Stephen A. Schwarzman Is Specifically Cited By New York Magazine’s Frank Rich As He Asks: What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies?- And Then Rich Compares Schwarzman To The American Industrialists Who Collaborated With Hitler

In New York Magazine NYPL trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman is rounded up as part of a rogues gallery of "toadies" compared to the wealthy American's who supported Hitler's fascism in Germany.

New York Magazine doesn’t like Trump.  Like a lot of other blue media these days it runs a lot of articles telling us how bad Trump is.  We don’t think there is huge value to the proliferation of articles nearly everywhere that focus on, describe or intimate that Donald J. Trump is the cause of all our national problems rather than a mere symptom.  We venture to say that incessant focus on Trump personally is a distraction from discussion of issues and problems that are institutionalized and embedded deeply in the political and power infrastructure of our country.

Nevertheless, some of these polemics against Trump also, on occasion, describe those problems that exist institutionally in this country and point out things that are wrong with the political and power infrastructure of our country.  Frank Rich has a new “Intellgencier” article in New York Magazine this week that we think falls into that category:   What Will Happen to The Trump Toadies? Look to Nixon’s defenders, and the Vichy collaborators, for clues, January 7, 2020.

The article is also of particular interest to us as library defenders because the article chooses several times to cite NYPL trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman as a particular and prime example of the people in power that Mr. Rich sees as facilitating the rise of fascism in the United States, in much the same way that American businessmen supported Hitler’s fascism in Germany.

And while Schwarzman, much like Trump, may be viewed as a symptom of problems with our country extending to the way that our New York City libraries are run, Schwarzman is also a very visible symbol of those problems.  Just the way that Trump has made himself extra conspicuous by putting his name ubiquitously on so many buildings and projects (even when he had scant involvement in bringing them about), so too has Schwarzman made himself extra conspicuous when it comes to libraries by insisting that his name be plastered with repetitive excessiveness on the NYPL’s 24nd Street Central reference library. . . . Something the NYPL trustees did for Schwarzman because Schwarzman transfered a paltry $100 million to the NYPL on the understanding that the NYPL would initiate the Central Library Plan (and probably Donnell) real estate deal sell-offs of libraries.

People are now, with embarrassment, busy ripping the name of Trump off various edifices.  Maybe, due to similar embarrassment, we'll also soon see the Schwarzman name ripped off the 42nd Street Central Reference Library.

Schwarzman has a knack for being on the wrong side of things.  As Rich argues, that may be because he is amoral and will do anything for money.  So relatively recently, we wrote about Schwarzman again in connection with his hob nobbing praise for Saudi Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (you know . . .  the dismemberment killing of Jamal Khashoggi).  We wrote when the NYPL was going to turn over space to the Crown Prince to teach young people how to enhance their reputations.  See: Stopped!! NYPL's Plan To Turn Over Its 42nd Street Central Reference Library Grand Celeste Bartos Ballroom For Event Honoring The Infamous Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (Good Friend of Stephen Schwarzman?)

Schwarzman with Ghislaine Maxwell

That article also talked about Schwarzman’s connection with burning down the Amazon and Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice in his pedophiliac sexual and political blackmail operation.

Soon after, we came back with much more bad news about Schwarzman when he was featured (and on the cover) in a new book about the maneuvers that transferred an extraordinarily vast amount of middle and lower income American wealth, what people had invested in their homes, to people like Schwarzman.  See: New Book “Home Wreckers” Identifies NYPL Trustee (And 42nd Street Library Namesake) Stephen A. Schwarzman As Key Culprit (Along With His Friends and Neighbors) In The Huge Theft That’s Responsible For Depleting Wealth of Other Americans.  

Schwarzman is the man who thinks that taxes on the poor should be raised while the loopholes that cause him, the highest paid CEO, over $1 billion in a single year, to pay far lower taxes than anyone else.

We agree with Matt Taibbi that the American media is far too focused on engendering counterproductive and artificial hatreds.  We agree with Taibbi also cheap that ramping up to histrionic Hitler and Nazi comparisons is rarely constructive and tends to tamp down rational thinking, but Schwarzman himself has indulged in this kind of thing.  It was Schwarzman who, perceiving himself to be involved in a class war, said that, when it come to protecting the preferential tax breaks he receives, the rest of us are like Hitler.

In using Stephen Schwarzman as a key cited example, Frank Rich’s article makes the case that the greedy self interest of such wealthy people as Schwarzman makes them amoral, as if they don’t care whether fascism will triumph.  There is another interpretation others have offered that Rich doesn’t put forth.  That is the argument that, for many of the wealthy looking to preserve their wealth in the run up and time of to World War II, those individuals actually preferred fascism to the possibly alternatives, particularly communism or socialism or any forms of wealth redistributions.

Here is some of what Rich wrote about Schwarzman and Schwarzman’s comrades whom he describes as “Trump toadies.”  Note that Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner also gets mentioned and that Schwarzman and Kushner were both involved in the NYPL’s sell-off the beloved Donnell Library, the first major NYC library sale real estate deal.  (Emphasis supplied below)

You don’t have to be a card-carrying fascist to collaborate with fascists and help them seize power; you just have to be morally bankrupt and self-serving. As the authoritative American historian of Vichy France, Robert O. Paxton, has pointed out, it was only “a rather small minority” of France’s wartime collaborators who were motivated by an actual “ideological sympathy with Nazism and Fascism” to go along with the Nazi puppet regime fronted by Marshal Philippe Pétain in Vichy. A more widespread incentive was “personal gain.” Others rationalized their complicity by persuading themselves they were acting in the “national interest.” It would be no surprise if that distribution of motivations persists among Trump collaborators today. Such backers as the financier Stephen Schwarzman and New York real-estate titans like Stephen Ross of Hudson Yards no doubt congratulate themselves on acting in the “national interest” while pocketing personal gains measured in either political influence or on a profit-and-loss statement.

In France, such ostensible moral distinctions among collaborators were rendered moot in the long-delayed and gruesome postwar reckoning.

    * * *

The antecedents for Trumpist enablers from the tycoon sector both within and outside the White House — Cohn, Schwarzman, Steven Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, et al. — can be found in those now-vilified captains of 1930s American industry who were prime movers in various back-channel schemes to appease Hitler. The America First Committee’s members included Henry Ford, an unabashed anti-Semite who was name-checked admiringly in Mein Kampf, and Avery Brundage, an Illinois construction magnate and president of the U.S. Olympic Committee who bent to Hitler’s will by yanking the only two Jewish competitors on an American team in the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin. . . .

These businessmen’s machinations did not bring about peace in their time but did bring financial quid pro quos that fattened their bottom lines.

 . . . Alfred P. Sloan, the longtime GM chairman, explained his philosophy: “An international business operating throughout the world should conduct its operations in strictly business terms, without regard to the political beliefs of its management, or the political beliefs of the countries in which it is operating.” Surely Jared Kushner, Mnuchin, and Schwarzman couldn’t have put it any better as they cavorted with Mohammed bin Salman at his investment conference in Riyadh in October, a year after the murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi. As with Ford, Brundage, Mooney, and the rest, any loot they accrued in exchange for their pact with the Devil will be unearthed in good time.

Mr. Rich ends, or nearly ends with the observation about all of the Trump “enablers and collaborators” he has singled out for the opprobrium of his article that: “It is too late for them to save their reputations.”

What Rich doesn’t ever bring into the conversation is that the powerful working with Nazi’s didn’t end with World War II, even that war’s conclusion.  After World War II, many Nazi’s were brought into this country, and it wasn’t just the rocket expert Wernher von Braun.  Many escaped anything like a prosecution at Nuremberg.  The name of one major U.S. government classified program to bring Nazis to the United States was “Operation Paperclip.”  With luck, its something you can read about in the libraries if. . .