Scott Sherman Writes An Article In The Nation That Declares Us As Activists The Winners In Thwarting Library Destruction Plans: Is It Believable?- Let’s Boil It Down To Some Quotes

Scott Sherman's new article in The Nation declaring Library Defenders victorious- His 2015 book and bio from its dust jacket.

Let’s begin here with a few quotes:

I hate careless flattery, the kind that exhausts you in your efforts to believe it.—
   Wilson Mizner

History is written by the victors.—

That’s an old adage that so reflexively accepted as true, we don’t even know who first said it and there are so many various iterations of it that hardly matters. . .  like Winston Churchill famously saying, “history will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.”  

We begin with these quotes because?–  Because Scott Sherman has written an article in The Nation that declares us as library defending activists the victors in the fight to rescue our New York City libraries from destruction by the trustees.  See: The Rescue of the New York Public Library—Activists—and The Nation—thwarted NYPL trustees’ harebrained plans and restored democracy to this vital public institution, July 26, 2021.

When you’re flattered, there is always the impulse to go along willingly to accept it as true, but that can be dangerous, which is why Machiavelli counseled shunning flatterers.    “Flattery is all right so long as you don’t inhale.” said Adlai E Stevenson somewhat more lightly.

The reason why we are not inhaling Mr. Sherman’s flattery, is because, to go back to our first quote, his flattery is so careless that, try and exhaust ourselves as we might, we just can’t believe it.

What also makes Mr. Sherman’s article so hard to believe is his very strange way of writing this history of us as the ostensible victors: He may have proclaimed us as the `victors’ but he never contacted us for quotes or perspective on the conclusions he was about to assert.  So much for ‘history being written by the winners’!

In fact, whatever accomplishments we might in fact admit to, and they exist, and whatever caveats Mr. Sherman supplies about his proclamations, we overall disagree with Mr. Sherman’s simplistic conclusion that we’ve rescued the NYPL libraries or restored democracy to the NYPL as an institution.

We were one of two groups with overlapping membership foremost in taking the lead and working together to prevent the library destruction that Mr. Sherman writes about: The Committee to Save the New York Public Library and Citizens Defending Libraries.  Although Mr. Sherman names our groups in the book he wrote and in earlier articles he had published in The Nation, we go unnamed in this latest article.  Citizens Defending Libraries was the first of the named plaintiffs in the “two lawsuits” Mr. Sherman mentions were filed against the NYPL’s destructive Central Library Plan. The plan was the intended consolidating shrinkage of Manhattan’s most important centrals destination libraries: The 42nd Street Central Reference Library (the one with the lions), The 34th Street Science, Business and Industry Library, the Mid-Manhattan Library and the remnants of the then just destroyed Donnell Library.

Mr. Sherman notes that the “trustees, from 2007 to 2014, were bent on selling the property, on 40th Street and Fifth Avenue, to real estate developers,” and he rhetorically asks “How did one of the world’s greatest libraries get into the real estate business?” then supplying his analysis that the “sordid” answer was that the NYPL wanted to “profit from the city’s real estate boom” by central Manhattan real estate.  While Mr. Sherman had already written derisively about the NYPL’s dismantling plans for the 42nd Street Research library, Citizens Defending Libraries was first to identify the role that real estate interests played in driving proposals so adverse to the public interest.

We don’t want to underrate the value of Mr. Sherman’s prior work.  He was on the scene writing about the expensive foolishness of the NYPL’s plans for the 42nd Street central reference library as early as November, 2011.  That’s before Citizens Defending Libraries was born in the very beginning of 2013.  His 2015 book “Patience and Fortitude: Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library” brought further attention to these issues and included valuable additional research.

The main criticism some offered of his analysis back then was that he was too kind in the judgments he offered of the New York Public Library’s wealthy and powerful trustees even while he described them as inept and clueless.  He never accused them of greed, self dealing, or of placing any other goals above the public interest in setting their agenda.  As he described it, the main flaws these wealthy trustees had was apparently not being very clear sighted about financial matters and not caring enough about scholarship and the real value of the information in libraries, and being too enamored of the glitzy, glamour of the redesign of library space by starchitect Norman Foster.

Mr. Sherman also confined himself to writing about just the NYPL, which only has  responsibilities for the New York City libraries in the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten island, and he wrote mostly just about a few libraries in Manhattan.  He did this without relating how the issue of library trustees straying off path this way was a citywide issue.  For example. he pretty much neglected to mention the sell-off of libraries in Brooklyn. Although, as he obviously had to, he wrote often about David Offensend the NYPL’s Chief Operating Officer being very involved in steering the NYPL into its library sales, including, the shrink-and-sink sale of the beloved 97,000 square foot Donnell Library across from the Museum of Modern Art, he totally didn’t mention the striking non-coincidence that at the very same time Janet Offensend, David Offensend’s wife, was a trustee of the Brooklyn Public library who was steering that library system into its own library sales including the shrink-and-sink sale Brooklyn’s second biggest library (63,000 square feet) in a transaction mirroring the Donnell sale.       

Mr. Sherman’s book did unveil relevant numbers showing that when the very valuable Donnell was sold in 2007 in what was essentially a secretly handled no-bid sale (the transaction brought Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law a hidden windfall), the NYPL netted less than $30 million for it, maybe only about only $25 million when all costs are reckoned.  In other words, it netted less than individual apartments would be selling for in the in the luxury hotel and condo building that would replace Donnell.  It likely netted less than the hidden windfall to Jared Kushner (a windfall that Mr. Sherman did not identify or mention, something he has never caught up with to include in his writings).

Although Mr. Sherman tells us in various of his writings that the NYPL’s Central Library Plan was “born in secrecy, with Booz Allen Hamilton as the midwife” he does not tell enough about Booz Allen and he leaves it mostly to the readers of The Nation and his book to be self informed enough to wonder an important question: Why Did The NYPL  Hire Booz Allen Hamilton, A Top Spy Firm Working For The U.S. Government, Before Launching These Book Banishing Plans?

Booz Allen Hamilton “is really an arm of the intelligence community,” that we know from the 2013 Snowden revelations has been involved with the federal government’s “most controversial federal surveillance programs in recent years.”  It is:

virtually indistinguishable from our government itself when it comes to surveillance, with as Bloomberg Businessweek said, the "federal government as practically its sole client."  The government's surveillance work is now carried out predominantly through `private' spy organizations like Booz: "About 70 percent of the 2013 U.S. intelligence budget is contracted out, according to a Bloomberg Industries analysis."

And with the U.S. contracting out the huge preponderance of its surveillance to private firms, and mainly to just a very few firms with  Booz Allen Hamilton regarded as the “colossus” of those few.

Mr. Sherman mentions Booz Allen Hamilton being hired and describes the firm as “a gargantuan consulting firm that derives much of its revenue from U.S. military and intelligence agencies.” He did not, however, follow up well on the implications of that passing statement.  The closest he got was in the one of his last Nation articles, (The Hidden History of New York City's Central Library Plan- Why did one of the world's greatest libraries adopt a $300 million transformation without any real public debate? August 28, 2013) where he expressed some anxious concern about what Booz was up to, but neglected to identify Booz as a spy agency, instead identifying it to readers of The Nation in alternative, if related, terms:

Finally, what was the role of Booz Allen Hamilton—the gargantuan consulting firm whose tentacles reach into the defense, energy, transportation and financial service sectors—which was hired by the NYPL in 2007 to formulate what became known inside the trustee meetings as “the strategy”?

Mr. Sherman did us a favor by combing through the minutes of the NYPL to find juicy tidbits that help tell his story in compelling ways (for instance he reports Booz Allen was paid $2.7 million by the NYPL), but he neglected to report how those NYPL minutes reveal that the NYPL hired Booz Allen not very long after its board was advised of the expectation that new federal law might “require” the NYPL and “to reengineer their Internet service facilities to enhance law enforcement's ability to monitor and intercept communications.”  Moreover, under direction from Mayor Bloomberg’s administration and his First Deputy Mayor, Patricia Harris, the Booz services were extended to the Brooklyn and Queens library systems, thus applying to all three. The NYPL’s initial hire was also around the time that it was finally disclosed to the public that a group of Connecticut librarians had fended off a federal government attempt to surveil their library as the government secretly asserted the PATRIOT Act for years.  

Scott Sherman also let us know that, before Booze Allen was hired, McKinsey & Company, replaced by Booz, had been advising the NYPL starting around 2003 on what became its real estate sell-offs.  Since that information about the NYPL hiring McKinsey & Company was furnished a lot of has come out affecting people’s understanding of the unsavory things McKinsey & Company (a private company that thereby avoids publicly reporting its activities) routinely gets involved with.  It has recast the firm’s reputation.

See: Why McKinsey’s Century Old Brand Name Is at Risk- Accused of aiding corruption, bribery, fraud, and opioid sales, the consulting giant faces reputation damage it may never recover from
Lance Ng, March 18, 2020,  Has McKinsey Lost Its Luster? More tough headlines for the consulting firm. By Andrew Ross Sorkin, Jason Karaian, Michael J. de la Merced, Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni
February. 25, 2021, How McKinsey Has Helped Raise the Stature of Authoritarian Governments, By Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, December 15, 2018, The McKinsey Way to Save an Island–  Why is a bankrupt Puerto Rico spending more than a billion dollars on expert advice? By Andrew Rice, April 17, 2019, The Secretive Firm Profiting from Puerto Rico's Crisis, WNYC, April 18, 2019, CIA has paid millions to a consulting firm to help with reorganization, By Greg Miller, July 1, 2015, Spies fear a consulting firm helped hobble U.S. intelligence- Insiders say a multimillion dollar McKinsey-fueled overhaul of the country’s intelligence community has left it less effective. By Natasha Bertrand and Daniel Lippman 07/02/2019, US gov, Tony Blair, and McKinsey plan to rebuild Gaza – with sweatshops to exploit Palestinian workers, Max Blumenthal·October 16, 2014, Immigration and the Prison Industrial Complex, – Major companies like Booz Allen Hamilton, Deloitte Consulting, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and McKinsey & Company have contracted with ICE, and it is the latter which has gained the most notoriety for its connections.  By Andrew Moss,  January 8, 2020, Doing Business with Tyrants, By Lawrence Davidson, January 9, 2019

McKinsey & Company surfaced as a topic in the 2020 election given that it was part of Pete Buttigieg’s resume.  He worked there from June 2007 to March 2010.  At first Buttigieg treated this as a commendable part of his past, but then while being evasive about what he did for the company, he switched over to saying that McKinsey has made a lot of “poor choices” in recent years and that some of its work was  “disgusting.”  The issue of his employment there was being raised by those referring to Buttigieg as “Deep State Pete” who saw such evidence of deep state connections in Buttigieg working for McKinsey on unspecified assignments in Iraq and Afghanistan and his thereafter going back to Afghanistan to work alongside the CIA while serving as a high-ranking Naval intelligence officer in 2014.  See: Media darling Pete Buttigieg was in unit that worked with CIA in Afghanistan, Alexander Rubinstein, February  7, 2020

In other words, there is a pattern that’s become much clearer in recent years of seeing McKinsey & Company get hired for dirty business.  This is something that Citizens Defending Libraries has come to appreciate only lately and well after the fact of knowing earlier that NYPL had hired McKinsey in connection with its library restructuring plans.  So we can’t chide Mr. Sherman for similarly not making more of a point of disreputableness of McKinsey & Company when he first wrote, but we are catching up with our writing here.

Mr. Sherman could, however, have brought more attention to the implications of hiring the Booz firm.  Did he hold back because he worried about sounding too shrill or too suspicious?  Or did his editors at the Nation want him to write at the level that the issue would only be picked up on by Nation readers capable of recognizing the issue and knowledgeable from reading other Nation articles about Booz and surveillance?

Booz Allen aside, had Mr. Sherman contacted us for quotes about how successful we consider ourselves to be in the ongoing fights to defend our libraries and where we consider ourselves to be in those fights, we would have brought up things not mentioned in Mr. Sherman article proclaiming us victorious.  We would have brought up things relating exactly to what Mr. Sherman mainly wrote about in his previous writings, the sale of libraries and the elimination of books.

We would have . . .

. . . brought up the fact that, just as previously planned, one of Mid-Manhattan’s central libraries has been sold: SIBL, the NYPL’s Science, Industry and Business Library and the city’s biggest and only real science library was sold one of the very richest of the world’s multi-billionaires to be turned into a “comic book museum.”  See: Wall Street Journal Reveals Fate Of SIBL, The City’s Biggest Science Library: Super-Wealthy Paul Allen Will Turn It Into “Pop-Culture Museum.  June 4, 2018.  More shutting down of science just as we are facing challenges like global warming’s climate chaos?

Losing SIBL we lost a library that held a research collection of 1.2 million volumes, plus a circulating collection of 40,000 books and videos, over 10,000 business and scientific serials, open shelf-shelf reference offering 60,000 volumes.
 
Where are those 1.2 million+ volumes from SIBL going?–  To the revamped Mid-Manhattan Library with which SIBL is supposedly being consolidated?  The NYPL is not even really pretending that such is the case.  The resource is more or less simply vanishing with the NYPL saying to the public that it is abandoning collection of science books, expecting that people can resort to “the internet” to learn about science instead. . . . That's the increasingly censored internet. . . that's also data scraped and surveiled.

In his latest, Mr. Sherman retreads his previous account of the loss of Donnell and while asserting that we Library Defenders were victorious he says that “much was still lost,” cites as the examples of what he means the money lost and squandered on the plan he indicates was abandoned and he does not mention the loss of SIBL as being part of that plan fulfilled and he does not mention the loss of its books.  In fact, what he writes implies that with our saving of the Mid-Manhattan Library there has been a happy outcome with respect to the availability of books at Mid-Manhattan.  He says:

The NYPL wars of 2011–2014 were about saving the libraries and preserving the books on the shelves. When the trustees hatched their plan in 2007, they mistakenly assumed that e-books would replace actual books. That faith impelled them to hastily remove 3 million volumes from the 42nd Street facility; those books were never returned to the stacks under the Rose Reading Room. It is appropriate that the new Stavros Niarchos Library* has 400,000 books.

(* The Mid-Manhattan has been renamed the “Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library”– We say SNFL, Sniffle, for short– after the Greek Shipping Magnate with whom Edward G. Robinson, who played a librarian in his very last role, had a beef.)

Mr. Sherman does not put into context that "400,000" quantity of books for Mid-Manhattan, New York City’s largest circulating public library, as we have, when we, for instance, point out that Karl Lagerfeld’s personal, one-man, private library when he died held 300,000 books.  (See: Through The Windows of Privilege (Like Karl Lagerfeld’s) The Enduring Value Of Physical Books And Libraries With Big Collections Can Readily Be Discerned, March 8, 2019)

Moreover, no one reading Mr. Sherman’s words would know that the previous incarnation of the Mid-Manhattan was designed to hold 700,000 books, Plus, aside from supposedly absorbing SIBL that once held 1.2 million+ volumes, Mid-Manhattan was supposed to absorb another 175,000 books from just one of Donnell’s collections when that central destination library was shut down.  And the NYPL has publicized that there could be even fewer books in the library in the future because the bookshelves “are not structural . . . you can take [them] away later if you want.”  Another dirty little secret: Although some administration space will be converted and added onto the public space, with only 100,000 square feet, the “renovated” SNFL Mid-Manhattan will have one third less space than the pre-renovation library.  This significant loss of valuable floor space is due to the floor space lost through the creation of atriums in the building.  See: Open House New York Hosts an NYPL Presentation of Its Mid-Manhattan Library “Renovation” Plan March 6, 2018

Had Mr. Sherman interviewed us we would also have told him that when it comes to the 42nd Street Central Reference Library and its banished 3 million books we Library Defenders are complaining strenuously about proposed and ongoing renovations designed to commercialize it.  See:  NYPL’s Presentation of its “Master Plan” to alter and commercialize the 42nd Street Central Reference Library, January 27, 2018.  Heaven knows what has rushed forward under the concealing cloak of Covid.  

Moreover, we have pointed out and objected to in testimony before the City Council the NYPL’s very contracted and shortened hours for use of the 42nd Street Central Referenced Library by scholars in order to hold private gala events at the library, and “cocktail parties for the connected” represents a highly inappropriate privatization of that public asset intended to serve the public.

We would also have told Mr. Sherman to talk about the loss of other libraries and library space, like the Inwood Library, Sunset Library, etc.

Mr. Sherman’s article has a feel to it that he wants to close the book on this story, but his journalism in doing so is a very poor first draft of history.

There are well-known sayings about history, knowing and remembering it.  One of the best known is George Santayana’s “When experience (which is history) is not retained...infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” which may be viewed as something of a retread of Cicero’s “Those who have no knowledge of what has gone before them must forever remain children.”  Malcolm X took a crack at essentially the same sentiment with: “History is a people's memory, and without a memory man is demoted to the lower animals.”

If Mr. Sherman had so much as mentioned Citizens Defending Libraries or the Committee to Save the New York Public Library by name instead of just referring nondescriptly to “an indefatigable group of citizens came together to save the libraries” as the victors his readers might have gone to our respective websites to get a far different picture of the status of our fights than he portrayed.

Dwelling on problems unrelentingly without solutions can be enervating and it can defeat the activist spirit.  That’s why on our Citizens Defending Libraries main page we proudly do declare our actual victories.  See: Achievements and Partial List of Successes of Citizens Defending Libraries (founded early 2013).
 
Notwithstanding the importance of giving due recognition to our victories in maintaining spirit and forward momentum, Mr. Sherman’s account that everything is now happily taken care of in some kind of lulling “end of history” way seems designed to send all the activists home and for all challenges to and questioning of the library trustees and their decisions, current and future, to cease.   Such a happy-ending erasure of our ongoing fight and important history raises this concern: If history is, as they say, written by the victors and we did not write this history, then somebody else somewhere, other than us, must be the actual victor. .  Somebody who had more to do with what te wanted written.  Then, with dread we remember George Orwell’s, words: “Whoever controls the past controls the future.”  

Hope you found some quotes you enjoyed reading this post, because, answer is, if you are looking at Mr. Sherman’s latest article in The Nation we don’t think you’ll find anything in it that’s in any way worthy of quoting. 

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. . .

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

NYPL trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman, a principal subject in Aaron Glantz's new book, "Homewreckers," is featured prominently on its cover and scrutinized within the pages inside.

It’s time to write, yet again, about why NYPL trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman has a terrible reputation that sinks lower and lower with everything you ever find out about him. 

We just got finished writing about Mr. Schwarzman in connection with his friendship and praise for the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS).  Crown Prince MBS is the Saudi leader who has enmeshed our country along with his in the war crimes and siege warfare against Yemen and he is the one everyone is looking at in connection with the dismemberment murder of Jamal Khashoggi.  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?)

We were writing then because of the plans the NYPL had to turn over its Grand Celeste Bartos Ballroom space in the famed 42nd Street Central Reference Library for Prince MBS to have a reputation laundering event where Prince MBS would teach young people how to manage their reputations.  It seems like everything these days is about reputation laundering for reputation management.  See: As The Brooklyn Public Library Holds Gala At The Barclays Arena Honoring Nets And Barclay’s Arena, Citizens Defending Libraries Is There With A Message: End Faux Philanthropy; Take Less And Don’t Sell Our libraries! and A Flourish of Stories About So-Called Philanthropy Being Used As A Guise For Diminishing The Public Commons– That Includes Libraries.

Yes, in its great unfettered wisdom, the NYPL, its trustees and senior management, was going to allow the Crown Prince to launder his reputation in the grand 42nd Street Library that, already for reputation laundering purposes, is now officially and ostentatiously called the “Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.”

In that article about MBS and Schwarzman we also passed along information about Stephen A. Schwarzman hobnobbing happily with Gislaine Maxwell, now famous and in the news for the stories about how she was the key and apparently foremost helper, Jeffrey Epstein’s number one elf, in running his pedophiliac sexual and political blackmail ring. . . and we passed along information about how Mr. Schwarzman and his businesses factor prominently in the burning up and deforestation of the Amazon rain forest.

As usual with Mr. Schwarzman, if you hang around a little while, there will be more information arriving that, if it is at all possible, drags your opinion of him down even further.

Now there is a new book out featuring its outstanding villains conspicuously on its cover.  Yes, Stephen Schwarzman is one of the main ones the book tells us stories about.  The book is Homewreckers: How a Gang of Wall Street Kingpins, Hedge Fund Magnates, Shady Banks and Vulture Capitalists Suckered Millions Out of Their Homes and Demolished the American Dream, by Aaron Glantz.  Glantz has won a Peabody award for investigative journalism and was a recent finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on modern-day redlining.

Glantz’s book which has, on its cover, members of what Glantz describes as “President Donald Trump’s inner circle” has, in addition to Schwarzman and Trump, Trump Cabinet members Steven Mnuchin, the current Treasury Secretary of the United States, and Wilbur Ross the current United States Secretary of Commerce.  Helping make Schwarzman more officially a member of that Trump inner circle is that, as you can pick up from the caption to one of the photo illustrations in the book’s interior, Trump made Schwarzman chair of his strategic and policy forum of corporate advisors and “titans”– You see Trump sitting next to Schwarzman at one of its meetings. (CDL video of them together here.)

Glantz’s book is about the unfettered mechanics of an enormous transfer of wealth that robbed a substantial portion of Americans of the share of national wealth they once traditionally held, enriching a very few at the very top and very specifically the men on the cover of the book as the prime examples.

Glantz is smart to stand back and unfold his story in big picture terms, laying out the two main aspects it divides into.  First, the astonishing transfer of wealth that occurred, removing almost all the wealth and financial security from a broad base of Americans, and secondly, how unfair that transfer to a small elite group of insiders was, accomplished by financial manipulations which government aligned itself to assist, and sometimes even subsidized to make the seizures riskless for those seizing the wealth, and which oft times descended into unchallenged illegalities.  Schwarzman was a leader and one of the few key players in these events as Glantz tells the story.

Talking about his book recently on Democracy Now, Glantz speaks of how so “much of Americans’ wealth is in their homes,” because we as Americans have very few other ways to save.  Thus it is of enormous consequence, as he points out that “eight million Americans lost their homes in the Great Recession” with financial groups like Schwarzman’s acquiring those homes through foreclosures.  Now, points out Glantz, “we live now in a society where the wealth gap between the richest one-tenth of 1% and the other 90% is bigger than it’s been in a hundred years.”  And with that shift of wealth along with power comes other things: Although Glanz didn’t note it, the very wealthiest are now paying taxes at a lower overall rate than the middle class.  Schwarzman is an advocate of taxing the poor more.

The Democracy Now interview with Glantz is at: Part 1 (part of DN daily broadcast): Homewreckers: How Wall Street, Banks & Trump’s Inner Circle Used the 2008 Housing Crash to Get Rich, October 15, 2019, and Part 2 (DN Web Exclusive): “The Federal Government Actually Paid Him”: How Steve Mnuchin Profited from the Housing Bust, October 15, 2019.
           
More specifically Glantz observes:

    . . . the richest 0.1 of 1% of the American people have the same amount of wealth as the other 90%. And that is because, in America, 80% of most middle-class families’ wealth goes to only five things: food, housing, shelter, transportation, healthcare. All those other things, besides housing, just disappear as soon as you spend your money. Housing is the only way that most Americans have to save. The average American family has $4,000 in the bank. So, either you put your money in equity in your house, or you pay it to your landlord,

Glanz then asks “who profited” off this transfer of wealth through foreclosures on these homes.  Glanz spotlights Invitation Homes, founded by Schwarzman and his Blackstone group, as one of the main profiteers, and observes that Schwarzman’s company now owns 80,000 homes all across the country.  In 2013, on Charlie Rose just a few years after the great recession began, Schwarzman was able to brag that his was the “largest real estate investor in the world” and that:

We started actually buying individual houses from Foreclosure about a year and a quarter ago. We're now the largest owner of houses in the United States.

Indeed, unsurprisingly, Glantz’s book confirms that the “biggest buyer of foreclosed homes was” Schwarzman’s “Blackstone Group.”  On that Charlie Rose broadcast, Schwarzman told Rose that he had absolute confidence in the future of the housing market in the United States in light of the real estate market turnaround following the Great Recession’s downturn, which enabled that wholesale acquisition of foreclosed homes by him and his company, and that “in fact it's turned out to be so even faster than we wanted it to.”  Presumably, he could only have been meaning that had the downturn continued longer he would have been able to buy up still more foreclosed homes to profit even more.  See: Noticing New York: On Charlie Rose NYPL Trustee Stephen Schwarzman Confirms Suspicions: His $100 Million To The Library Was Linked To NYPL’s Real Estate Plans, June 22, 2013.

When Americans lose the wealth of their home investments, they lose more: They are at the mercy of the decisions of landlords to increase rents or to neglect to make habitable the premises they then need to rent.  Glantz notes of Invitation Homes that because it’s a publicly traded company you can “very clearly their rent increases” and “the relatively small amount of money they spend on maintenance.”

Something else has happened, a shift of wealth on another level, with all these foreclosures.  Glantz writes:

The Obama administration's bulk sales gave rise to a class of landlord that has never been seen before.  At the beginning if 2012, national Real Estate Investor magazine reported, not a single landlord owned as many as a thousand single-family homes.  But just two years later, industry analysts were tracking more than a dozen vulture companies that had swooped in after the housing bust to buy thousands—removing then from individual ownership and concentrating wealth in the hands of billionaire investors.

More explicitly, his book covers how, until this sea change, the landlord industry had been mostly an industry run by moms and pops, dominated by “small investors doing it locally across the country.”  In other words, those renting to tenants once comprised an interstitial layer of  a somewhat more wealthy group of people with closer ties to the community.   Their absence from the local landscape leads to other consequences; writes Glantz: “the corporate landlords were far more likely to file eviction notices than mom-and-pops.”  In fact, the way in which the Blackstone and Invitation Home owners have supplanted the mom and pop landlords means that landlords who once made personal and judgement based decisions about whether to evict families and how to accommodate hardships when families are pulling themselves through a financial crisis have been replaced by a whole new eviction industry running based on numerical formulae. . . .

. . . Worse, that new eviction industry is now pursuing practices that are apparently designed to make money out of the cycle of fines and desperation that launching threatened and actual evictions entail, with, for instance, some owners who “see the late fees they impose prior to eviction as extra income,” given that tenants can wind up paying “22 percent more every year in housing costs because of the added fines and fees.”  That is not to mention that just raising the rent extraordinarily can be a de facto eviction, and the fact the cost of low income housing, rising faster than inflation, is also rising even faster than expensive apartments.

The late-paying renter, with already limited options, is less able to move because they don’t want an eviction notice trailing them around, and is this forced to continue paying nearly unaffordable rent.  They are:

thus transformed into a perpetual debtor. Never able to catch up, her power to demand basic services or repairs, to complain about anything at all, dwindles from little to nothing.

This was covered in (and quotes above come from) the recent multi-part “On The Media” series about the alarming current state of eviction in the United States, The Scarlet E (especially Part III of the series)* : See: The Scarlet E, Part I: Why?, June 7, 2019, The Scarlet E, Part II: 40 Acres, June 14, 2019, The Scarlet E, Part III: Tenants and Landlords, June 21, 2019, and The Scarlet E, Part IV: Solutions, June 28, 2019.

(* This On The Media series done by co-host Brooke Gladstone, is an example of the excellence of the work On The Media can often produce, and used to do so more regularly, but it makes for a confusing problem, because On The Media recently has also been churning out some truly appalling propaganda pieces, particularly when it involves reporting on narratives concerning information from the intelligence communities and rationales for more perpetual war.  Typically, it's been co-host Bob Garfield who has become the prime mouthpiece for these suspect pieces.  Whereas, On The Media used to encourage a meta-awareness of media and often used to teach media literacy by interrogating narratives offered by other sectors of the media, Garfield now, more and more, seems to be stenographically transmitting talking points from the intelligence communities and military industrial complex.  It’s been so bad that Garfield even had to broadcast a mea culpa in one follow-up segment- May 24, 2019, his apology though wasn’t as maxima culpa as it should have been.  Very interestingly, Garfield’s mea culpa segment stands out exceptionally on the On The Media site as one for which there has been no transcript provided, making it less likely to Google- Garfield's more important apology is thus harder to find than the original apologized for segment for which there is a transcript.)

The Scarlet E series explains how, as the Blackstones of the industry Walmartize property ownership, the increased “social distance” with landlords no longer personally talking with or intimately interrelating with tenants means there are no personal or locally tailored solutions to problems or avoiding cycles of despair.

The Scarlet E also notes (Part II) that tale that the data tells: “One of a plague that could have been contained had it not been purposefully designed to diminish the wealth and power of specific populations–black and brown ones.”

During the Democracy Now interview of author Aaron Glantz, Juan González brought up “the disproportionate impact that this loss of equity in all these homes had, especially on the African-American and Latino communities, which were even more dependent on home equity for what little wealth they had or net wealth they had.”  In fact, the following week in a Democracy Now interview with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an assistant professor at Princeton University about her new book, “Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Home Ownership,” it was noted that:

Recent census data reveals the homeownership rate for African Americans has fallen to its lowest level since before the civil rights movement. In the second quarter of this year, the rate fell to just 40%, the lowest level since 1950.

Glanz responded to González noting that:

What we see is that banks, like Steve Mnuchin’s bank, concentrated their foreclosures in communities of color. And then, when they started making loans again when the economy improved, they didn’t make loans to those communities. [virtually none– Glantz gives numbers.]

And now Steve Mnuchin, as the treasury secretary, is in charge of regulating every American bank.

The book depicts how, throughout the transfer of homeownership wealth and equity resulting from the Great Recession, the government wasn’t on the side of the resident homeowners; it was on the side of the big investors like Schwarzman.  In the Democracy Now interview Juan González note, “Julián Castro, now a presidential candidate, was at HUD supposedly in charge of the efforts to assist homeowners, and that’s come under heavy criticism, what the Obama administration did to help these homeowners.”
                       
Big picture, some may remember– everyone ought to remember–  that at the beginning of the Great Recession there was even a question about whether a firm like Goldman Sachs would go bankrupt given the risks it had taken along with similar financial institutions that were bad bets. The bad bets and inappropriate risk taking on the part of Wall Street firms were what triggered the enormous economic downturn that negatively affected everyone else in the economy. Other firms, Lehman and Bear Stearns did collapse, and if firms like Goldman had been allowed to fail it could, properly handled, have led to a generally desirable break up the monopolies in the industry that are not good for democracy (see Tim Wu’s work).

Instead, with Goldman advisors sitting in the top positions in government guiding most of the decisions, government saved Goldman and the rest the firms like it, coming to Wall Street’s rescue.  Government did not concentrate on rescuing the resident homeowners who had been negatively affected by Wall Street’s bad decisions.  It was a question of how and where the money to “rescue” the economy was pumped into the economy.  It went to the financial sector and was used to fund the overall transfer of homeownership wealth.

In 2008, there was fear of a “deflationary recession” as had occurred during the Great Depression. In essence, that’s a market recognition that values of homes were now inflated.  A recognition that homes generally were not worth what had been presumed when banks made loans on them would normally mean that both the homeowners and the bank that lent them money would be forced together and at the same time to cope with the fact that they had both made bad more or less, the same, mostly shared bad decisions about the market.  If the home is worth less than previously, there aren’t alternative buyers on the horizon and the bank’s best outcome is to write down the amount of the loan and allow the resident homeowner to pay off a lower mortgage amount or pay a reduced rate of interest.  In that case, the wealth reflected by the homes doesn’t get transferred elsewhere.

There are ways to avoid “deflationary recession” and keep the resident homeowners in place. That’s if the choice is to bail out homeowners (rather than Wall Street), and Glantz told Democracy Now that there were many “very senior people” inside the Obama administration who pushed for those kinds of programs as an alternative response, but he says that advice was consistently ignored.  Glantz says:

all these people came forward, and they said, “We don’t need to bail out the banks. We can have a program like Franklin Roosevelt did back in the 1930s to bail out the people.” And then learning that that New Deal program actually made money for the government as it helped millions — it helped a million Americans stay in their homes, created the 30-year fixed mortgage, and then how, even when foreclosures happened, this government-run bank sold them off one at a time to individual families instead of in bulk to speculators . .  there were like very senior people in the room who were making this argument the whole time, who were just ignored every step of the way.

Instead, the threat of deflation was battled by pumping up the market back up by streaming money into the hands of the banks.  With pumped in funds, the financial sector, sidestepping the need to take necessary loses and it gained the upper hand to force transfers.

In the Scarlet E series it is noted that what made things significantly worse for the prospect of resident owners continuing to own their own homes was the way the banks, who had previously been requiring little equity be paid before the Great Recession, changed the borrowing rules as the federal “rescue” money flowed to Wall Street.  The changed rules favored big investors:

 . .  banks went from stupid to stupid . .  they [started giving out loans to no one]. You had to put 25, 30 percent down. So then the question is who has the opportunity to take advantage of this market. The answer I think is larger landlords or private equity; people that have capital. . .  that property gets consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. And so then the house -- the most intimate of spaces the most sacred, protected of spaces -- the house becomes a pure commodity and it becomes something that's driven completely by a market logic.

Under the terms by which some of the federal money was dispensed, there were, in theory, some rules at least, to benefit the beleaguered homeowners.  They were supposed to be followed by the banks getting the federal dollars being pumped in.  Glanz, however informs us about how those rules were not, in fact, followed.

Part of Glantz’s book involves tracking the stories of actual individual homeowner families affected by the crisis.  One of the happier through lines of these stories in his book is about Sandy Jolley, albeit, she is one of those lost her home to foreclosure.  After losing her home, Ms. Jolley won an $89 million whistleblower settlement against Steve Mnuchin’s bank. An attorney who took her case had her meet with the  Justice Department, the FBI, and the HUD inspector general when she contacted him to present “evidence of a massive fraud.”  Of that multi-million dollar settlement, Ms. Jolley got $1.6 million for herself.  It took ten years.  By that time, Steve Mnuchin had profitably sold his bank and was the Treasury Secretary.  Also, Glantz points out that while Mnuchin’s bank had to pay the $89 million whistleblower settlement, it had received over $1 billion in federal subsidies in connection with its foreclosure portfolio.

In his book Glantz describes the sweet deal “loss-share” agreement subsidies that his “homewreckers” got from the government; Mnuchin for OneWest Bank, John Otting for US Bank, Wilbur Ross and Stephen Schwarzman for BankUnited–  The banks got to keep all the money they made on foreclosures or anything else, but if they “lost money foreclosing on homeowners, the government would pay for it,” to the tune of billions of dollars. By the way, note how this lays the pavement on the raceway to speed up home foreclosures all the more.

In Glantz’s Democracy Now interview, there was a natural focus on candidates now running in the 2020 presidential campaign.  In addition, to noting, as mentioned above, that Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro was at HUD when HUD and the federal government was failing so miserably to address the needs of those who owned their own homes, Glantz gave prominent mention in the interview to the fact that a number of the other Democratic candidates in the field have plans “to tackle the housing challenges of ordinary Americans, many who are still struggling after the devastating 2008 housing market collapse.”  Specifically listed as having proposals are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Pete Buttigieg.  Joe Biden was mentioned as apparently having no plan.  Julián Castro got no mention as having a plan.  Glantz also made specific mention that “Kamala Harris says she wants to put $100 billion towards promoting African-American homeownership.”  And he noted “black homeownership rate in this country is below the level that it was at when segregation and discrimination was legal.”

That made it sound like Kamala Harris could be depended upon to be part of a solution.  But, as needs to warned, Democracy Now’s often excellent news coverage tends to give you about 85% of the news.  It’s been said that Steve Mnuchin would probably not be Treasury Secretary today if he had been prosecuted for his bank’s mortgage fraud in California back when it was happening.  (And much the same applies to Wilbur Ross as Commerce Secretary.)  And prosecuting Mnuchin and his bank is something it has been noted, Kamala Harris, who was Attorney General of the state of California at the time didn’t do.

Although it went unmentioned in the Democracy Now interview, Glantz’s book deals (pages 86 to 88) with how Mnuchin’s bank OneWest falsified and backdated documents and evaded other required procedures in order to accelerate the foreclosure mill operations maximally- it would also have disqualified the bank from receiving more federal foreclosure subsidies.  Kamal Harris disregarded the “strong recommendations of her staff” and did not sue Mnuchin’s bank.

Something else you didn’t hear on Democracy Now that you would have heard if you were picking up your news from Jimmy Dore’s Radio Show (one of the shows on WBAI radio, currently subject to a destructive dismantlement attack on the Pacifica Public Radio Network)— Steve Mnuchin has since that time been a donor to Kamala Harris’ campaigning.  In other words, if you get a lot of your news from Democracy Now, you need to work to supplement what you hear there by informing yourself from other sources as well.

Citizens Defending Libraries has included the following in flyers it has distributed:

It has been noted that if Steve Mnuchin had been vigorously prosecuted at the local level for his business’s mortgage fraud, misrepresentations, backdating and falsification of documents to rev up the pace of his OneWest foreclosure mill, he wouldn’t be Treasury Secretary, appointed by Donald Trump today- Similarly, had NYS Attorney General Eric Schneiderman investigated the shrink-and-sink Donnell Library plunder with Blackstone’s Stephen A. Schwarzman involved on the selling side and Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner as principal financial beneficiary, those two Trump henchmen might not be in significant positions of power today.  The whole political landscape at the national level could be different, not to mention having healthier local politics.

Two of the co-founders of Citizens Defending Libraries spoke to Amy Goodman, the Democracy Now host who created the Democracy Now program (incubated out of WBIA radio her in NYC), on November 12, 2015 at the Brooklyn For Peace fund raiser where Ms. Goodman was honored and they discussed with her why Democracy Now should cover these matters and the sell off and shrinkage of New York City libraries.  We sent follow up materials to the Democracy Now producers about what that coverage ought to consist of.  Democracy Now never followed up and never covered this other story other story they could have covered involving Steve Schwarzman before Trump was elected and Schwarzman appointed the head of Trump’s economic policy council.

Not only did the unprosecuted Mnuchin become Treasury Secretary, he was able to sell his OneWest bank at a nice profit.  Glantz makes a point in his book about how small the club of elites is.  The club is so small that Mnuchin did no have to go very far at all to sell his bank, he sold it to his neighbor John Thain owning another apartment in the 740 Park Avenue where they both live.  Glantz makes a point about how many of the characters in his book, corporate raider Ronald Perlman, Steve Mnuchin, former Goldman chief John Thain, and Steve Schwarzman all reside at 740 Park Avenue.  Nowhere in Glantz's book does he mention that the address is also famous as David Koch’s address or that the conglomeration of billionaires at 740 Park Avenue was the subject of a documentary about escalating wealth and income inequality that Alex Gibney made, “Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream.”

Schwarzman’s apartment at 740 Park Avenue was formerly owned by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  Small world, he bought it from another wealthy NYPL trustee.  It’s twenty thousand square feet, has thirty-five rooms, thirteen bathrooms.  Schwarzman doesn’t have to worry about going out to the public library, he has his own “pine-paneled library” in the apartment.  The apartment is just one of Schwarzman’s homes. Amy Goodman’s reaction on Democracy Now:

So, when you want to sell banks or whatever, you just go trick-or-treating in your own apartment building.

In his book, Glanz describes the lavish birthday parties Schwarzman has given himself, both his sixtieth birthday party in 2007 (where the wealthy attending came dressed as European nobility of the past and “Among the most popular costumes was Marie Antionette"- Rod Stewart was paid something around $1 million to perform and Patti Labelle sang as well) and his seventieth birthday (Gwen Stefani sang there).  The seventieth was quite as lavish as the sixtieth, live camels, trapeze artists, fireworks, etc., but Glantz notes that while the 2007 birthday's lavishness “sparked condemnation” even from conservative sources, by 2017 with Trump in office, this kind of excess was taken largely in stride, going mostly unnoticed and unremarked upon.

Glanz’s book says that “Schwarzman sought to rehabilitate his image” after his “controversial [sixtieth] birthday party” by transferring $100 million to the New York Public Library, which is when Schwarzman’s name was put on New York's  42nd Street Astor, Tilden, and Lenox Central Reference Library (the one with the lions).  Glanz apparently didn’t do enough research on Schwarzman to realize that this $100 million transfer was not merely for reputation laundering purposes, it was also intended to jump start New York library real estate deals, including the first one, the shrink-and-sink Donnell Library sale that benefitted Jared Kushner.                               

Schwarzman is thoroughly covered in Glantz’s book, which is 330 pages before the acknowledgments start.  Schwarzman gets mentioned some 53 there and his Blackstone gets mentioned some 41 times in all.

Blackstone, acting quickly. has a defense web page site up with Invitation Homes attacking the book:  Correcting the Record on Blackstone and Invitation Homes- Correcting the numerous falsehoods and mischaracterizations in Aaron Glantz's recent book that references Invitation Homes and Blackstone.  Nevertheless, when you look at that web site, it s not clear what are asserted to be the "numerous falsehoods," what would make them "numerous," or what the corrections are that the site means to offer.

The New York Times has just reported that NYPL trustee Stephen Schwarzman, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, and Jared Kushner are all going to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman upcoming economic event despite the infamy.  Despite the dismemberment killing.  Despite Yemen.  It’s just business- as usual.

Notes the Times article:

Since then, many executives have pledged to continue their partnerships with Saudi Arabia, which range from joint investments in entities like Blackstone’s multibillion-dollar infrastructure fund. . .

The Schwarzman Blackstone multibillion-dollar infrastructure fund deal is Saudi seed money to be used to privatize American infrastructure.

Privatization, whether it it turning libraries into real estate deals or selling American infrastructure, is a symptom of wealth inequality.   It means that accumulated wealth, running out of other things in which to invest its capital, needs to start buying up what was previously the public commons as one of the few things still left to acquire and collect rent on. It also reflects how the increasing imbalance of power enfeebles the public’s ability to fend off these encroaching advances.  Lastly, with the shift of resources to the wealthy and the powerful, there is less and less public money to invest in the public’s resources to maintain them healthily and robustly to benefit all of society. 

The parallels of such privatization to the shift of wealth described here and by Glantz with respect to homeownership are obvious.

Kanopy, The Internet Movie Streaming Service That Was Being Used By NYC Libraries To Help Make Up For Elimination Of DVDs Is Now Being Abandoned!- The internet giveth! And The internet taketh away!

When Citizens Defending Libraries was handing out leaflets at the Climate Strike March on September 20th in New York City, one woman told us of her upset that along with the elimination of books from her local library, the DVDs were disappearing as well.  She was a woman of action: She told us that she was so upset that she wrote the NYPL.  The NYPL wrote back to her with a letter that said, yes they were getting rid of the DVDs, but they were making up for it in other ways.  One of the main replacements for the DVDs was a movie streaming service they made available to library patrons.— The internet giveth!

And now we read that the New York City libraries, all three systems at he same time, are abandoning Kanopy. The internet taketh away!  We hardly knew yee.

See: Variety-  New York City Public Libraries Drop Kanopy Free Movie-Streaming Service, by Todd Spangler, June 25, 2019.

Oh well, you can always stream movies over the internet expansively through the Amazon monopoly, and don’t worry about. . . . 

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?)

If you were following our Twitter or Facebook feeds you already know-

On Wednesday, September 18th, the NYPL trustees had their meeting.  We were there.  Some of us were outside demonstrating with Code Pink.  The NYPL trustees went into executive session.  The NYPL then cancelled the event that it was allowing to be held in its grand Celeste Bartos room at the 42nd Street Central Reference Library.  The event was to honor the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MBS”).   Crown Prince MBS is the character one running Saudi Arabia now who is responsible for the Yemen War and siege and many attendant war crimes (helped by the U.S. and endorsed by Israel), plus he has been identified as responsible for the dismemberment killing of Jamal Khashoggi, lured to his fate into the Saudi embassy in Turkey to get marriage license documents.

See the scathing Guardian op-ed that our library defending team had up at the same time that the NYPL trustees were meeting:

Why is New York's most famous library getting into bed with the Saudi crown prince?– Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is going to be sponsoring an event at the iconic New York Public Library. This reputation-laundering shouldn’t be allowed to happen

In that excellently juicy op-ed, read about Stephen Schwarzman and MBS:

Schwarzman gushed about his relationship with the crown prince in a 2017 interview: “He’s a very smart, very energetic, very visionary person, and being involved with someone like that on a personal basis as well as institutionally is really fascinating.”

Unbelievably, the MBS event was to involve the Crown Prince MBS teaching about “reputation management.”

We have previously put up more about Mr. Schwarzman,* his use of the NYPL for his own personal reputation laundering and his relationship whereby he got $20 billion from the Saudis as seed money for the privatizing of American public assets and public infrastructure. . .   (in other words, when it came to NYC libraries, Mr. Schwarzman was just getting started.)

This gets you to the many pages we have put up at CDL about Mr. SAS.

(* From that link, you can scroll down for older pages for more.)

Here is one recent article we have up about Mr. Schwarzman:

NYPL Trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman, With His $1 Billion Salary, Claims Success `NOT Because We’re Smarter’, But Because `We Just See Things Others Can’t See,’ Have Data Others Don’t, And Get Advance Warnings.

Other unsavory people Schwarzman hobnobs with?: We have this tweet up about Schwarzman hangig out with Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice in his pedophiliac sexual and political blackmail operation- New York Magazine also wrote about their hobnobbing.  

Another recent tweet about Shwarzman we have up is this one linking to an article in the Intercept about how NYPL trustee Schwarzman's Blackstone is involved in the destruction of the Amazon.

Here are tweeted pictures of us with Code Pink outside the Trustees meeting.

After the NYPL trustees meeting when it was announced that the MBS event was cancelled, NYPL COO Iris Weinshall (Sen. Schumer's wife) came out and encountered us, we held up one of our signs and she said, "We did the right thing."  But we think that Ms. Weinshall had to have been involved in making the wrong decision in the first place, and we know that her husband is one of the biggest recipients of campaign contributions from Mr. Schwarzman.  

Here is a video of Senator Schumer's wife, NYPL Chief Operating Officer Iris Weinshall at another NYPL trustees meeting  patting Blackstone's Schwarzman on back about approval after the public was told about a plan to replace central library space with fancy café.

Library Defender Legal Action To Challenge Extremely Expensive and Insensitive Changes To Landmark 42nd Street Central Reference Library Building The NYPL Wants To Make The Library A Better Place For Society Weddings (With Shorter Hours For Researchers)

Legal challenge letter from our counsel Michael Hiller

 On August 12th our legal counsel Michael S. Hiller of Hiller, PC delivered a letter legally challenging in multiple respects the NYPL’s proposed very expensive and insensitive changes to the landmark 42nd Street Central Reference Library.  The changes are intended to make the library a better place to hold society wedding and similar events.  Meanwhile, the NYPL keeps shortened hours for the researchers and researchers the building was intended to serve.  This is an inducement to continue those shorter hours that make way for the society events.

In one respect, what the NYPL is doing is an example the incremental creep by which the NYPL is trying to implement the much reviled Central Library Plan we previously sued to stop and caused to be derailed.

In one respect, our new legal challenge here is, in ways, a legal challenge version of testimony we not long ago delivered to the New York City Council pointing out many of the same things.  For that testimony, text and video versions, See: Defending Libraries Testimony To City Council Regarding NYC Library Budget, The Sale of Libraries, Privatization of Libraries, Short Library Hours, And The Elimination of Books.

The legal challenge letter, which is eleven pages, goes into a lot of detail that is probably mostly not that easy for the layman to quickly absorb.  It concerns how a state agency (under Governor Andrew Cuomo), SHIPO, the State Historic Preservation Office, and a city commission, the Landmarks Commission (dominated by Mayor Bill de Blasio who appoints the commissioners) were both not doing their respective jobs to make sure that a library granted the use of the public park space in which it sits (part of Bryant) is continued to be used and properly treated in landmark terms as the library is is supposed to be.  However, we particularly like this part of the letter starting on page 2, which we think clearly makes points we can all appreciate:

Second, as shown below, the Proposed Work includes, in particular, a twin-elevator bank abutting the landmarked South Court and the non-designated, but equally-as-important North-South Gallery directly adjacent to one already-existing larger elevator, resulting in a redundancy that the Applicant has never explained or justified. A closer examination of the Application and the circumstances surrounding its preparation confirms that the requested CofA is designed to streamline the Applicant's catering business for large special events and receptions (weddings, bar mitzvahs, corporate parties, etc.) that have become the new priority at the Main Branch ("Reception Hall Business"). See the Applicant's Special Events Brochure (Ex. 2). However, as reflected below, the Applicant's Reception Hall Business, which caters to the wealthy and privileged (id.) at the expense of public access to this publicly-owned building sited in a public park, violates: (i) a certain Agreement of Consolidation, dated May 23, 1895, entered into between the three trusts that established the Applicant more than 120 years ago ("Consolidation Agreement") (Ex. 3); (ii) a certain lease between the City of New York and the Applicant, entered into in 1897 (the "Lease") (Ex. 4); (iii) the City Charter (Ex. 5); (iv) a certain Library Construction and Enabling Act of 1897; and (v) the public trust doctrine, which limits use of park spaces to "park uses." Accordingly, the requested CofA would constitute clear violation oflaw, empowering the Commission under §25- 307(b)(3) of the Landmarks Law to deny the Application.

Third, the proposed work, which, we emphasize, is designed solely to enhance an illegal Reception Hall Business in the iconic Main Branch, would destroy architectural and cultural resources (both those which are protected by designation and those certain interiors which have not yet been recognized but which are nevertheless uniquely important spaces), critical to maintaining the integrity of this designated landmark. And the affected interior spaces, although not yet designated, have been the subject of three Requests for Evaluation ("RFEs"), the first of which was filed nearly six (6) years ago ("First RFE"), and as to which, the Commission has not yet taken action (First RFE, Ex. 6). Thus, the Research Department of the Commission has implemented a virtual  pocket veto with respect to important cultural and architectural resources, preventing their preservation. Regardless, in the absence of a compelling justification, the Commission should reject the Application as a needless demolition and renovation that would result in permanent disfigurement of the Main Branch.

Our counsel in this case is being paid for by our partner in this effort, the non-profit Committee to save the New York Public Library.  This effort can use your support. You can help.  Good legal counsel like this, essential to a muscular protection of the libraries, and it is only available when we pay them.  Please go to web site of our non-profit partner Committee to save the New York Public Library and make a donation toward these costs.