Davos’s Supreme Big-Wigs (e.g. NYPL’s Stephen Schwarzman), Only In It For Themselves, Are Graduating To New Concept: “The Useless Class”– And They Don’t Mean Themselves!

The lower right corner is the Davos talk about "the useless class"

Davos is in the news.  We are increasingly hesitant and careful about recommending the increasingly often dangerously propagandistic (embedding disguised corporate mainstream narratives) reporting of Democracy Now, but we do recommend dropping in on today’s report on Davos-

“Davos Man”: How Billionaires Devour the World & Fuel Global Inequality, Prolonging the Pandemic, January 21, 2022.  It’s an interview with New York Times global correspondent Peter Goodman, author of the new book “Davos Man: How the Billionaires Devoured the World.”

The report features one of our favorite, regularly recurring bad guys, NYPL Trustee Stephen Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone Group.

Here on Schwarzman:

    •    Steve Schwarzman, who’s the world’s largest private equity magnate, worth about $35 billion, made a fortune on the foreclosure crisis in the U.S., and then around the world. He’s now vacuuming up homes again at distressed prices.

Not only was Schwarzman perfectly positioned in taking advantage of the 2008 financial crisis, he presciently invested to take advantage of the Covid crisis.

    •    Schwarzman invested heavily in healthcare in the run-up to the pandemic. He owns a company called TeamHealth, which is a huge staffing company that puts people in emergency rooms, where there’s just an epidemic of surprise billing — patients wheeled in, not knowing the terms of their insurance policies, discovering later that they’ve been treated by an out-of-network provider, with huge bills, collection agents hassling them. And Schwarzman has taken the opportunity of the pandemic to buy more healthcare assets.

Basically the discussion lambastes the wealthy that show up at Davos proclaiming their beneficent intentions while being out for their own interests at everyone else’s expense:

    •    it’s well and good that in Davos they’re talking about [‘important good issues ’ - “climate change,” “gender imbalance,” “systematic racism, “voting rights”] about which they not only do very little — . .  they put out some great reports — but then they go home, these participants, and they commence the battle to protect their privileges, to prevent actual redistribution of wealth.

    •    The forum convenes under the mantra “committed to improving the state of the world,” which is a handy phrase that connotes change. These are the ultimate beneficiaries of the status quo.

    •    these are the people who have rigged our system so that most of the wealth flows in their direction, at the direct expense everyone else.

“Stakeholder capitalism”?

    •    It’s all about us depending upon the goodness, the innate goodness, of . . . CEOs to run their companies so that everybody wins. And central to that is this idea, that is pervasive at Davos, that all solutions to problems can be found if people just earnestly debate them and find win-win solutions. They love win-win solutions, because then that obviates sacrifice. It’s all an elaborate prophylactic against the actual exercise of democracy toward the redistribution of wealth so that we can tax wealthy people and finance the things that we actually want . . .

Does that sound bleak enough?  It’s been said before by people like Anand Giridharadas with his “Winners Take All” book that pulls its punches and now Anand Giridharadas taking a big MSNBC salary is getting tamer by the minute, obfuscating his message. Giridharadas also came out of the New York Times which backed and heralded his message when his “Winners” book came out.

Here are bleaker and even more forthright concerns coming out of coverage of Davos.

Once upon a time, there was the lower class, the underclasses, and the poor.  Once upon a time, the thinking was that the wealthy wanted as many poor as possible to ensure a big pool of labor willing to work for low wages.  Now, at Davos they are beginning to trade in a new coinage implying things opposite to that notion: The “useless class.”  The “useless class” can be thought of as all of those who are now disposable and not needed because robots and the new technology that will take care of the wealthy without Their having to worry about who will labor to do it.

Watch the Unlimited Hangout and the very unsettling Davos speech it covers here:

Dump Davos #1: Data Colonialism & Hackable Humans (Bad news: this is from a year ago so time's a-wasting to catch up with these guys).

In this video series investigating the people and agendas of the World Economic Forum, Whitney Webb and Johnny Vedmore analyze a recent speech given at Davos by Israeli "futurist" historian Yuval Noah Harari that exposes the WEF's agenda for the "useless class", the rise of exploited data colonies and the creation of an internal and external surveillance state.

SEE ALSO: Upward Transfer of Wealth Alert! Upward Transfer of Power Alert! Look What Just Doubled! Enough To Make Everyone Sick! Tuesday, January 18, 2022

As The Public Gets Distracted With Other Descriptions, Biden Is About To Pass The Worst Kind of Infrastructure Bill- One That Privatizes Our Public Assets

We are not even hearing about it, but something really awful is about to happen: It looks like we are about to pass the worst kind of “infrastructure bill,” one that will be privatizing public assets.  It’s being set up so nobody is supposed to notice.

If you really don’t pay attention to anything, maybe the only thing you’ll notice that they are describing the bill as a “Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal”– “Bipartisan” sounds sort cooperative and friendly, like something everybody should agree on as good.

If you think you are paying attention they might have successfully distracted you by highlighting other asserted flaws in the bill, flaws that may, or may not, be taken care of to some extent before the bill is passed; the flaw that the bill lacks measures to address climate change; flaws that it doesn’t meet social and racial justice standards by, for example, failing to spend on neglected public housing.

The New York Times coverage of the bill, including virtually no policy analysis, ruminated about its potential passage mostly as a political jockeying and horse race story, and referred to how the spending being planned was not addressing:

“human infrastructure”: education, child care, paid leave and tax credits to fight poverty, among other initiatives.

(See: Biden Kicks Off Sales Tour to Salvage Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal- An event in rural Wisconsin was meant to show liberals that the agreement was sufficiently ambitious — while assuring moderates that the president remained committed to the deal.  By Jim Tankersley, June 29, 2021.)

Democracy Now opened up its Tuesday, June 29, 2021 coverage as if the major part of the story would be how would be linked to how western states are battling record-breaking heat waves, (Portland hitting “116 degrees Fahrenheit Monday, making it one of the hottest places in the world”).  Starting into the story, we heard that:

Members of the Sunrise Movement called on Biden and congressional Democrats to pass an infrastructure bill that includes major investments in green energy, including a fully funded Civilian Climate Corps.

The Democracy Now story also pushed to the fore public housing that is being allowed to deteriorate.  (See: Rep. Jamaal Bowman: We Need Climate & Racial Justice Addressed in Broader Infrastructure Package, June 29, 2021.)

But then, as David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, was being interviewed as part of that Democracy Now story, he did an important pivot that had not been Teed up at the beginning of the segment and maybe wasn’t planned for.  He brought up that privatizing public assets was distressingly a “key piece” of the bill.

Here’s how it went in Dayen’s exchange with Democracy Now cohost Juan González:

DAVID DAYEN: . . .  But what’s the key piece of the bipartisan bill, to me, in addition to the lack of climate measures and, as you correctly point out, the fact that nature, from Seattle to Miami, where sea level rise may have been a large contributor to the collapse of the condo building, is just screaming for a change in priorities in America because of the climate crisis and a need to upgrade our infrastructure to reflect this new reality — but the other thing that’s in that bipartisan bill is privatization. So, it’s really the selling off of infrastructure to private companies, and really the substitution of public tax collection, where we pay for these common assets that we all use and share, to private tax collection, where you sell the infrastructure assets to a private company, whether for toll roads or privatized water systems, privatized parking meters, or what have you, and that private company gets to effectively tax the public. And inevitably, that tax goes up, because they have to build in their layer of profit. So, I think that’s something that progressives like Representative Bowman need to focus on, because it’s a very dangerous part of the bipartisan bill.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But, David Dayen, are those concerns sufficient for many progressives to say, “No, let’s kill this thing altogether”? Because, clearly, the move to privatize public assets has been part of the neoliberal agenda now for about four decades.

DAVID DAYEN: It has been. And that’s why it’s incumbent to take a stand at this point. I mean, you have a representative on; you can ask him if that’s sufficient or not. But it is a serious issue. I mean, we have examples of this, as you say, Juan, all over the country — water systems that charge exorbitant rates, parking meters in places like Chicago that have gone up 800% in their rates over a number of years, and every time the street is shut down for a street fair, the private company gets to recoup lost revenue from that day. It’s not just the gouging of the people who use the infrastructure; it’s the loss of democratic control. So, a private company is in charge and says when the street will be shut down or not, and the private company is in charge of when a certain toll road is open or not. So, that’s, I think, at the core of the issue with privatization, which, as you correctly point out, was part of this neoliberal project. But we’re in a new era, and I would hope that there would be very strong pushback against it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what about that, Congressman Bowman, in terms of, in Chicago, for instance, a private parking meter company, whenever the city wants to shut down a street for a parade, it has to reimburse the private parking meter company for its lost revenues? . . .

It seems we are not supposed to be paying attention to these very important privatization provisions.  Read the New York Times coverage, scan it as hard as you can, you’ll find no mention of these important privatization provisions.  They are just not there. . .

. . . And oddly, the next day, Democracy Now did a follow-up on the infrastructure deal proposals interviewing Congressmember Nikema Williams of Georgia, and in that follow up totally neglected to have any mention or discussion about the privatization provisions.  Democracy Now host Amy Goodman set up the very limited discussion going right back to making it seem that the only flaw in the bill to focus on is its deficiency with respect to climate change provisions:

AMY GOODMAN: . . .It [the bill] does not include funding for major programs championed by progressives, including investments in green energy jobs and funds to combat the climate crisis, as we are experiencing the worst heat ever in this country, not to mention Canada, as well. Portland broke every record, one of the hottest places on the planet right now. That’s Portland, Oregon, just to name one place. In a moment, we’re going to talk about what happened in Florida with the catastrophic collapse and its connection, possibly, to the climate crisis. But what about this, the demand that the — linking the bipartisan infrastructure plan with the much larger one that Bernie Sanders and others are crafting?

In part, the horse race and political jockeying story being told (the Times story is such a prime exhibit in this regard) is another version of the corporate Democrats always winding up inexplicably incompetent to win anything they say they stand for when faced with the mysteriously always effective thwarting maneuvers from the corporate Republicans (who are nominally the corporate Democrats “opposition”).  It is yet one more example of Biden scaling back to seek far less than the very meager things he promised when he ran for office. . . forget about the public option, forget about minimum wage and now this infrastructure spending will be far less than what Biden talked about when he sought office.
                                            
Other than this lack coverage of the privatization aspects of the “bipartisan” infrastructure deal, the coverage has been about how inadequate the funds now being made available are versus how dire the need is to spend on our roads, bridges, water projects, replacing our lead water pipes, and other major projects, along with how great it would be to deploy reliable high-speed broadband internet in all our rural areas to reach “every American home” (NY Times).  This is the kind of narrative that regularly precedes and sets up an excuse for privatization and the sell off of public assets. . . `because he public just can’t pay for them'. .  `So the private sector has to take over to supply the funds while making a profit in doing so'. . . Blah, blah, blah.

Here is a link to the Citizens Defending Libraries page (including valuable information and further links) about the last forum we had on selling off public assets, Saturday, April 8, 2017:

Fourth Forum on Selling Off Public Assets, Presented by First Unitarian Congregational Society of Brooklyn's Weaving the Fabric of Diversity & Citizens Defending Libraries, April 8, 2017

What’s happening is very real.  This Biden infrastructure “deal” reflects continuity with what was underway in the Trump administration. Traveling with Trump to Saudi Arabia in 2016, NYPL library trustee Stephen A. Schwarzman brought back $20 billion from the Saudis for his Blackstone investment group as seed money for the selling off and privatizing of American public assets.  This is not just because Schwarzman has such good relationships with the likes of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (remember the dismemberment killing of Jamal Khashoggi- the illegal siege war and bombing of Yemen?); others like Goldman Sachs are busy raising funds for the same thing.

Thankfully, there are those who are being more forthright and honest than Democracy Now and the very deceptive New York Times.  Take this statement (‘Bipartisan’ Infrastructure Plan is a Privatization-Promoting Disaster– Wall Street takeover will cost ratepayers and must be rejected) released by Food & Water Watch Public Water for All Director Mary Grant:

“This White House-approved infrastructure deal is a disaster in the making. It promotes privatization and so-called ‘public-private partnerships’ instead of making public investments in publicly-owned infrastructure. Communities across the country have been ripped off by public-private schemes that enrich corporations and Wall Street investors and leave the rest of us to pick up the tab.

“Privatization is nothing more than an outrageously expensive way to borrow funds, with the ultimate bill paid back by households and local businesses in the form of higher rates. The White House identifies privatization as a means to finance infrastructure investment is disappointing and outrageous. Communities need real support, not privatization scams.

“The most sensible infrastructure solution is to provide robust public funding for publicly-owned projects, which would discourage price-gouging by corporate interests, protect public control over these precious assets, and save everyone money. The most comprehensive funding solution on the table is the WATER Act (HR1352, S916), which would provide $35 billion a year to fully fund the state revolving funds and other programs at the level that is needed.

“This package does not provide adequate funding to rebuild and repair our country’s infrastructure, nor does it do nearly enough to combat the climate crisis. Lawmakers can and must press for a better deal.”

As Michael Bloomberg Runs For President It’s Time To Resurrect And Reissue Our “Save New York City Libraries From Bloomberg Developer Destruction” Petition— (To Remind People How Mayor Bloomberg Defunded New York Libraries In Order To Sell Them To Real Estate Developers)

With Michael Bloomberg running for president it’s time to remind people what kind of mayor he was.

In 2013, when Bloomberg was mayor of New York, Citizens Defending Libraries formed immediately issuing our “Save New York City Libraries From Bloomberg Developer Destruction” petition.

We formed Citizens Defending Libraries and issued our petition  to oppose Bloomberg’s program of deliberately defunding New York City libraries at a time of increasing public use, population growth and increased city wealth, shrinking our library system to create real estate deals for wealthy real estate developers.  He launched an unjust and shortsighted plan that was particularly unfair in a time of cutbacks in education and escalating disparities in opportunity.

With Michael Bloomberg now running for president, it looks like it’s time to resurrect and republish our petition.  Actually, it can still be signed. We are still working to oppose the sale and defunding of libraries, the elimination of books and librarians.  We are still sending out periodic emails to the signers of our petition to keep people up to date about defending libraries and the threats they face.  And there is so much for people to know. . .

The plans Bloomberg launched to sell New York City go back until at least 2004 or 2005. In the Summer of 2007 the Mayor Bloomberg and First Deputy Mayor Patti Harris expressed enthusiasm for the NYPL’s plans to sell and redevelop major central destination Manhattan Libraries.  That included the shrink-and-sink sale of the beloved central destination Donnell Library in midtown Manhattan, which was sold in what was essentially a no-bid  deal that shortchanged the public and provided a windfall that enriched Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner with a $30 million windfall.

The first library sold, the 97,000-square foot, five-story central destination Donnell Library on what was documented to be the most valuable block in Manhattan at the time, was sold to net the NYPL less than $25,000 million.  The penthouse in the luxury tower that replaced it in the 50-story luxury tower replacing Donnell went on the market for $60 million.  Another single lower-level condo unit in the luxury building, 43A, sold for $20,110,437.50.  There is also a 114 guest room luxury hotel in the tower.  According to the Wall Street Journal, Chinese investors made that hotel,“the most highly valued hotel in the U.S.” after agreeing to buy it for “more than $230 million. . .  .more than $2 million a room.” . .

. .  In the luxury restaurants in the luxury hotel in the tower that now claims to the once publicly owned site, you can get $1,500 Ice Cream Sundaes and $500 Cocktails while you luxuriate on coyote pelts.


Bloomberg who was to leave office January 31, 2013, made the very expensive consolidating shrinkage Central Library Plan, which involved the sale of the Manhattan libraries, a stated priority to achieve by his term's end.  Similarly, it was his goal to achieve the shrink-and-sink sale of Brooklyn's second biggest library, the Business, Career, Education and federal depository library in downtown Brooklyn on the edge of Brooklyn Heights by the end of his term.  He didn't meet these time frames and his plans were somewhat derailed through work of Citizens Defending Libraries and other activist we teamed up with.  When other, better uses were proposed for the funds to be plowed into vastly expensive Manhattan library sale plans, those plans were unacceptable to Bloomberg.  Scott Sherman says in his book (“Patience and Fortitude- Power, Real Estate, and the Fight to Save a Public Library”) on the subject, "It seems that for Bloomberg, it was all or nothing."

It's important to pay attention to who, along with Bloomberg, is selling off NYC libraries.  Bloomberg cared enough about implementing these plans to have many of his administration high-ups on the city's three library boards.  His counsel became the chair of the Brooklyn Public Library board of trustees. Bloomberg's official representative on the New York Public Library board was his very own sister,  Marjorie Tiven.  At the press March 11, 2008 press conference announcing launch of the plans for the consolidating shrinkage of the Manhattan libraries Bloomberg praised his "friend" Stephen A. Schwarzman, one of the main people pushing NYPL libraries in sales out the door to benefit people like Jared Kushner.   Schwarzman is one of Trumps top economic advisors. He's a remarkable piece of work involved in arranging for the wholesale sale and privatization of American Public assets, proud to describe himself as a good friend of  Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (“MBS”-  You know the dismemberment killing of Jamal Khashoggi and Yemen war). . . . Not surprisingly, Bloomberg also hobnobs with MBS.

People should remember what Bloomberg did when was entrusted with New York City's libraries as Bloomberg now asks to be entrusted with the U.S. presidency. 

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.

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.

A Flourish of Stories About So-Called Philanthropy Being Used As A Guise For Diminishing The Public Commons– That Includes Libraries

There’s a bouquet of new stories blossoming about how what wealthy and powerful individuals and corporations would have us accept as `generous philanthropy’ is actually money deployed as a force to seize influence, diminish the public commons, control public discourse, and supplant the narratives in our culture about what is truly for the public good, who is doing good and who isn’t.

If this sounds familiar to fellow library defenders, it could be because of information we have previously supplied about, for instance, who is one the boards of our NYC libraries and their private sector conflicts of interest (Brooklyn Public Library Trustees- Identified + Biographical and Other Information Supplied), and how readily the board of “charitable” institutions like libraries are getting off track (Why Nonprofit Boards May Stray From Their Core Missions And Obligations To the Public- Considered Generally And Particularly With Respect To Libraries).

It might also be because you recall what we have written recently respecting these themes talking about Anand Giridharadas, author of  “The Elite Charade of Changing the World” (we've written about him before).  Now, in yet one more very valuable interview by “On The Media” you can hear Giridharadas (who says “that “giving has become the wingman of taking. Generosity has become the wingman of injustice. Changing the world has become the wingman of rigging the system”) address these theme again.  See: On The Media-  How Philanthropy Lets Rich People Off the Hook.

The “On The Media” story was generated after “philanthropic” pledges from wealthy individuals in France for repair of Notre Dame Cathedral.  It’s quickly been noted that these same individuals who were seeking acclaim for their “charity” as they readily unearthed cash for the cathedral have been saying they can’t afford to pay taxes and claim that they currently pay too much in taxes.  There was even a synchronous effort made to get their taxes lowered still further: In effect, through the treatment of their ‘charitable’ deductions, to have the government pay for restoration of the cathedral while the wealthy got credit and naming rights.  (There is fear that in order that this can be done more ostentatiously, those jostling into the limelight might even restore the cathedral with an anachronistic glass ceiling via, perhaps, Norman Foster who was involved in the NYPL's Central Library Plan.)

Giridharadas seems to be getting better and better at his interviews, sharpening his expression of the issues if not his analysis itself.  In his “On The Media” interview he speaks about what people should be skeptical about when the wealthy “give” enumerating three concerns:

    . . . One, is this giving single individuals or companies way too much power over public life? Number two, are these problems better solved by government? Where you have accountability, where you can throw people out in an election if they don't solve the problem and the right way. Number three, is the money that is being used to solve these social problems also culpable in the creation of these social problems?

On the subject of why Mark Zuckerberg’s “philanthropy” is problematic Giridharadas says:

I actually think journalists and regulators would have had way more aggressive scrutiny on Zuckerberg over the last 10 years [absent Zukerberg's `philanthropy']. So I'd be willing to lose whatever schools and disease programs Facebook has funded in exchange for having a healthier democracy where Facebook is in check. And I really do think in so many cases there's a link between these things. And a lot of these billionaires really understand that doing this giving buys you reputational space to keep doing the things you need to do to make money.

“Reputational space to keep doing the things you need to do to make money”: That obviously applies to the NYPL awkwardly renaming the 42nd Street Central Reference Library and putting on it the name of Stephen A. Schwarzman (as we have written before). . .                                              

. . .  Stephen A. Schwarzman is the head of the Blackstone Group (and the highest paid CEO in the country- the first $1 billion CEO).  Many are familiar with the fact that the 42nd Street Central Reference Library has awkwardly been renamed after Schwarzman, who, is not exactly about spreading the wealth or being magnanimous to the common man or general population.  He wants the poor to pay more taxes, while he pays, along with others in the hedge fund industry, an exceptionally low rate in taxes due to the carried-interest tax loophole, from which he personally benefits.  He has opposed that loophole's repeal saying repeal would be akin to the German invasion of Poland. And Mr. Schwarzman has also been leading the Trump administration’s initiative to privatize America’s public infrastructure. Mr. Schwarzman is a trustee of the NYPL.  

The “On the Media” story also mentions, for context, the Sacklers, the family that controls Purdue Pharmaceuticals.  Like Schwarzman they like their name up all over the place.  "On The Media" mentions how “in the face of mounting public pressure,” including dramatic protest demonstrations at the Guggenheim Museum, “Britain's National Portrait Gallery, New York's Guggenheim and the UK'S Tate Galleries have announced that they will no longer accept their money.”

That brings us to a recent FAIR Counterspin radio segment about activist work to reclaim our museums and public institutions from so-called wealthy philanthropists creating “reputational space” for the questionable things they continue to do while influencing public discourse narratives.  See: Amin Husain on Decolonizing Museums, Nikole Hannah-Jones on School Resegregation, May 10, 2019.

FAIR’s Counterspin text describing the show's segment reads:

This week on CounterSpin: If someone makes lots of money by, say, knowingly and cynically exacerbating opioid addiction, is it OK as long as they give some of that money to an art museum? Cultural institutions are important sites of public conversation, but the public doesn’t have much say in who gets to lead that conversation, or the stories they tell. Activists are asking us to talk about what that means, and what it would mean to change it. We’ll talk about accountability for cultural institutions with Amin Husain, core organizer with the group Decolonize This Place.

The Counterspin segment begins with a quick reference to the New York Museum of Natural History not allowing its museum space (its Hall of Ocean Life) to be used for a gala event by the Amazon ecosystem-destroying Jair Bolsonaro, the fascist president of Brazil (newly in charge in that country after a soft coup that imprisoned the former president and popular candidate Lula during the election and still holds Lula incommunicado).  The segment then proceeds to its central topic: Protests being organized concerning who is allowed to be in command of the resources of public cultural institutions like museums.  The Counterspin discussion with Amin Husain, of Decolonize This Place cites as a prime example, how Warren B. Kanders is on the board and vice-chair of the Whitney Museum.

Kanders is the owner of the Safariland Group that sells what it calls “non-lethal solutions,” which means that it supplies tear gas used against asylum seekers at the U.S. boarder, against the Furguson protestors, in Baltimore, by the repressive governments in Egypt and Turkey, plus the Safariland Group supplies lethal bullets used against Palestinians.  Mr. Husain points out that, at the same time Kanders is on the board, the Whitney is putting on exhibitions that “define what protest is” and what our art is.  Husain discusses how there is a “whole other economy going on” in museums and similar institutions based on the “one-percenters” determining what “aesthetics and culture” are, but notes that with people like Kander on the boards of such institutions they are not accountable to the communities they “claim to serve,” which raises questions about what these environments are “hospitable” to, even, as the Whitney, for instance, self-promotes and self-defines itself as a “progressive” institution.

Program host Janine Jackson commented about the “confused view of wealth” when people “make their money off misery,” while it is expected to somehow “all balance out” if they use that money for things like museum thus making these institutions “in some sense money launderers.”  Husain noted something else ingrained and related that the defines culture in the art world: How wealth finds a “home” as the art world creates a parking place, a repository for wealth, plus it creates a medium of exchange for great, often stolen, wealth (e.g. the $91 million Jeff Koons rabbit) while furnishing the wealthy with the benefit of tax write-offs.  Money is often being hidden this way.  Meanwhile, Husain notes these institutions are supposed to make rich people look better while they are engaged in ‘philanthropy that’s not really philanthropy.’  He said these institutions need to stop getting a pass on “pretending to be something good, but actually advancing something bad.”

Husain and his protestors are targeting the leadership of these institutions, not the employees, who often share these same criticism and concerns– Over 100 staff members of the Whitney joined in signing a letter calling for the removal of Kanders.

Fittingly, given that Counterspin is a media watchdog program, there was some discussion about the too frequently skewed, somewhat “containing” reporting of these protests by news media– An analogy was also made to how corporately-owned news media, like institutions such as museums, often purports to be serving the public, when it actually isn’t.   

Husain spoke about how these culture-defining excursions can be exclusionary and biased, saying it is important to be conscious how these institution are “not neutral” in ongoing public justice fights and dialogues.  He rhetorically asked how can you summon people in to spaces at the Whitney to speak out against fascism when there is someone like Warren Kanders on the board.  Husain concluded saying that challenging such leadership at these institutions was part of changing the nature of the conversation.  The public, he said, needs to reclaim these institutions.

Now, let’s progress more directly to the subject of libraries, starting with a Carnegie library.  Would the Whitney be better of if, rather than having to deal with Safariland Group associations, Apple just slapped its logos on the Whitney property?. . .

. . .  A new article up in the Boston Review makes the point that Andrew Carnegie’s style of giving, for instance, when he donated libraries all over this country (whatever questions his style raised), was far less problematic than what is going on now with the modern style of “philanthropy.”  The article’s case in point is Apple’s takeover of the Carnegie donated Washington Public Library.  See: The Boston Review: Apple's Newest Store and the Perverse Logic of Philanthro-Capitalism- The Apple Carnegie Library embodies recent developments in philanthropy that should trouble us: the uncritical valorization of philanthro-capitalism and the privatization of public goods and public spaces. Benjamin Soskis, May 21, 2019.

Benjamin Soskis, the article’s author, says: “The Apple Carnegie Library betrays the core goal of Carnegie's giving: to create fully public institutions. . .” and that Apple’s approach to an expensive physical restoration of the building “was not merely architectural.”  (“The library’s marble façade now glows, as do the two Apple logos that flank the entrance like totemic laptops.”)

Soskis observes:

It is true that plenty of knowledge will be diffused on the screens sold there. But in two fundamental respects, the Apple Carnegie Library embodies recent developments that betray the principles that animated Carnegie’s giving: the uncritical valorization of philanthro-capitalism and the privatization of public goods and public spaces. Carnegie’s philanthropy was certainly not unimpeachable—it was often warped by his own ego and eccentricity—but we don’t need to idealize it in order to admire elements of it, especially his library campaign. Indeed, reexamining that campaign should help us appreciate the problem with using Carnegie’s philanthropic legacy to promote the opening of an Apple store in the shell of Washington’s old public library.

He contrasts the Tech industry’s self-promotional furnishing of benefits with Carnegie’s ideal of truly public institutions:

    . .   Apple, and the tech industry more generally, has embraced a particular approach to philanthro-capitalism, one in which the products and services they profit from are presented as powerful forces for good themselves—today’s tech products forge social networks and connections, offer ladders for the aspiring to rise, and, yes, diffuse knowledge.

    . . . . Fundamental to Carnegie’s library campaign was the idea that they be fully public institutions—that is, democratically supported and tax-funded. In order for a town to receive funding to construct a Carnegie library, it needed to provide the site of the building, as well as an annual appropriation of 10 percent of the construction costs, in order to cover maintenance and upkeep, staff salaries, and books. . . .

Soskis’ analysis, citing Carnegie own words, that a man of wealth must consider himself “a mere trustee and agent for his poorer brethren, bringing to their service his superior wisdom, experience, and ability to administer” tracks that of Carnegie biographer David Nasaw.

Nasaw at BPL

Speaking at the Brooklyn Public Library (of all places!) Mr. Nasaw made this point precisely, that Mr. Carnegie was actually very different from many of the wealthy today.  Saying that Carnegie had a lot in common with Senator Elizabeth Warren, Nasaw said that Carnegie was a  proponent of the “dangerous but cogent belief” that the wealthy hold their wealth “in trust for the benefit of the public.”  Carnegie did not believe that he should die possessed of wealth that he had not directed toward the public benefit (he actually failed to give his money away fast enough because of the rate at which it was coming in).  Nasaw said that, although, Carnegie considered himself to have a superior ability to administer and direct wealth, he viewed his ascendance to wealth as somewhat accidental, the luck of his being where two rivers converged at Pittsburgh where iron ore and coal for smelting were also plentiful.

We should mention that David Nasaw was also a co-plaintiff with Citizens Defending Libraries in two lawsuits seeking to stop the NYPL “Central Library Plan” selling and shrinking libraries and getting rid of books and librarians.  That plan was being funded in part, by Mr. Schwarzman, the ostensible reason his name was put on the 42nd Street library that it put in jeopardy.

Using Apple’s ambitions as example, Soskis’ speaks about the erosion of the public commons as private sector branding takes over:

    The Apple Carnegie Library is one of thirteen that the company has recently opened and introduced as “town squares,” shifting attention from the stores’ commercial purposes to their civic ones. . . .

    . . .  The “town square” label is an impressive branding effort, but no amount of rhetorical silting can hide the erosion of public space that has taken place on Mount Vernon Square. The Carnegie Library Apple store—let us call it that—is fundamentally a commercial venue, run by a corporation accountable to its shareholders. And it arrives on the scene when actual public libraries are both starved for resources and dramatically expanding their own civic functions . .

Soskis is thus echoing concerns raised by two prescient librarian authors of books we have written about before: John E. Buschman “Dismantling the Public Sphere– Librarianship In the Age of the New Public Philosophy” (2003) and Ed D’Angelo  “Barbarians at the gate of the Public Library: How Postmodern Consumer Capitalism Threatens Democracy, Civil Education and the Public Good” (2006). Each of those authors cite back to the concerns of Henry Giroux, who in a cover blurb endorsed D’Angelo’s book.  (One source to hear interviews with Giroux is the Project Censored Radio Show, a recent segment of which was an interview with Citizens Defending Libraries co-founder Michael D. D. White about the dismantlement of libraries.)

Our near final stop on this series of stories about so-called philanthropy as a guise for diminishing the public commons, including libraries, is our report on the Brooklyn Public Library’s May 22nd `charity’ gala honoring the private Ratner/Prokhorov Barclays basketball arena and the Nets basketball team.  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!

Citizens Defending Libraries was leafleting outside the gala.  Our chant (borrowing a bit from Mr. Giridharadas) was: “Put a stake in faux philanthropy: Take less and don’t sell our libraries!”

There was much that was especially troubling about the gala.  Linda Johnson, the president on the Brooklyn Public Library said when she arrived in her position at the BPL that turning libraries into real estate deals was her biggest priority. Topping the list for those deals: Two libraries next to Forest City Ratner property, including Brooklyn’s second biggest library.  The Ratner organization headed by mega-subsidy collector Bruce Ratner created the “Barclays” arena as part of the ill-famed Atlantic Yards eminent domain project.  The dots to be connected concerning library sales, the real estate industry and Ratner are myriad.  The latest connection: BPL president Linda Johnson has literally shacked up (in a Brooklyn Bridge Park apartment) with Bruce Ratner.

Yes, that, indeed, is the background for the BPL “honoring” (i.e. advertising) the private basketball arena.

The BPL’s press release for the event made several points about how this public commons is  “partnering” with arena.

In our flyer that we handed out we made the point that a huge amount of tax dollars had been diverted into subsidies for the private Barclays area while city public libraries were simultaneously starved.  Specifically, what was spent on the Barclays and sports arenas was “a sum more than one-third greater” than “the city committed for capital improvements to the its 206 branch libraries and four research centers” even though those libraries serve “roughly seven times as many people a year as attend baseball games.” (That’s not to mention that the teams are getting an additional $680 million in subsidies spread over 40 years.)

A basic point of the flyer that we handed out that evening is that we the taxpayers pay for our libraries, that "NYC Public Libraries Are Mostly Public Tax Dollar Funded," and that when taxpayer money is diverted into huge subsidies for projects like the private Barclays arena and then the BPL is induced to use our publicly funded libraries to advertise that private arena, it's not charity, and our public tax dollars are being stolen to support private interests. . .

Plus, as essentially all of the stories above observed, this amounts to a dismantlement and privatization of the public commons.

This `philanthropically' funded dismantling of the public commons is not the way it has to be: We make these rules up.

In a May 2017 interview, Jane Mayer, author of  “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right,” (it’s on another “On The Media Segment,” recently reprised) said that a lot of what we are looking at today in terms of the working of modern day politics is “set up as sort of an arm of `philanthropy.’”   That includes, as noted at the beginning of the interview segment, a general deployment of philanthropy to support the “preservation of capital for rich people.”  That includes, for example, concerted and well funded efforts to ensure we keep polluting the atmosphere with fossil fuels creating climate catastrophe.

It's all the result of rules created in 1916 to allow the wealthy to get tax breaks for giving money to charities.  It's money that is supposedly to serve the `public good.'  See: Dark Money and the Rise of Conservative Orthodoxy, May 31, 2019.

From the very beginning the danger of this was understood, in a way that it too little spoken about today.  Mayer says that when the Rockefeller family wanted to set up the first of these big philanthropies, the Rockefeller Foundation:

 it was incredibly controversial. There was bipartisan opposition from across the board. All of these congressmen and senators said, this is an undemocratic thing, to have a rich family be able to spend its money on public policy and get a tax deduction. They saw foundations as unaccountable to anybody but the super rich and playing a undemocratic role in the midst of our democratic society.

Stephen A. Schwarzman in Jane Mayer's book

The previously mentioned Stephen A. Schwarzman makes an appearance as one of the powerful billionaires in Mayer’s “Dark Money” book as a class warrior agitating to have the poor pay more in taxes and for the wealthy, like himself, to pay less, including through tax loopholes that make his own real estate exceptionally low.  Schwarzman, of course is the man who hopes to get a pass on “pretending to be something good, but actually advancing something bad” by having his name on the NYPL’s 42nd Street Central Reference Library.

(PS: For more about how money is being used to so that the public doesn't get what it wants, but should, see- Everybody’s Realizing It Now: The Political Establishment Is Not Willing To Give The Public The Things The Vast Majority Of Americans Want And That We Could Easily Have)