‘He chastised prosperous donors for giving disproportionately to Ivy League schools, rich hospitals and well-endowed museums, all while getting tax breaks for their donations. Why not share more of that wealth, he asked, with community colleges, low-income health centers, small arts groups and other struggling organizations?’

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.

The problem with being an elitist hypocrite…

… is that you’re an elitist hypocrite. As such, you make it easy for people to attack you. Even people on the wrong side of an issue. Like the NRA.

You probably should have thought of this problem when you, for instance, “land[ed]” one of your “many helicopters at a heliport on the east side that’s conveniently located closest to [your] townhouse. Sure, there are antiquated ‘rules’ closing the landing pad on weekends, and some ungrateful area peons have been whining about the noise…”

How was he supposed to know — yes, the chart handed to all helicopter pilots lists the heliport as closed on weekends, but he’s the mayor, not a helicopter pilot. Oh, wait. [He is a helicopter pilot.]

Scathing Online Schoolmarm says…

this is excellent writing.

Yes, there’s one mistake.

After getting caught on tape repeatedly using the heliport on the weekends — when it’s supposed to be closed because of noise pollution — a reporter for ABC 7 confronted the mayor, who explained…

This makes it look as though the reporter got caught, not the mayor.

But otherwise this piece is terrific satire, snark, irony, sarcasm, whatever.

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And you can relax. Ira Rennert, who used to be one of Yeshiva University’s fabled trustees (that great religious institution also had Bernard Madoff and Ezra Merkin running the place), will continue to break the rules and use the heliport on the weekends. “Being an entitled plutocrat just isn’t what it used to be,” complains the Gothamist writer. But it is. Rennert’s holding down the fort.

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