@nirile
I've been wondering when someone would get around to writing out some context for Chomsky being "in the Epstein Files".. And Greg Grandin did, and Walden Bello provides an intro to Grandin's long Nation article.

Walden Bello:^1

Grandin is right, Noam responded to every email and started from the basic assumption one was approaching him in good faith until proven otherwise. When I approached him cold back in 1981, via snailmail, asking him to read and, if he felt it met his standards, endorse "Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines," I was astounded when I received back a detailed commentary on the manuscript along with his endorsement, which contributed mightily to discrediting the Marcos-World Bank relationship that was the subject of the book. Speaking for myself, from my personal experience with the man, he is both an intellectual giant and a person of great integrity. ^1

Greg Grandin:^2

Chomsky earned a reputation early in his career as someone whose door was always open—who talked to anyone who knocked and answered any letter delivered. Then came e-mail.

I wrote Chomsky cold in the early 1990s, and within a week, I was in his Cambridge office. We spent an hour discussing Iran-contra and death squads, and before I left, he gave me his “secret” e-mail address, [email protected], which, as it turned out, wasn’t so secret. He gave that address to everyone anyway.Chomsky, to be clear, has not been implicated in any of Epstein’s crimes. Rather, he seems to have been one of the many marquee names Epstein cultivated over the years.Tunnel focused on geopolitics and on crimes of state, Chomsky apparently didn’t see what others saw clearly: that Epstein was a pimp servicing a privatized global aristocracy, and that his victims were children.And who knows, if more e-mails come out on the Chomsky-Epstein relationship, this whole essay may read as wrong as that tweet.

Still, Chomsky’s e-mails display none of the fawning chatter found in, say, Summers’s mash notes to Jefferey and Ghislaine, and none of the affective investment in Epstein that Anand Giridharadas dissects so sharply in a recent New York Times opinion piece, “How the Elite Behave When No One is Watching.”^3 And he does not appear to have been co-opted by whatever access Epstein provided.

^1 facebook.com/walden.bello/post…

^2 thenation.com/article/society/…

^3 archive.is/TbYs7

#GregGrandin #WaldenBello #NoamChomsky #EpsteinFiles #EpsteinAndChomsky #GrandinOnChomsky #GrandinOnEpstein

🧵
> ... they didn’t give it to Donald Trump, but they seem to have given it to the next best thing in terms of — at least as long as Marco Rubio is concerned, if he needs justification to escalate military operations against Venezuela. It really seems to be a disastrous choice and a smear on the — I mean, your next guest is Cory Doctorow. It’s really the #enshittification of the Nobel Peace Prize. I mean, they gave it to Kissinger in the 1970s, but at least he — they waited 'til he negotiated an end to the Vietnam War.
#GregGrandin