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.

Only Vinod Khosla and his beach (scroll down) can hold a candle to the story of this house in LA.

America!

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.’

… you don’t want to look too closely at some of your biggest donors (Steve Cohen, Zygi Wilf).

UCLA‘s biggest donor is also kinda grody – but in a very Hollywood way [scroll down for Colbert Report segment]:

Best of all of these guys is California media mogul David Geffen… ‘These are designed to look like garage doors… But … they’re actually sealed shut.'”

All pretend! But law-abiding ordinary people, Geffen knows, assume they’re real. And therefore the dupes obey the… law…

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.