"Back then, #Hitler wanted to kill me because I am Jewish. Now #Putin is trying to kill me because I am Ukrainian", a 88-year-old Holocaust survivor Roman #Schwarzman said in a powerful address to the German #Bundestag during the annual Holocaust remembrance ceremony
“Open Celebration of Oligarchy:” Dems/GOP Both Sucked Up to Billionaires in 2024 Election
https://www.democracynow.org/2024/11/8/david_sirota_billionaires_election_2024_trump
* richest people saw net worth soar as stocks rapidly shot up
* outsized role of super-rich in U.S politics
* Trump, Kamala Harris campaigned heavily w. billionaires looking for return on investment
#DavidSirota #Trump2 #billionaires #WealthTax #Musk #Bezos #Mellon #DeVos #Uihlein #Schwarzman #Singer #meritocracy #plutocracy #oligarchy #fascism #GOP #inequality #WealthConcentration
In the wake of the reelection of Donald Trump, some of the richest people in the world saw their net worths soar as stock prices rapidly shot up. “What was different about this election was how central billionaires were in the entire political discourse,” says The Lever's David Sirota, who joins Democracy Now! to discuss the outsized role of the super-rich in U.S politics, pointing out that both Trump and Kamala Harris campaigned heavily with billionaires, including Elon Musk and Mark Cuban. “These people are not giving money simply out of the goodness of their hearts. They want things. They have policy demands,” Sirota says. “The investors, the donors, like billionaires, are looking for a return on their investment.” Sirota, who previously worked as a communications adviser and speechwriter for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, also explains how Elon Musk's influence on Trump’s campaign is a preview of the power he could wield if he ends up appointed to the Trump administration.
In office, Trump gave some of his donors highly unusual roles in government.
#Schwarzman, the Blackstone C.E.O., for example, had not supported Trump in the 2016 primaries, but he gave $250,000 to his Inauguration;
soon after the Senate passed the tax-cut bill, he hosted a private lunch with Trump at his New York triplex
—the former home of John D. Rockefeller
—where the cost of entry was $50,000 a plate.
Schwarzman revealed in his 2019 memoir that Trump had asked him to help renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Schwarzman reportedly spoke with Trump as often as several times a week during the talks.
“Donald listens to me because I’m richer than Donald,” Schwarzman joked at one point to Gerald Butts,
then the top adviser to the Canadian Prime Minister.
Schwarzman also wrote that he had served as Trump’s intermediary with the Chinese leader Xi Jinping,
personally extending the invitation that led to Xi’s visit to Mar-a-Lago, in early 2017.
In 2018, Schwarzman made eight trips to China “on behalf of the administration,”
personally reporting back to Trump about his efforts “to assure senior Chinese officials that the President was not looking for a trade war.”
His pivotal role was not disclosed at the time,
despite the potential conflicts inherent in having the person in charge of Blackstone’s broad investment portfolio also represent the U.S. government.
In 2020, Schwarzman gave $3 million to a pro-Trump super pac.
The ex-President arrived with his son Eric,
stopping to shake hands and exchange pleasantries with each of the approximately two dozen guests,
a “AAA list” of the G.O.P.’s top funders,
as #John #Catsimatidis, the billionaire supermarket owner, put it.
Such events, another attendee told me, often feel like a birthday dinner for the host,
except that “there’s a lot of money being given to someone who isn’t the host
—making Donald Trump the birthday boy, so to speak.”
Trump was seated at the head table, between #Fanjul
—a major Republican donor going back to the early nineties
—and #Stephen #Schwarzman,
the C.E.O. of Blackstone, the world’s largest private-equity fund,
who had endorsed Trump the previous Friday.
Securing the support of Schwarzman was a coup for the Trump campaign.
In 2022, he had said that he would not back the former President again,
because it was time for “a new generation of leaders,”
and, during the primaries, he had given $2 million in support of Chris Christie,
the former New Jersey governor,
who had repeatedly called Trump “unfit to be President.”
In a statement explaining the reversal, Schwarzman said that Biden’s “economic, immigration and foreign policies” were “taking the country in the wrong direction.”
At the dinner, Trump reprised his public rant about the “biased” legal proceedings brought against him,
but an attendee who spoke with me was struck by how “calm and confident” Trump seemed for someone facing prison time.
“He has this very strong internal capability to push those things aside and still feel good about things,” the attendee said.
At the end of the evening, Trump went around the room and solicited opinions on whom he should pick for his running mate.
Haley, Scott, and Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota and a wealthy businessman, were mentioned;
-- a couple of the attendees expressed a preference for J. D. Vance,
the young populist senator from Ohio, whom Trump would ultimately choose.
The donors appeared to relish the chance to help select a Vice-Presidential candidate.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” the attendee marvelled.
🔸Trump raised about $50 million at the event.
Perhaps the most notorious byproduct of Wall Street’s private equity boom is the #leveraged #buyout,
a revolutionary and controversial investment method that Stephen #Schwarzman and #Peterson helped pioneer at #Blackstone.
For the most part, leveraged buyouts follow a predictable pattern:
A private equity firm buys a company, implements managerial changes designed to increase efficiency and then sells the company at a handsome profit.
But these transactions have drawn scrutiny from Wall Street watchdog groups,
because in most cases, the private equity firm funds its buyout using a large amount of 💥money borrowed by the company being purchased.
Thus, when it resells the company a few years later, 🔥the firm often profits greatly beyond its initial investment, 🔥while the company is left to pay off the debt created by the original buyout.
“It’s all about trying to buy and sell within three to four years,” said Josh Kosman, a financial reporter for the New York Post,
who is the author of “The Buyout of America: How Private Equity is Destroying Jobs and Killing the American Economy.”
“You try to jack up the profits quickly often by cuts in different areas, and then you try to get out and resell it or bring it public.”
According to Kosman, private equity buyouts often lead to layoffs or other cost-cutting measures that actively harm workers.
“Companies who need to pay money back end up not spending enough on research and development, fire more people than their peers, and often they fall behind their peers,” Kosman said.
A case study of Blackstone’s method is the firm’s 2006 investment in the travel reservations business Travelport,
says Celia Weaver, research and policy director at New York Communities for Change, a social and economic justice nonprofit.
Blackstone spent $4.1 billion on the acquisition, and over the next year, Travelport laid off nearly 850 employees, about 10 percent of its total workforce.
A story in The Wall Street Journal documented the human cost of those cuts: lost health insurance, unemployment, workers forced to sell their homes or postpone plans to start a family.
“Travelport took on a lot of debt, which is common in private equity,” Weaver said.
“They will overleverage any asset because their model is to only be in the deal for a short period of time.”
Private equity investment is “inherently predatory,” Weaver said.
But defenders of private equity argue that investment by firms like Blackstone enables struggling companies to regain their footing,
leading to long-term job growth.
School of Management professor Andrew Metrick ’89 GRD ’89 described private equity investors as “radical surgeons”:
The treatment is necessary, even if sometimes a body part must be amputated, or the patient dies.
“I’m relatively certain that if you add up the ledger for contributing to society from Stephen Schwarzman, it’s heavily in the positive standpoint,” Metrick said.
“But you know, he’s broken a lot more eggs to make these omelets than most people do.”
Since the 1980s, Blackstone has evolved significantly, moving beyond traditional buyouts and expanding its reach outside the United States.
After the foreclosure crisis in the late 2000s, the firm became a major player in the real estate business, buying houses through a subsidiary group called #Invitation #Homes.
Indeed, in 2015, Blackstone became the largest owner of real estate in the world.
Claire Parker, a spokeswoman for Invitation Homes, said the company spends an average of $25,000 renovating houses, which is required to meet a 250-point checklist before move-in.
“Invitation Homes brings value to the 120,000 residents we serve by providing access to high quality,
well-maintained homes in close proximity to the neighborhoods and schools they value,” Parker said.
But according to Weaver, Invitation Homes has a track record of poor management.
In 2014, a family sued the company for failing to make repairs to a three-bedroom rental house infested with mold and cockroaches.
“There’s a huge gap between what private equity expects and what the market will deliver, if your goal is stable, long-term housing,” Weaver said.
“No matter what, Blackstone is going to make its profit.”
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2017/04/07/profit-at-any-cost/
Pathetic: More Billionaires for Trump
These guys are not looking out for us!
Billionaire ”Stephen A. #Schwarzman — chairman, CEO and co-founder of #Blackstone, the #PrivateEquity and real estate giant — tells #Axios he will support Donald #Trump as a "vote for change."
"Axios is told Schwarzman's concern about rising #Antisemitism sped his decision to re-embrace Trump, along with concerns about President #Biden's policies.
"The dramatic rise of antisemitism has led me to focus on the consequences of upcoming elections with greater urgency," he says in a statement to Axios.”
https://www.axios.com/2024/05/24/trump-2024-stephen-schwarzman-blackstone?stream=top
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