… the most morally bankrupt of characters… [lacking] basic moral and behavioral standards…’

The Harvard Crimson calls for Larry Summers to resign.

Summers’ appointment as Harvard’s president “worried some of those who knew [him]. The economist had earned a reputation as a bull in a china shop, rudely dismissive of the opinions of others, astoundingly arrogant even by Washington standards.”

Some gems in this Politico piece.

It’s not just that Summers continued a friendship with a man who clearly had a pathological sexual interest in girls and had gone to jail for his sexual proclivities. It is also hard to imagine how Summers could have been so stupid as not to expect that emails with a convicted felon might one day go public.

As for the content of the emails… much of it is, in a word, gross. Certainly, we all write emails that, deprived of context, could embarrass us if they went public. But Summers’ emails went to a deeper, darker place; there is no context that absolves them.

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 In July 2011, the former Harvard president was interviewed at the Aspen Institute by its head, author Walter Isaacson, in front of an admiring group. A friendly Isaacson asked about the veracity of a scene in the movie The Social Network in which Summers agrees to meet with Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, two Harvard undergraduates who claimed that Mark Zuckerberg had stolen the idea for Facebook from them. The “Winklevi,” as Summers referred to them, came from Greenwich, Conn., rowed crew, were tall, handsome and old school — they wore coats and ties to meet the Harvard president. Summers disliked them instinctively, and the film portrays him treating them with humiliating condescension. Was it true? Isaacson wanted to know.

“One of the things you learn as a college president is that if an undergraduate is wearing a tie and jacket on Thursday afternoon at three o’clock, there are two possibilities,” Summers answered. “One is that they are looking for a job and have an interview. The other is that they are an asshole. This was the latter case.”

The remark — a former president of Harvard describing two of its students as assholes — prompted near-unanimous laughter from the audience, titillated by this trash-talking rule-breaker. Summers wore the chuffed look of a man who rarely tells a successful joke but is pleased to have done so now. The funny thing is that Summers was wrong on both counts: Zuckerberg wound up paying a $65 million settlement to the Winklevoss twins, and Larry Summers turned out to be the asshole.

As vile a compendium of moral squalors as his French economist twin, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Summers has for decades evaded the reputational death he so richly deserves. Finally, this morning, his long, gushing intimacy with/admiration for Jeffrey Epstein has forced his hand a tiny bit – He’s going to keep teaching and also to hold on to many of his bigshot appointments in Democratic policy circles to be sure, but okay he’ll step back here and there somehow somewhere from ‘public life’ …

Like Prince Andrew, a degenerate protected for decades by the crown, Summers has for years depended on the kindness of powerful friends to misspend/ineptly manage public and private money, to hang with fellow degenerates, to turn Harvard University into a hedge fund, and to broadcast mentally retarded statements about women. The death of Elizabeth finally destroyed Andrew; the life of Epstein has perhaps done the deed on Summers. Perhaps! He’s not yet been banished to a cottage deep in the thousand acre Sandringham wood; the hapless Democrats are probably hapless enough to keep him front and center…

Seriously, read this rather long 2020 piece on the dude by Robert Kuttner and ask yourself why it took five more years plus domestic life with a convicted sex offender for fate to catch up with this guy, and the answer has everything to do with hated elites who make everyone else take a licking and who themselves just keep ticking. How in God’s name did Harvard prez Summers survive the Andrei Shleifer scandal? How did Shleifer survive it? Elites protect their own; elites aren’t like you and me. Greedy for money, hugely powerful, they have contempt for the little peoples’ silly rules of ethical conduct. Why shouldn’t they? Their intimate Alan Dershowitz is always there to bail them out.

Keep reading the Kuttner. I know it’s long, but it has to be, because it is touching on the serial sordid cavortings of Democratic Sage Larry Summers, who must have breathed a sigh of relief when Epstein died cuz Larry’s secrets died with him. But Epstein turned out to be another Rasputin, a man of many lives before and after the grave.

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Fun ‘degrees of separation’ fact: Summers buddy, protégé, and co-author Jason Furman bought his Cambridge house from UD‘s friend Peter. It’s a house UD knows well, but she’s certain Furman has totally redone the thing, so she probably wouldn’t recognize it. (I put that particular link over Furman’s name because a fawning 2008 NYT piece about Summers’ rehabilitation after the Harvard presidency fiasco ends with this wonderful quote: “Now, who talks about Harvard?” Mr. Eizenstat, the former deputy Treasury secretary, said. “It’s a thing of the past, a little blip on the radar screen.” In a few years, perhaps the same paper will roll out Furman to say “Now, who talks about Jeffrey Epstein? It’s a thing of the past, a little blip on the radar screen.”)

“This kind of mutually reinforcing corruption is what one sees in failing societies and empires in decline.”

To protect his own ass, Trump’s currently going after prominent Dems who got down and dirty with Epstein; and, as loyal readers of this blog know, Harvard prez Larry Summers was way dirty. Mutually reinforcing corruption being what it is, Harvard never issued a condemnatory statement about Summers, but hold onto your hats cuz it’s probably coming.

Here he is dining with Mr Lolita (and Dersh, natch) where? Oh, babe, you can’t make this shit up. An Alice in Wonderland-themed restaurant steps from Harvard’s campus. Your blogeuese has eaten there and can attest that it attracted droves of thirteen year old girls (it no longer exists).

[rick friedman/polaris]

On the multifarious ethical/financial corruptions of Summers, feast your eyes. Scroll, scroll, scroll.

… the grotesque Dan Snyder house undergoes more than a mere reduction; it thins all the way down to nothingness. For the price of a pre-war Manhattan studio with a Central Park view, you can now boast a home the size of Dulles Airport.

Will anyone bite? This will be fun to watch.

This blog has long chronicled one of the most notorious pathologies of billionaires — the compulsion to generate perpetual domestic construction noise. Infinite implosion, enlargement, elaboration, further enlargement, and finally reimplosion as the results fail to satisfy, or as the municipality makes the billionaire take it all down because he was too arrogant to get permits… Then the lengthy lawsuits resulting in further, somewhat amended, construction, deconstruction, reconstruction, deconstruction…

Imagine having spent a lot of money to live in a classy discreet Manhattan co-op only to discover that the hedgie next door is deep into a lifelong wall-explosion frenzy. Imagine (see my headline) living on Zuckerberg’s Palo Alto street and trying to deal not only with endless thundering construction zones but daily traffic from his illegal personal Montessori school, as well as from his restlessly coming and going non-specific serf-army. “Frankly I’m not sure what’s going on,” one neighbor said…“Except for noise and construction debris.”

Building private institutions (schools, churches, synagogues, and health clinics are popular) is another billionaire pathology, part of the paranoid journey whereby withdrawal from the public world into a hypersecure fully equipped private world completes itself.

The incoming mayor of a metropolitan area rife with billionaires and close-to-billionaires won big in the last election in part because billionaires have made themselves detestable. If Andrew Cuomo thought he could turn things around by taking gobs of money from … billionaires, he was a real idiot for thinking so.

We could spend time, I guess, analyzing the root causes of the two behaviors that make everyone who shares their world hate billionaires – total withdrawal from the public realm without the decency to shut up about it. The rest of us must hear and witness the cacophony of their world-contempt, their mad, haughty, removal from humanity. Howard Hughes had nothing on these guys. But he in his day was a one-off. In places like NY and CA they constitute a society – a loud, rule-flouting, society, for whom what lies outside the wall implosions exists to be ignored or exploited.

For all its seeming withdrawal, the ethos is one, obviously, of naked aggression.

Next thing you know he’ll say we shouldn’t have trillionaires; and today’s Elon’s big day!

Four different people came forward with concerns to [Vice Principal Ebony] Parker about the student on the day of the shooting, the lawsuit alleges.

During opening statements, [the teacher’s attorney] claimed that Parker did not act on her authority to search the student or remove him from school…

An Israeli soldier states the grotesque truth.

About sixty percent (!) of its GDP comes from cybercrime.

What makes it even prettier is that they traffic, imprison, and abuse the scammers.

It’s where all the rich scum go.

Federally allocated taxpayer money to feed hungry Missouri children! Twenty million dollars! So generous! SOOOO generous that the person allocating it figured she could take most of it herself – McMansions and a fluro yellow $200,000 Mercedes and lots more shit like that. She left a trickle for the kids.

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UPDATE: Got sixteen years.

… is trashy enough.”

Every day their beloved superintendent turns out to be guilty of yet another category of crime. Today: Drug trafficking! Stay tuned!

He was arrested by ICE with the help of the Iowa State Patrol on Sept. 26. ICE said Roberts attempted to flee arrest and was found hiding in the brush. The vehicle he was driving was found with $3,000 in cash, a fixed blade knife and a loaded Glock 9mm pistol, which led to additional criminal charges of being an illegal alien in possession of firearms.

A real gift to Trump. All tied up with a ribbon.

Iowa will never live it down. They actually paid money to a firm to vet the guy!

Wouldn’t want to leave Yale out of the Epstein saga. The Yale Daily News weighs in.