantled and recoded in imaginations that center worker rights and the right of those who have historically been placed at the margins by the Epstein-Summers-Clinton-Trump nexus.
The trees will remember.
Not the handshake in 1999, not the email at 3:19 p.m., but the moment when the margins rose and rewrote the ledger.
Redistribution is not a slogan. It is infrastructure. And it is already under construction.