It lives! So what if Epstein is dead, he was just a symptom of a whole slimy vein of rot.
One of his successors is Leon Black, another billionaire and good buddy to Jeffrey.
Now Black is back in the headlines, this time accused of raping a 16-year-old girl in the home of Jeffrey Epstein, a serial sex trafficker Black financed with more than $150 million.
Is anyone surprised? The poison spreads. It spreads further. It turns out Black and his private equity cronies have bought a politician, Kyrsten Sinema. Are you surprised yet?
In 2018, Black and his wife together made a $5,400 donation to Sinema’s campaign, the maximum legal contribution at the time. Three years later, Black was out from the top post at Apollo Global Management, the firm he helped found, after it was revealed that he paid the disgraced financier Epstein more than $150 million for estate planning and tax services. The Senate Finance Committee is currently investigating that payment and whether it involved tax evasion.
During her 2018 bid, Sinema received a smattering of donations from others in the private equity world, including a few dozen senior Blackstone managers, Bain executives, and Goldman Sachs financiers, but she received much more money through the Emily’s List political action committee and from Google employees.
This whole story is about tawdry corruption and the oddly insulated world of the very rich. One of the main threads connecting everything, though, is Harvard. Harvard isn’t an educational institution anymore, it’s the prestigious locus of every pretentious wanna-be and nouveaux riche moneybags who wants to buy credibility…and unfortunately, Harvard knows this and is happy to sell out. It’s what they do, and they simultaneously attracted grifters like Epstein and exploited them in a hideous symbiotic relationship.
As the steady drip of revelations over the past few months shows, Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to intellectual, cultural, and financial luminaries were much more extensive than previously known. For years after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting and procuring a minor for prostitution, he socialized with Bill Gates, Woody Allen, Noam Chomsky, Leon Botstein, former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, private equity billionaire Leon Black, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, CIA director William Burns, and Lawrence Summers.
According to a recent report in The Wall Street Journal, Summers—a former president of Harvard and the current Charles W. Eliot University Professor and director of the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government at the Harvard Kennedy School—had more than a dozen meetings scheduled with Epstein from 2013 to 2016. In April 2014, Summers sent Epstein an e-mail seeking “small scale philanthropy advice” regarding his wife, Elisa New, a professor of English at Harvard. “My life will be better if i raise $1m for Lisa,” he wrote. “Mostly it will go to make a pbs series and for teacher training. Ideas?”
“Small scale.” She wanted to make videos about poetry, which is nice, but most of us wouldn’t even dream of getting a million dollars for that sort of thing. But if you know a criminal who wants to whitewash his reputation and suck up to a famous university, you can find a way.
The Summers-Epstein relationship opens a window into the interlocking of intellectual and financial elites in our era of bloated capital accumulation. The perks and privileges that the superrich can offer make their company and resources hard to resist. Top universities, in turn, entice the tycoon class with a mix of academic prestige, intellectual stimulation, and social legitimation. And no university has more to offer in this regard than Harvard. The school has come to have a mesmerizing effect on the American public, especially its most mercantile tier, for which it is a honeypot.
Harvard is going to have a tough time buying their way out of the strikes against their reputation in the last few decades. I know if I had a grandchild applying to callege, I’d strongly discourage them from considering Harvard. I’d consider Harvard on a CV to be a detriment, but then, I’m not a billionaire with ties to the financial industry who thinks schmoozing with other rich people is more important than an actual education.
Right now, I mainly follow news from Harvard for the scandals. Like this one:
On June 16, Harvard Business School put one of its most celebrated professors on leave after an internal investigation into accusations that she had falsified her research. Francesca Gino was a popular behavioral scientist who was known for prolific publishing and a schedule packed with speaking gigs and expensive corporate trainings. Harvard paid her over $1 million a year while companies paid tens of thousands more to book her for their private events.
Gino’s record of publishing over 10 journal articles a year, in contrast to the faculty average two or three, seemed too good to be true—and as is now coming to light, it may have been. A four-part investigation by the independent academic watchdog site Data Colada alleges that Gino fabricated some of her high-profile research over at least a decade and as recently as three years ago. It claims to have found at least four times that data in her studies were manipulated. The watchdog believes it is likely that Gino carried out the alleged fraud without assistance from her collaborators.
OK, Harvard Business School is kind of the lowest cesspit of a tainted brand, but a professor getting paid a million dollars a year is already suspicious. What, you may wonder, does she study that warrants that kind of salary? She studies dishonesty in business, ironically enough. She’s an advocate for being a rebel and breaking the rules, so you can see already why this would appeal to corporate executives.
Anyway, don’t go to Harvard unless you dream of one day being a willing enabler of the extremes of capitalism.
Harvard is an ongoing networking event for the wealthy that occasionally holds classes for tax reasons.
Want proof? Their most famous & successful student in the last 2 decades didn’t actually graduate; he dropped out to make Facebook. That implies that Harvard’s academics are unremarkable, and the real value is that you meet other people who got into Harvard.
So we have a class of wealthy elites that have learned nothing but fancy themselves intellectuals.
…after it was revealed that he paid the disgraced financier Epstein more than $150 million for estate planning and tax services. The Senate Finance Committee is currently investigating that payment and whether it involved tax evasion.
Why on Earth would anyone want to pay more than $150 million for estate planning and tax services? Just hire an ordinary CPA firm and pay whatever taxes they say you owe — that’s surely less money than $150M. Any decent CPA should be able to find ways to minimize your taxes LEGALLY — it’s what they do, innit?
What, you may wonder, does she study that warrants that kind of salary?
Maybe she earns every penny of it by advising the football coach.
Raging Bee @ # 2: Why on Earth would anyone want to pay more than $150 million for estate planning and tax services?
One might save much more than that, by paying whatever is asked to keep certain, ah, personal indiscretions under the rug.
The Vietnam war was planned out and connected to…Harvard.
This was in the 1960s.
Nothing has changed since then.
Notorious conperson Jordan Peteson was at Harvard for 5 years.
To be sure, at least he didn’t stay there for too long.
Ah, Sinema… quelle surprise.
One of my ex-girlfriends was a lawyer for the EEOC (she is of Jamaican heritage). A large company tried to recruit her away so they could, you know, come within a hair’s breadth of breaking the law….
Look on the bright side: Sinema now has an identifiable specific policy (enabling sexual exploitation of teenagers) to make her stand out, not just the mush of her self-branding as a centrist, and hopefully now Arizona voters have an opportuniy to reward her appropriately for that (with early retirement).
@Raging Bee: You apparently have no idea how rich some people are. $150 mil is a bargain compared to what they’d have to pay legitimately.
Dunc@8 — I think that was Raging Bee’s point. If a tax submission is completely legal and above board, why would anyone need to spend $150M in consulting and accounting fees on it?
Of course, it’s not even really about that. As Raging Bee points out, it is a financially unjustifiable practice by people who are not financially naive. A few years ago, an investigation using ATO (our IRS) data showed that around half of Australia’s wealthiest people paid zero income tax. And when the investigators drilled down, they found something very disturbing — in those cases, the accounting fees were highly variable and made no a priori sense…but very consistently, they were exactly what it took to zero the clients’ income. In other words, these parasitic sociopaths would rather slide whatever was left over after their tax minimisation as a bonus to their accountants than give a single dollar to help the nation they live in. I suspect the same is at work in the US.
chrislawson:
Tax avoidance is illegal. Tax minimisation is not.
That’s why.
OK, so why am I unsurprised?
That a starfish was cut into sections and tossed into the clambed and ruin ensued?
@ 2, I’ve actually saw cases where that was involved.
I can’t discuss them in detail, but they were justified.
In others, not so much, but lawyers operate under an order of protect their client and provide the best defense possible.
So, to fix that, maybe shoot all of the doctors and pharmacists, so that lawyers cannot exist or some other insanity.
Or maybe deny defense to someone of dark color skin, to give a real reflection of that objection’s potential result?
We The People, In Order To Form a More Perfect Union suggests at its onset that we’ve not got a perfect union. Confounding that is perfecting it.
Howinhell do we protect all from harm, while perfecting perfect protection for all?
History awaits such a sage answer!
It was always thus with Harvard – catch phrase”training the leaders of tomorrow,” meaning the children of every plutocrat, despot and dictator of the world. I mean, hey, they are the leaders of tomorrow.
Speaking of jeffrey-epstein and his ilk here is another article about ‘sinenema’:
https://www.rsn.org/001/private-equity-billionaire-tied-to-jeffrey-epstein-led-industry-backing-for-kyrsten-sinema.html
She is so selfish all she cares about is being the untouchable princess of greed, never considering the needs of the people who she was elected to represent. Many of us in Scarizona now classify her as ‘massively-funded trailer-trash’
Also, a dear friend of mine (second level manager) was sent through the accelerated Harvard MBA program by our employer. He was quite intelligent and perceptive and considered it a huge waste of time and money
Yeah, a teacher at a third rate State college goes on a rant about the world’s pre-eminent university. That really has a good look. Sort of goes along with your vicious personal attacks on J. K. Rowing. Professor Myers, I have read your blog for many years and have appreciated the vast majority of what you have had to say, but the last year or two, you seem to be descending into some sort of serious attitude problem. This is not an attack, it is a sad observation. You really need to step back and think about what is happening to you.
@Green Eagle
Your comment is strangely void of any specifics. You do not address any particular statement or dispute any fact. The only content appears to be your personal distaste.
This is not an attack, just an observation.
@15. Green Eagle : “Yeah, a teacher at a third rate State college goes on a rant about the world’s pre-eminent university.”
What? PZ didn’t mention Oxford at all..
Really? Which “personal attacks” exactly and are they really that or pointing out JKR’s blatant and widely noted transphobic bigotry?
Also seconding what LykeX wrote above. What exact part of the OP here do you think is wrong and why please?
@ Green Eagle, while PZ and I do differ in some opinions, especially in regards to violence, I do greatly respect his opinions and views and you’ve offered only chum to the waters, without anything factual to support your, well, bullshit.
From my observation, HARVARD IS GOD! WORSHIP GOD!!!!!!!
And zero nutrition. My cultures would starve!
And in a massive departure to PZ’s pacifism, I’d slap the shit out of you with my shoe.
Now, back to reality. I would slap the shit out of you with my shoe in real life, wanna follow that up, go for it with a retired SF guy, it wouldn’t end well for you.
My problem is, given the bullshit you shoveled into such a short statement, it’d be a career longer than my probable life of another 30 or so years.
You justified juvenile rape, while condemning someone wanting to enforce our laws and taboos and somehow think you’re justified to even enjoy sunlight and oxygen?!
Nope, I suggest impalement, Vlad style for you.
Unlike PZ, I was the monster sent out to hunt monster terrorists, I present as a nice guy in person, but beneath, not at all. I protect the unprotected always.
Now, excuse me while I pull out my concealed carry howitzer for you.*
*Those familiar know the dimensions of a howitzer by now and the absurdity of concealed carry of a device several times even the tallest member in existence here is in greater size.
As in, five meters or longer sitting comfortably in my pants leg.
I do observe one attack that I’ve made elsewhere, under an entirely different moniker, to Harry Potter’s Magical Phallus. Perhaps a coincidence, perhaps a leak.
Or maybe I worked with intelligence too long. No, I recognize an injury response and potential leak.
Yeah, a teacher at a third rate State college goes on a rant about the world’s pre-eminent university. That really has a good look.
Yeah, actually, it does have a good look, since he seems to have a considerable set of facts to back it all up.
Sort of goes along with your vicious personal attacks on J. K. Rowing.
Which is also backed up by a considerable set of facts, AND a few other bloggers making the same points. Oh, and it’s spelled ROWLING, dumbass. Unless you’re referring to her “rowing” up shit’s creek…?
Yo, wzrd1, is that a howitzer in your pants, or are you just happy to be here?
Well, I’ll sorrily admit, that was a disguised 16 inch gun from an Iowa class.
Thanks for allowing me to drop that dead weight.
But, I’ve a grand pistol shrimp in my pocket that wants your attention.
Finding me, well, that’ll require Hawking Radiation measurements, save for when I want to be, erm, found.
As an annoying and clinging neighbor has slowly been learning.
Besides, you should’ve already done the math, the projection exceeds the barrel length by far. As usual.
Don’t need a hat, think I’ll need my helmet…
BTW, I used to have a CCW permit.
One night, while I was again having to clean my pocket artillery of an M1911A1, I entertained the notion of a criminal, ever so sporting as to allow me to, “Excuse me, Mr Murderer, may I kindly be allowed to draw my own firearm?”
Yeah, stuffed the damned thing into a clean box, called it a day.
Did and still do carry a knife or three. Most, utility tools, all also a weapon, as tools and weapons are interchangeable. Pick a tool, it’s a weapon.
Application shows a civilization’s level.
The pretence to have once been an admirer but recently… is a bog-standard Slymepit lie. Couldn’t you at least have made the effort to come up with a more original one?
He has been commenting here for at least 8 years, although he does sporadically blurt out this nonsense about how I’ve changed, whenever I write something he disagrees with.
In one comment, he confesses to being a Harvard graduate, which explains much.
Greeneagle, I’ve read your comments once for the last 30 seconds.
You are an idiot and a liar.
I’ve been reading PZ Myers since the Sciblog days, almost 20 years now.
PZ has been consistent throughout all that time.
We are Social Justice Warriors here among many other things.
If that is a problem, you can find plenty of right wingnut websites to reinforce your bigotry and hate.
And, being at Harvard or any other Ivy League university is no guarantee of worth whatsoever. That is the whole point of his blog post.
Ted Cruz is Harvard Law.
Jordan Peterson, the notorious and pathetic conman, was at Harvard for 5 years.
George Bush was at Yale.
Steven Pinker the notorious fake scientist is at Harvard.
And JK Rowling is a hate filled bigot.
I’m glad she came out as a crackpot before I ever read Harry Potter. I have no intention of spending any of my valuable time on anything she wrote.