June 6th, 2023
‘He is alleged to have failed to declare a trust in Singapore with a bank account containing around 650 million US dollars.’

Bernie Ecclestone is actually appearing physically as we speak on trial for fraud/tax evasion, but a glance at his Wikipedia page tells you there’s so much more (TAX AVOIDANCE HITLER REMARKS BRIBERY ACCUSATION ILLEGAL POSSESSION OF A FIREARM) where that came from.

His attorneys will argue that at 92 the old crook is simply too tuckered out to go to jail.

January 24th, 2020
Oh Gstaad, Poor Gstaad…

… the Sackler Family’s Back and I’m Feelin’ So Sad…

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The original.

November 14th, 2019
“[Leon] Cooperman mentioned that over the weekend an acquaintance had come by to get some friendly advice on managing his personal finances. He was a seventy-two-year-old world-renowned cardiologist; his wife was one of the country’s experts in women’s medicine. Together, they had a net worth of around ten million dollars.”

“It was shocking how tight he was going to be in retirement,” Cooperman said… “I’m just saying that it’s not an impressive amount of capital for two people that were leading physicians for their entire work life,” Cooperman went on. “You know, I lost more today than they spent a lifetime accumulating.”

Just to get you situated pronto in le monde Léon, if I may, where ten million dollars is a shocking shortfall, a humiliating failure, and an opportunity to shoot one’s mouth off about one’s own incomparable booty… Did bribery help Leon? Did insider trading (he had to pay a five million dollar fine to make the SEC go away in that one) help Leon? Is it fair for him to compare himself to two sadly fraud-challenged physicians who probably didn’t even engage in theft of medicaid funds?

In the political realm, Leon loves to bat designated-belligerent-billionaire-hitter. He hit one out of the park with Obama – said he never worked a day in his life; said he was just like Hitler! And now he’s taking a big ol’ swing at Elizabeth Warren, who had the temerity to remind people that he had to settle that big ol’ insider trading charge (this was long after he settled the bribery charge). (Why did he settle the insider trading charge? He said he was going to fight it.)

[Cooperman called] Warren “disgraceful” in an interview with CNBC. “She doesn’t know who the f— she’s tweeting. I gave away more in the year than she has in her whole f—-ing lifetime,” Cooperman continued. Cooperman also said he “won” his case involving insider trading, though he actually just settled it with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Someone should write an essay about that favorite word of the rogue: DISGRACEFUL. DISGRACEFUL. DEEZGRAITZFOOLLLL. The president, Giuliani, Dershowitz – all of our country’s highest-profile, most wretched rogues, use it all the time. Such a prim prissy word – the sort of thing you associate with Margaret Dumont – and yet all these guys – who are clearly Groucho Marx in the matter – are doing her. They’re doing Dumont! Why, I never! Really! There are certain conventions!

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UPDATE: It takes a strong man to cry. On national tv.

May 1st, 2018
Class warfare, American-style

Mass transport for ordinary folks is being shut down, in the great state of New York, for the sake of greedy plutocrats, and The People are fighting back.

The days of cheap thirty-minute Manhattan-to-East-Hampton helicopter flights will soon be over, giving travelers who can only afford the $700 – $800 fare no option but to battle surface traffic to get to the Hamptons, while private helicopter owners ($4,000 and more per flight) are free to keep landing their enormous earth-shattering Sikorskys.

“The tycoons who own helicopters and ferry their guests back and forth to the city are the worst [noise] offenders,” said one local.

“And they tend to use the high-status, louder, Sikorsky choppers — the civilian model of the Black Hawk — rather than the smaller, quieter models used by [mass transporter] Blade.”

(The Sikorsky pilots are equipped with body armor, M-16s, Hellfire Missiles, and cyanide tablets in case a reporter disguised as a summer renter pulls out a gun and demands details on the owner’s Paradise Papers companies.)

America’s owners of massive loud military helicopters have generated opposition on both sides [Manhattan/East Hampton] of this itinerary, as “sensitive local serfs” protest ceaseless earsplitting noise immediately above their hovels.

The plutocrats have thus managed to shut down market competition and enrage two local populations.

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Once Vinod Khosla takes the beach away from Californians, this class war will be pretty much over.

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Superior snark here.

January 24th, 2018
‘Anne Milton, an education minister in the Conservative government, said that David Meller, co-chairman of [a] group that … held [a] dinner [where the all-male guests groped and exposed themselves to women servers], had stepped down as a member of the board of the Department for Education.’

Interesting to discover that the education and welfare of England’s children has been in such good, uh, hands.

November 1st, 2017
Greco-Roman Wrestling at Columbia University

A lawsuit filed on Oct. 2 in Manhattan federal court against [Columbia University] and the historian, William V. Harris, 79, an expert on Greco-Roman history, said Dr. Harris repeatedly forced himself on [a female graduate student] and belittled her when she rejected his advances… Dr. Harris, the complaint said, … once forced her against his office desk and kissed her. He once put his mouth on her breast, the complaint said, and explicitly asked her for sexual intercourse on numerous occasions.

August 25th, 2017
“It’s one thing to get in trouble for bragging about your designer clothes; it’s quite another to get in trouble for using taxpayer dollars to view an eclipse while standing on a Scrooge McDuck-worthy vault of gold.”

Standing?

Please tell UD they were lying. The ever-elaborating Louise Linton story does not get really, really good until they turn out to have had Eclipse Coitus up there.

UD‘s keeping her fingers crossed.

August 22nd, 2017
UD is old enough to miss…

… Martha Mitchell.

And now….

She’s BAAAACK!

August 12th, 2017
Shall I Sue?

Time to wheel onstage at the University of Louisville John Dowland’s melancholy air.

Now that the school’s longtime chiseling president and his cronies (some of them? most of them?) have been, uh, made to absent themselves from felicity, the question is: Shall we sue to get back at least a little of the tens of millions they seem to have .. taken? Or shall we, as we desperately seek a new president, say fuck it – We’ll never find a non-larcenous president if we’re on the front page of every paper in the country – UNIVERSITY SUES PRESIDENT FOR MILLIONS IN STOLEN FUNDS — a national embarrassment, a school universally ridiculed as the U of Smell for years of financial and sexual scandals… Plus it’ll cost a fortune to sue these assholes…

ON THE OTHER HAND! It somewhat rankles that Ramsey took all our money and bought four houses and …

Auditors determined Ramsey was paid $12.4 million by the university and the [university’s fund-raising] foundation [which Ramsey also ran!!] from 2010 through 2016, including $7.2 million in deferred compensation. The report shows Ramsey and eight other employees collected $21.8 million in deferred compensation, apparently without foundation board approval.

Two days after his forced resignation last July, Ramsey and his wife paid $800,000 in cash for a 4,200-square-foot home in Miramar Beach, Florida. They also own two other Florida properties purchased for a combined $1.08 million, as well as a $470,000 home in Oldham County.

Yeah, don’t worry ’bout little Jim Ramsey!

“Don’t worry about me. Nobody is more blessed than Jim Ramsey of Fern Creek, Ky.”

Little Jimbo! Blessed, blessed, a thousand times blessed! Just a little ol’ fella from Fern Creek, Ky!

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All the rats are scrambling:

[E]x-foundation officer Kathleen Smith, who was fired in June, [has reportedly] recently moved about $800,000 worth of properties to limited liability corporations.

I mean, the endowment was just sitting there:

[T]he foundation’s officers and directors depleted the university’s endowment to fund excessive spending on compensation, football tickets and bad investments in real estate and start-up companies.

Hate to quote myself, but…

How did U of L get so bad? Just put it together. Just put it all together: The southland, good old boys, football, basketball, sex, and money. Add a hundred jiggers of Kentucky bourbon for a brilliant finish.

This here’s a BIG ol’ story, folks. Hold on to your hats.

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Words fail me.

August 12th, 2016
Donarchical Privilege

Years before he ran for the White House, Trump built his political brand by accusing President Obama of concealing his past. Trump called on Obama to release his college applications, transcripts and other records, asking how such a “terrible student” got into Ivy League schools. The business executive also demanded that Obama release his passport records and, most famously, his birth certificate, declaring in a video released before the 2012 election: “We know very little about our president.”

… [Trump himself] has refused to release many of the same documents that he demanded from Obama, including college transcripts and passport records. He has shirked the decades-old tradition of major nominees releasing their tax returns and other documentation to prove their readiness and fitness for office. And he has yet to release records showing why he received a medical deferment during the Vietnam War and whether he has actually donated the millions of dollars he claims to have given to charity.

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