“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.

She forgot to mention his steadfast defense of Andrei Shleifer, his taking over Harvard’s endowment and promptly losing $1.8 billion, his hedge-fund freelancing while president of Harvard, etc., etc. Summers is a-fucking-mazing.

Lawrence Summers has so frequently been airbrushed, and has himself so frequently airbrushed others, it’s a miracle he and his cronies continue in the realm of visibility at all. Harvard law prof Lawrence Lessig (that’s him in my headline) doesn’t really care about that, though:

There’s little need to reform Larry Summers. He will, I suspect, pass quickly from Harvard’s orbit. But it is the culture that would have allowed Larry Summers to be protected that must now be called to account. How could Harvard have allowed this production of Hamlet without the Prince? And will it now commit to a practice that will not protect the elite among us… ?

As you know, UD has wondered for years how Harvard could have airbrushed so corrupt a figure as Summers for so long; she has also long speculated that the appointment of Ma Ingalls (à bas “excessive materialism”!!!) right after Summers was a crude reverse engineer.

I mean, crude but effective. Lasted for years, until Summers’ grody to the maxness eventually sucked the air even out of the most elite of airbrushes. You can sort of see the supersecret superelite Harvard Corporation secretly gathering back then to brushbrushbrush its president’s rep. You can see them sweeping dual-action, adjustable pressure tools over Summers glossies. Keep spraying! Tell no one! Tell Drew Faust to name her price!

Not sure, though, about Lessig’s Hamlet thing. He seems to have in mind a production of Summerskrantz and Epsteinstern.

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An enlargement of this theme.

People are right to sense that, as the [Epstein] emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. 

And C. Lasch, 1995.

To an alarming extent the privileged classes – by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent – have made themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards…. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure – of business entertainment, information, and ‘information retrieval’ – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline.

[Summers] is so convinced of his own genius, and he is so convinced that he is smarter than anyone else, that he is very bad at listening to other people, people who might be able to stop him, prevent him from doing really stupid things. I’m sure that he had people telling him, don’t be emailing Jeffrey Epstein, that’s a bad idea. But he would just go ahead and do it anyway because he has that kind of hubris, right?

He did one of the world’s worst ever fixed income trades when he was president of Harvard, where he decided that he was going to build a massive new campus across the river. And he knew that this massive new campus was going to cost a lot of money. And he was also convinced that interest rates were very low and they wouldn’t go down any further. And in fact, they were going to go up further.

And so he reckoned that when Harvard in the future was going to borrow money to build the campus, he wanted Harvard to be able to borrow the money in the future at the interest rates today. So he entered into this incredibly complex sort of future forward swap thingy. And then, of course, interest rates went down rather than up. He had to unwind the swap because they never built the campus. And he cost the university about a billion dollars.

… is the provocative title of a New Republic essay which goes there. It goes to the place where you say that the fault lies with us. Not just them – the Trump voters. Us – the other side.

“Avarice, ambition, revenge, and licentiousness would break the strongest cords of our Constitution, as a whale goes through a net,” [John] Adams once wrote to [a] friend. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral … people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

So far, Americans are failing that test—and the republic itself... It would be tempting to dismiss the Epstein scandals as a purely elite phenomenon. But this is the society for which the American people have voted. The 2016 election could once be dismissed as a constitutional fluke since most Americans voted for Trump’s opponent. The 2024 election is more definitional. This country had nearly a decade of experience with Trump in power—the corruption, the lies, the bigotry and misogyny and abuse and violence—and welcomed more of it.

This is, if you like, the importance of Larry Summers. That Harvard University, of all places, appointed a corrupt greedy licentious reprobate president is a chapter in a story. It is a story about millions and millions of Americans, including our corrupt elites, including even presidents of our greatest universities, failing the test and failing the republic. Don’t forget Stanford’s disgraced corrupt billionaire ex-president! Coast to coast, at our greatest schools, reprehensible self-serving cynics and liars are appointed president, just as Trump is elected and re-elected the country’s president.

As late as 2014, Harvard ignored this letter from an anti-trafficking organization: “[It is] unusual and disheartening . . . to read almost daily press releases distributed by a pedophile [who] feels entitled to identify himself as a ‘Harvard philanthropist.” Who was allowed to identify himself as a Harvard philanthropist.

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At its core, Trumpism is a permission structure for evil. It is the abolition of ethical norms and the erasure of moral authority… Trumpism is not really about immigration, or inflation, or trade, or draining the swamp, or building the wall—it is ultimately about the dark thrill of abusing those whom its adherents consider to be inferiors, either directly or by proxy.

Summers abused those he considered his inferiors – women – and he got his thrill by proxy. We assume.

Everyone [outside the contemporary American elite is] part of an underclass whom the wealthy can abuse and immiserate at their own discretion. The Epstein emails give the rest of us a glimpse into this world, where even the most grotesque crimes can be forgiven or ignored out of a sense of elite solidarity—at least until they become too publicly awkward to privately sustain—and where amorality is required to participate.

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.”)

Only he forgot a couple of things.

1. He gambled away $1.8 billion of Harvard’s money.
2. He made five million dollars working for a hedge fund while still Harvard’s president.

(Also featuring Jeffrey Epstein, but that’s for a different post.)

[Before Hunter Biden’s legal but unethical activity in Ukraine,] there was already a template… for how insiders in a gas-rich kleptocracy could exploit … a [government] crisis using Western “advisers” to facilitate and legitimize their plunder—and how those Westerners could profit handsomely from it. A dozen-plus years earlier, amid the collapse of the U.S.S.R. of which Ukraine was a part, a clutch of oligarchs rifled the crown jewels of a vast nation. We know some of their names, in some cases because of the work of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s office: Oleg Deripaska, Viktor Vekselberg, Dmitry Rybolovlev, Leonard Blavatnik. That heist also was assisted by U.S. consultants, many of whom had posts at Harvard and at least one of whom was a protégé of future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

Yes, she’s talking about Professor Andrei Shleifer, whose greed cost Harvard millions, but all is forgiven.

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UD wants very badly to see the end of Trump.

Yet she also thanks Chayes for focusing on a particularly disgusting practice.

Scratch into the bios of many former U.S. officials who were in charge of foreign or security policy in administrations of either party, and you will find “consulting” firms and hedge-fund gigs monetizing their names and connections.

Certain universities – Louisville, USC, Yeshiva, the University of Miami – have the smell of more or less criminal enterprises. They’re always generating high-level, multifaceted, scandal; some of their trustees are crooked or even criminal financiers. Yeshiva had Bernard Madoff as treasurer; Ezra Merkin also sat on their board. Also, I believe, Ira Rennert. The school continues to have as a trustee Zygmunt Wilf. These are not pretty people.

Now, Harvard and MIT were indeed buddies with Jeffrey Epstein; Harvard even celebrates as an emeritus professor Alan Dershowitz, at least an Epstein intimate, and at most (according to one of Epstein’s slaves) a secret sharer in the sex. Its erstwhile president, who helped run a hedge fund while president, hung out with Epstein too. (He also hung out with Andrei Shleifer…) But these schools are not the rackety dives those other schools are. They’re not just in it for the money. Nor are they just in it for the sports: The heavy campus hand of plutocrat college sports fans (the recently departed T. Boone Pickens at Oklahoma State; Phil Knight at Oregon) generates scandals, too – but these are the tired, expected scandals of the jock school.

No, MIT and Harvard are great schools, serious schools, productive schools – they are among the world’s greatest intellectual institutions. They fuck with plutocrats because of their professors’ smokin’ ambition to understand, to invent, to cure. They want money, money, and more money to fund their projects. To be sure, some of this generative creative activity makes some of their professors personally wealthy — the ex-head of MIT’s Media Lab took money from Epstein for his own investments, which adds to the embarrassment of it all… More commonly, professors monetize their medical and technical breakthroughs, producing all kinds of conflict of interest trouble at cutting edge places like Stanford…

We little people, looking in at all of this from the outside, are assured that COIs can be “managed” – the word is always managed – and we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads. Yessir!

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Now look. Most people are pretty greedy; many putrid plutocrats realize that a university affiliation can clean them up real good. It’s a marriage made in heaven. But here’s what UD finds remarkable: MIT’s endowment is close to 17 billion; Harvard’s is close to forty billion. In ten years or so, Harvard’s wealth will be, say, a hundred billion. Harvard is a superplutocrat.

These schools are currently in trouble for promiscuous plutocrat fraternization; but given how INSANELY – not to say unconscionably – rich they are, why is this sort of thing happening at all? Just make an appointment with the “super-secret and dictatorial Harvard Corporation” and explain to them that you’d rather dip into the school’s billions and billions and billions than have to take research money from a guy in jail for sexually enslaving fifteen year olds. The worst they can say is no!

And while we’re at it – Why do superbillionaires like Harvard feel compelled to appoint rich turds like Epstein visiting fellows? We know that legacy parents can pay their kids’ way into Harvard; we know that rich parents can bribe coaches to get their kids into schools like Harvard and Yale. I’m not sure we knew that profit-oriented Harvard faculty can gift generous rich guys official appointments. Not a good look. Not a good look at all. But when Larry Summers spends his presidency running a hedge fund, losing $1.8 billion of Harvard’s endowment on market gambles, and defending a faculty crony who misused, for personal gain, government funds to Harvard, whadaya expect? That crony cost Harvard tens of millions in federal penalties, and it made not one bit of difference in terms of his high-profile position in Harvard’s economics department. That’s the way plutocracies work, kiddies. Plutocracies are even smart enough to know when their workings have become too public, which is why right after Larry Summers, Harvard appointed preachy anti-materialist Drew Faust (‘And while you’re at it, find me a woman, for crap sake!”) to maintain the non-profit theatrics.

Skeptical of the clean-up crew function of women when plutocrat sausage parties get out of hand? Read and learn. As FIFA went, so went Harvard – when things get truly desperate and you can’t hide what you’ve been doing any longer, Find A Woman, Pronto. You can always go right back to men when it all blows over.

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As ever, sing it.

[Before and after his conviction in 2008, Epstein was a regular on the masturbatory tech gadfly circuit — an attendee and sponsor of “billionaire dinners” and related sausage-factory soirees at which ultrawealthy men (among them the founders of Amazon and Google), elite scientists and various other male luminaries discussed the future they were collectively trying to build (or, depending on your perspective, squander.)]

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The party’s over

It’s time to find us a dame

Until we start up again

I’m going to miss our game

It’s time to wind up

The masquerade

There’s no more Epstein

To keep us paid…

[His cadre of intellectuals] could also catch Epstein at Harvard, where so many of them taught and where he became so prolific a donor that one whole academic program seemed to be run like his private Renaissance atelier.

Frank Rich, who years and years ago condemned Epstein pal Larry Summers for his hedge fund activities while Harvard’s president, compiles a long list.

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On which, of course, the moral conscience of a nation and the late lamented president of the rapeabilliest and most Baptist campus in the country, appears.

… Kenneth Starr chose to join Jeffrey Epstein’s defense team in 2007, after his moral fulminations against Bill Clinton’s sexual perfidy. His obsessive pursuit of President Clinton made him a folk hero on the right, representing the defense of traditional sexual virtue and the notion that it was under assault by Bill Clinton and the liberal elite. His special-prosecutor exploits propelled him to the presidency of the conservative Baptist Baylor University. During his tenure, the football program engaged in a horrific pattern of sexual abuse that led to the dismissal of the football coach and the removal of Starr after an investigation found “actions by University administrators that directly discouraged some complainants from reporting or participating in student conduct processes.”

It is perhaps coincidental, but Starr has tracked the broader conversion of the religious right from sexual shaming to sexual shamelessness. In an era when Donald Trump has exposed the hollowness of so many values conservatives allegedly hold dear, it is fitting that this Zelig of right-wing sexual hypocrisy has made yet another cameo.

The good old days:

[Jeffrey] Epstein’s appointment to the board of New York’s Rockefeller University in 2000 brought him into greater social prominence. .. [At the] Epstein Program for Mathematical Biology and Evolutionary Dynamics [at Harvard], … Epstein will have an office at the university. .. He says he was reluctant to have his name attached to the program, but [Larry] Summers persuaded him.

More recently:

Feds Allege That Ersatz Financier Jeffrey Epstein Is Indeed A Genuine Sex Criminal

Why does everyone on the Upper East Side look so nervous? … Epstein is something of a pervy Zelig in New York City high society and financial crime. … [He’s always been engaged in] a laughably inscrutable web of schemes, lawsuits and really shady shit. What makes it even more amazing though are the people who seem to have been involved with Epstein on all these batshit little deals, the kind of people who would really prefer if Epstein did not roll over on literally everyone he’s ever done dirty shit with in order to get out of life in prison for being the world’s most openly insidious sex criminal.

So while everyone else is watching out to see if Jeffrey Epstein flips on Donald Trump and/or Bill Clinton, we here at Dealbreaker will be waiting with bated breath to see if he flips on, well… you.

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Anybody who helped Epstein in any way needs to get a lawyer and get scared.

A writer for The Nation finds the long Harvard job security of Larry Summers’ corrupt crony shocking — as does UD. But apparently we live in an old-style oligarchy.

Summers – “A man whose intellect seems genuinely invigorated by a debate with his billionaire sex offender buddy over the costs and benefits of first-class versus NetJet.” – has himself been taken out of commission, but good ol’ Shleifer keeps on keepin on.

Off he goes.

Harvard president Larry Summers will be known to posterity as an executor of a will left by the captain of the Lolita Express.

“Epstein and Summers were so close, Summers went to Epstein for advice about an extramarital affair he was trying to have with a reluctant grad student, in between bouts of calling women stupid.”