Go Public (Outcry)

"I just think there's too much influence about big money, Wall Street money, in our society," complained Robert Durham, who works at the local Chevrolet dealership and sent two sons through Abington Senior High School.    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/13/business/steven-schwarzman-blackstone-abington-pennsylvania.html

He's right, totally, and everyone knows it. A society that celebrates wealth and shrewd over everything, certainly over value and smart. And when anyone bemoans it, generation after generation, he or she is labeled a communist, socialist, un-American, loser, not smart, or simply jealous. In one fashion or another, money and the increasingly inequitable distribution of it, and the power that goes with it, are at the center of our problems as a nation.

So while one must applaud Mr. Schwarzman's benevolence to his alma mater and the New York Public Library (and note in passing the ego feed from naming buildings and tax deductions that must surely accompany the largesse), one can't help but think that a properly structured and prioritized society would have the revenues and understanding to direct its own resources to public schools and public libraries.

Unfortunately when I think of this benefactor, I still think of other things.

2007, when Rod Stewart sang and the Trumps dined at his 60th Birthday Party.  http://gawker.com/236663/stephen-schwarzmans-super-sweet-60th-birthday

2009, when his Blackstone Group stock traded for $4.50 a share ($27 a share below its 2007 IPO price and its price today) before a taxpayer-funded bailout kicked in.

2010, when he used a proposed tax on banking's carried interest tax loophole and Hitler's 1939 invasion of Poland in the same sentence.    https://www.theguardian.com/business/andrew-clark-on-america/2010/aug/17/privateequity-secondworldwar

2012 to the present, when Blackstone's foray into buying up eighty thousand or so foreclosed single-family homes paid off handsomely into the billions.

And 1175 of course, and Maimonides and his Eight Levels of Charity.  https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/45907/jewish/Eight-Levels-of-Charity.htm

I'm giving this a 5 at best.