… about which Leon Cooperman weepingly complained, is nothing. Now they’re profiling them!

Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay said his March 2014 arrest for driving under the influence was a result of prejudice against him for being white and wealthy…

“I am prejudiced against because I’m a rich, white billionaire.” 

People also probably take against him for his tendency toward redundancy (“rich… billionaire”) and his tendency to endanger us all by driving while high as a kite.

 Irsay had the painkillers oxycodone and hydrocodone as well as alprazolam, which is used to treat anxiety, in his system at the time of his arrest. Officers on the scene said he had trouble reciting the alphabet and failed other field sobriety tests.

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Get yours today.

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And UD pledges to be kinder to this much-misunderstood demographic.

(My title comes from this 1963 essay.)

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Everyone’s laughing at Schultz’s request not to be called a billionaire; instead, he asks that we use the phrase ‘people of means.’ Some of the more amusing responses to his ‘billionaire’ problem:

I prefer ‘wealth extractors’

[how about] ‘money hoarders’

‘poverty profiteers’

Thank you Howard Schultz for calling out the dehumanising label ‘billionaire’ applied to people merely for causing vast swaths of the world to live in absolute, crushing misery. I vow to do better

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Why would a billionaire not wish to be called a billionaire? I can’t think of instances where millionaires asked not to be called millionaires. Michael Hiltzik wrote a recent column titled America is Falling Out of Love with Billionaires, so there does seem to be a problem of some sort. (“The plus side of Howard running is he’s making more people hate billionaires.”) What could it be?

Let’s start with Matt Taibbi on Goldman Sachs:

The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth — pure profit for rich individuals.

Millionaires can be pointlessly and destructively greedy, but only to a certain, reasonably comprehensible, extent. Billionaires can – nay, many of them, it appears, must – really go to town, in a way that strikes the rest of us as simply mentally ill. There will always be no-limits wealth defenders to tell us we’re envious or we’re going to destroy personal enterprise; but it’s hard to know how to be envious of people who desperately unenterprisingly do things like this:

Last week it was reported that Daniel Snyder, the owner of the NFL’s Washington Redskins, was spending $100 million on a 305-foot super-yacht complete with an on-board IMAX screening room. It’s his second yacht, after a 220-foot version.

At the same moment, hedge fund owner Ken Griffin was disclosed as the buyer of the most expensive home in America, a $238-million Manhattan penthouse. According to Bloomberg, he already owns two floors of the Waldorf Astoria hotel in Chicago ($30 million), a Miami Beach penthouse ($60 million), another Chicago penthouse ($58.75 million) and another apartment in Manhattan ($40 million).

Titanic, duplicative, restless, vacuous greed unsettles us; it makes the ethical grotesquerie of one human being holding fourteen billion dollars extremely graphic. “Why,” asks Farhad Manjoo, ” should anyone have a billion dollars, why should anyone be proud to brandish their billions, when there is so much suffering in the world?” What sort of people has our, uh, country of means spawned? Consider the vast antiquity of Robert Hughes’ 2004 comment on the billionaire art buyers of his day:

[T]he present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological.

$104m? Try $450m.

Billionaires, notes Merryn Somerset Webb, typically exist

as a result of mismanaged monetary policy (free money can do a lot if you use it right); badly thought-out regulation; politically unacceptable rent-seeking; corruption; asset bubbles; a failure of anti-trust rules; or some miserable mixture of the lot.

Hiztlik quotes Keynes going deeper into the obscenity Hughes describes. Keynes found the emergent form of what he called “the money motive” repulsive, and hoped for an end to “many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues…. [T]he love of money as a possession [has become the goal] — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life. [This behavior] will [someday] be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semicriminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.”

Billionaires represent the compulsive masturbators of their day, and more and more of them are doing it in public. Schultz knows this.

…just as nasty billionaires, in a beautiful synergy, need the, uh, colonic properties of universities.

Bernie and his comrade in trade Ezra Merkin were madly generous, madly esteemed trustees of Yeshiva University. That pious institution made them look pure as the driven snow, preoccupied with things of the mind, things of the spirit; and Bernie and Ezra for obvious reasons valued this look highly.

Yeshiva continues to confer sweetness and light upon the likes of Ira Rennert and Zygi Wilf; and in this it resembles many other American universities, whose buildings and scholarships and professorships bear some seriously nasty names.

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Here’s one. Much-esteemed University of Pennsylvania benefactor Howard Marks is an investor who writes judicious memos about how “markets make mistakes and the greatest market mistakes are driven by emotion – [like] too much greed…”

Marks himself owns but has never lived in a 22,000-square-foot Manhattan apartment which among many other things contains “30 rooms, six terraces, two dozen closets, two chefs kitchens, [and] two libraries.” It sits there on Park Avenue, completely empty, year after year. Like the California venture capitalist who got hold of a long-public beach only in order to post armed guards there to keep anyone from using it, Howard Marks has been driven by some emotion or other to dispense $52 million in order to spend years and years loudly, daily, breaking down the walls of two floors of dead space.

His downstairs neighbors have had enough and are suing. They point out that he’s been breaking building construction rules involving noise levels and hours of work per day for years, and ignoring their pleas that he stop. He has made their lives hell. Not only does he not give a shit; his lawyers are fighting the neighbors tooth and nail.

U Penn gets all excited and writes of Marks as if he’s a god because he gives a few hundred thousand to some of their writing programs, while their benefactor directs his real money to this twisted nihilistic project characterized by vacancy, aggression, and stunning waste.

Pablo Eisenberg, a hero of this blog (UD has forever shrieked at super-icky moneybags who give their hundreds of millions to Harvard), has died.

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(By the way — Harvard’s current endowment woes – it has only just reached 53.2 billion dollars – have energized its alumni network to organize a massive, unprecedented, Save Our School campaign, with outreach via Go Fund Me pages in addition to traditional methods. “Our rainy day fund is down to 10.5 billion,” warns Sam Bankman-Fried, an MIT grad who nonetheless accepted a position as head of Harvard fund-raising because “Harvard is the lifeblood of Cambridge; when it goes, the city itself is imperiled.”)

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And as to how to convince people who give their money to Ivy League schools, rather than to the sort of places Eisenberg lists in my headline, to redirect their money… Well, you need to understand the cohort you’re talking about, first of all.

Let’s consider, for example, billionaire investor Marc Wolpow, who gives money to fat cat Wharton. What do we know about Marc?

Here’s our most recent information.

The wealthy head of [a] multi-billion dollar private equity firm is under investigation by Nantucket Police and the state Environmental Police for purposefully untying a 32-foot boat from a slip at Old North Wharf, allowing it to drift out of the Easy Street Basin and into the ferry lane. 

The suspect is Marc Wolpow, the co-CEO and co-founder of the The Audax Group, who allegedly found an unknown boat in the slip he uses on Old North Wharf on the morning of Sunday, Oct. 16…

After Wolpow untied it, the boat drifted dangerously past Steamboat Wharf, got pushed northward in the wash of the car ferry the M/V Woods Hole, then collided with the $5 million, 70-foot Viking sportfishing boat “El Jefe” causing damage to that vessel. It eventually ran aground near 22 Easton Street. 

Reached by phone this week, Wolpow declined to comment. 

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Here’s what’s shocking about this story:

1 Just anyone reached Wolpow by phone.

2 Wolpow declined to comment.

Why allow just anyone to get past your protection squad and reach you by phone? That’s nuts.

Even more bizarre is Wolpow’s refusal to say the obvious about his behavior.

Heard of property rights, asshole? [“Asshole” here refers to the person who got through to Wolpow’s phone.] It’s my fucking slip, I own it, and I don’t have to look at some cheap shitty boat some person decided to put in it. Do you think I want Nantucket boat owners to think I have a cheap shitty boat? It’s my right to do whatever I like to cheap shitty boats and I think the fucker who put it in my slip will think twice before he does it again. Oh, and fuck you for calling me.

Getting a person of this sort (Marc Kasowitz, Howard Marks, Vinod Khosla, Noam Gottesman, the Heliport Guys, stop me when you’ve had enough) to give money to what he inevitably is going to consider cheap shitty recipients will be very difficult indeed.

Vinod Khosla’s Wikipedia page still says he’s a trustee of a very high-profile outfit committed to fighting global poverty; but in fact his name disappeared from this page not long ago; and UD‘s thinking it’s maybe cuz a filthy rich stinker who goes all the way to the Supreme Court to keep people off a public beach is … not a good look for the Blum Center…

I’m seeing public presentations to the globally poor in which representatives from the Blum Center say Our trustees include a billionaire who has never spent a night at his colossal coastal property in California and in fact doesn’t like the beach but decided he wanted to spend hundreds of millions of dollars clearing out the place, posting armed guards, and pressing his case to keep doing that up to the Supreme Court. We feel your pain.

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.

Wait a minute. I’m on a university board with Vinod Khosla?

The board of an academic center dedicated to global poverty and inequality??

Are you fucking kidding me?

There’s always a guy – Vinod Khosla, Tom Perkins, Todd Henderson, Glenn Hubbard and Frederic Mishkin, Dick Fuld… There’s always an ugly rich guy whose greed, aggression, and general dickishness launch him straight up into the news-of-the-world stratosphere for a week or two.

This week it’s $800 an hour consultant and Harvard business school professor Benjamin Edelman, who threatened massive legal retribution against a local Chinese food merchant who overcharged him by four dollars. Now, in the long tradition of God opening a door when he closes a window, embarrassed students at Harvard have started an online campaign in honor of those precious four dollars:

Jon Staff launched a fundraising campaign called ‘Harvard Gives: $4 to Fight Hunger’, encouraging Harvard students to donate four dollars to the Greater Boston Food Bank, in response to an article on Boston.com, which publicised a dispute between Edelman and the Sichuan Garden restaurant in Woburn.

… ‘In accordance with our community values, we are calling on all Harvard students to flip the script by donating $4 to provide for for those in need’, [the campaign organizer] wrote.

[The organizer also said he hopes this campaign] will remind people that Harvard is a big, diverse place full of almost universally wonderful people behaving well.’

Well, China has Hong Kong… I guess this is what social unrest looks like in postmodern America…

UD will admit she’d enjoy seeing a vast street demonstration made up of No Beach Access billionaires…

For those of us impatiently awaiting Tom “Kristallnacht” Perkins’ successor, Vinod Khosla has arrived not a moment too soon. It’s his beach, and he’ll sue all the way to the Supreme Court if he has to.

There’s even a wonderful mine, mine, all mine cosmic convergence here: For years, Khosla worked for Tom Perkins’ venture firm.

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Khosla has progressive academia’s endorsement as a trustee of Berkeley’s Blum Center (and Mr. Blum... eh. Nuff said.)

Maybe Robert Reich, who has been eloquent on the corrosive social and moral effects of income inequality, can take Khosla aside for a chat. Reich too is on the Blum board.