Our Billionaires Are Not Much Different From Putin's Oligarchs. They're Cousins.

Schwarzman with his pal, the other landlord

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

GED/HEO

3-3-22

 

Stephen Schwarzman, the head of Blackstone, a parasitic private equity company, had a windfall last year the Wall Street Journal reported. Schwartzman took home a whopping $1.1 billion pay packet, and is now worth more than $37 billion according to Forbes.  No “sanctions” for Stevie boy. Naturally, we should oppose sanctions anyway, we want to appropriate their stolen hoards not fine them for appropriating them from us.

 

Wikipedia points out that Schwarzman, who comes from a business family of small capitalists, claims that “Schwarzman's first business was a lawn-mowing operation when he was 14 years old, employing his younger twin brothers, Mark and Warren, to mow while Stephen brought in clients.” This activity (bringing in the clients while others provide the labor power) is what is considered honest work and a mark of success in the capitalist world. Had his brothers been smart, according to this philosophy, roles would have been reversed.

 

What stands out in that statement is how similar Schwarzman’s activity, even at 14 years of age, is to a pimp who brings clients to the prostituted woman who does the work so the pimp can get rich. Ah, sweet commerce. Schwarzman was a member of Yale University’s Skull and Bones Club as was George H W Bush, the father of the imbecile George Bush. It was very difficult for Jews, Blacks and at times, Catholics to enter this prestigious gang of bourgeois so Schwartzman was lucky there.

 

Schwarzman is a good friend of the degenerate Donald Trump apparently, and at one time referred to the Obama Administration’s plan to raise tax on carried interest, a great money maker for the private Equity crowd, to Hitler’s invasion of Poland.

 

Schwarzman’s partner in crime was Peter G Petersen who died in 2018, another social waster who created a think tank, the Petersen Institute, in order to streamline this practice of accumulating wealth without working. All of these characters have (if they’re not dead) held positions in the US state apparatus or have been advisors to various administrations, so there’s not much difference between these people and Putin’s oligarchs as they call them. Check out Larry Fink of the similar named BlackRock Corp. in: Blackrock The CompanyThat Owns The World. Video.

The social disruption and outright misery outfits like Blackstone create is immense. The
largest landlords in the US are capital management companies, or Wall Street to be more
concise. MMA Capital group, another capital management company, is the largest landlord
of rental apartments in the US with more than 100,000 units. MMA’s website boasts that its
purpose is, “Creating Financial Freedom Through Investment.”

Here’s a list of the top 50.

 

The 2008 crash, when some 5 million families lost their homes (homes are not “lost” they are physically taken from the residents by the sheriffs on behalf of the moneylenders), was a game changer for these parasites that normally like their victims in one place, a block of flats for example. Single family homes are individual units sometimes great distances apart which means more resources and increased maintenance costs and so on.

But, as Obama’s buddy Rahm Immanuel pointed out, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”. Schwarzman and Blackstone took that advice and ran with it buying “tens of thousands of foreclosed homes” at bargain basement prices creating a company called Invitation Homes and renting them out. The reader may recall that the same process played out after the Saving and Loan Crisis of the 1990’s (S&L Crisis) when these institutions went bust. The U.S. taxpayer bailed them out, bought the failed S& L’s selected the best of them and sold them back to the same crooks at bargain basement prices. See the Resolution Trust Corp.

 

In 2021, Blackstone bought Home Partners of America Inc., which owns more than 17,000 houses throughout the U.S and continues the practice that has made Schwarzman a multi-billionaire.

 

Not such a nice picture for young individuals or families that need a place to live mind you. California State Senator Nancy Skinner, a Democrat, pointed out in 2020 that corporations owned $60 billion worth of single family homes.  She introduced legislation that was passed that aimed at “leveling the playing field” when it comes to bidding for foreclosed homes, Senate Bill 1079.

 

When we review the numbers and massive amounts of wealth involved, the solution is not what Skinner, a capitalist politician in a capitalist party proposes. Housing is human shelter and should be a right in any society. Waging war is a public activity and so should housing be, that way the term foreclosure would disappear from our lexicon.

Creating financial freedom as MMA puts it doesn’t mean the life savings of the worker having the capacity to put food on the table or being able to go on vacation once or twice a year, it means avoiding work altogether and accumulating as much wealth as possible. All people obsessed with this goal in mind want to be like Stephen Schwarzman; but that wealth for a minority on the one end (we can’t all avoid honest work), means depravity and poverty for the majority on the other.

 

We must demand social housing as we demand social health care, mass transit, free public education and so on. The social needs of society will never be provided by the private sector.

 

It is not true that public expenditure is wasteful and inefficient. We have to reject the corporate mass media and the propaganda from the pulpit, the universities, which are capitalist think tanks, and the politicians and their colleagues like Schwarzman who make this argument. The dominant ideas in society are the ideas of the class that governs. Would any thinking worker argue that the Divine Right of Kings sprang from the head of the peasant? I think not.  The most efficient outfit in the US is the United States Post Office. The private sector wants to get its grubby little hands on it and close about 4000 of them; they want to make it profitable----for them.

 

The world is in a dangerous place at the moment and workers cannot ignore the dangers. We cannot allow big business (I’m not talking about the grocery store here as this section of society is also crushed by capital) to continue to have this dictatorship over society and we cannot bury our heads in the sand, we cannot continue to boast that we never discuss politics, or history.

 

We can start by recognizing that in the last analysis, Stephen Schwarzman, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson Elon Musk, Bill Gates and all of them are no different than Putin’s oligarchs; they are also very connected to politics and the capitalist state.

 

Workers must regain our past, our history, our role in making that history. We must understand we are a class un to ourselves with our own distinct economic and political interests.  We are varied, in many different jobs and professions, but if we live through the sale of our labor power, wages, we are workers; we make it all happen. Public spending is not charity, it is returning to us the wealth we create in the form of social needs and services; it’s our money.

 

The more we understand that the more likely our children and grandchildren will have a future.