Blackstone Group 2
ntbcw ADF legal incubator clerks
420 mofo, evil pending on ER doc fired covid
CORP BAD ACTOR
see CEO SCHWARZMAN TRUMP FUNDER
SEE HOMELESS/ SOCIAL HOUSING VIENNA
SEE ENRON PIPELINE DAPL BP
SEE MBS
oops, see also black$tone gp
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Joanna Coles explained, the book explores the "Great Capitulation" across American society in 2025, as numerous powerful individuals and entities caved to Trump's new demands, falling in line and lining his pockets all at once. Weisberg explained that he sought to drill down past "the flacks and flunkies" around the president, finding eight of the worst cowards, including Sen. Mitch McConnell, Chief Justice John Roberts, former Fox host Megyn Kelly, lawyer Brad Karp, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, former President George W. Bush, and Dartmouth president Sian Beilock.
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VID] AN 26
President Donald Trump's authoritarian rampage over the U.S. in his second term has been enabled by numerous cowards in high places, but as author Jacob Weisberg told The Daily Beast, there are at least eight of the "very worst" cowards who have gone above and beyond in their capitulations.
Weisberg is a reporter and author who appeared as a guest on the latest episode of The Daily Beast Podcast on Sunday, promoting his new book, Profiles in Cowardice. As host Joanna Coles explained, the book explores the "Great Capitulation" across American society in 2025, as numerous powerful individuals and entities caved to Trump's new demands, falling in line and lining his pockets all at once. Weisberg explained that he sought to drill down past "the flacks and flunkies" around the president, finding eight of the worst cowards, including Sen. Mitch McConnell, Chief Justice John Roberts, former Fox host Megyn Kelly, lawyer Brad Karp, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, former President George W. Bush, and Dartmouth president Sian Beilock.
Chief among these names, he explained, has been Amazon CEO and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos.
"I think they all deserve shame, and they're all different stories and interesting stories," Weisberg explained. "But Bezos, in a way, is the paradigmatic example because he was so good in [Trump's first term] as owner of the Washington Post. Trump threatened him, bullied him, pressured him to have the Washington Post be less critical and less aggressive. And Bezos didn't yield an inch. Marty Barron, who was editor of The Washington Post in those years, really paid tribute to him and said, we couldn't have had a better owner... [In Trump's second term] it's a different person. He's on bended knee at Mar-a-Lago, paying $40 million for the Melania Trump documentary from Amazon Prime. You know, Amazon Prime is, like, known for being stingy. This is an absolutely ridiculous price. It's effectively a kind of bribe, a personal bribe, to the president and his wife."
Weisberg further suggested that Bezos's desire to gain government contracts for his space company, Blue Origin, and his ultimate goal of helping colonize space have been one of the main factors driving his capitulation to Trump.
In digging in against Roberts, meanwhile, Weisberg highlighted the 2020 ruling that gave Trump and other presidents sweeping immunities for "official acts" while in office, making it "essentially impossible" to prosecute them once they leave office. He also argued that, in many ways, Roberts probably dislikes Trump immensely, but has been willing to give him favorable rulings because of a deep and genuine belief in unrestricted executive power.
On McConnell, Weisberg argued that the former Senate Majority Leader was "afraid of losing his position inside the party" when he refused to back Trump's second impeachment, for which a conviction in the Senate would have barred him from ever hold office again.
"But if he had held firm to what he had said just after January 6th, he could have had Trump convicted," Weisberg said. "Trump was already out of office or would soon be out of office, and it would have been an easy matter to pass this subsequent vote that would have banned Trump from ever holding public office again, and we would have no second term. And that is on Mitch McConnell."
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8 26 TARIFF FUCKERY 50% CDA
KLEIN ASTRA YT ETF 8 28 26
CARNEY INVITE BLK ROCK AND BLACKSTONE TO DEAL W TRUMP BS, BUT SORTA //?
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an no lnx
It's official: The American Dream is dead — and Trump's billionaires are to blame
(L-R) Priscilla Chan, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Lauren Sanchez, businessman Jeff Bezos, Sundar Pichai, and businessman Elon Musk, among other dignitaries, attend Donald Trump's inauguration as the next President of the United States.
Thom Hartmann March 12, 2025
Trump ordered Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser to evict homeless people from various parts of Washington DC. He then cut millions of dollars in federal support to house poor people.
He didn’t make any suggestions about solving homelessness, mind you; he simply wants the problem moved out of sight. It’s a classic Republican strategy, and will work about as well as putting a Band-Aid over cancer.
It wasn’t always this way in America.
Back in 1967, a friend of mine and I hitchhiked from East Lansing, Michigan to San Francisco to spend the summer in Haight-Ashbury. One ride dropped us off in Sparks, Nevada, and within minutes of putting our thumbs out a city police car stopped and arrested us for vagrancy.
The cop, a young guy with an oversize mustache who was apologetic for the city’s policy, drove us to the desert a mile or so beyond the edge of town, where we hitchhiked standing by a distressing light-post covered with graffiti reading “39 hours without a ride,” “going on our third day,” and “anybody got any water?”
Vagrancy laws were so 20th century.
The explosion in housing costs — driven in large part by Republican policies — have triggered our crisis of homelessness.
The problem with housing inflation is so severe today that without it the nation’s overall core CPI inflation rate would be in the neighborhood of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell’s 2 percent goal.
Both homelessness and today’s inflation are the result of America — unlike many other countries — allowing housing to become a commodity that can be traded and speculated in by financial markets and overseas investors.
Forty-four years into America’s Reaganomics experiment, homelessness has gone from an occasional, local problem to a nationwide crisis. Rarely, though, do you hear that Wall Street — a prime beneficiary of Reagan’s deregulation campaign — is causing it.
Thirty-two percent seems to be the magic threshold, according to research funded by the real estate listing company Zillow. When neighborhoods hit rent rates in excess of 32 percent of neighborhood income, homelessness explodes.
And we’re seeing it play out right in front of us in cities across America because a handful of Wall Street billionaires want to make a killing.
Again, it wasn’t always this way in America.
Housing prices have spun out of control since my dad bought his house in 1957 when I was six years old. He got a Veteran’s Administration-subsidized loan and picked up the brand-new 3-bedroom-1-bath ranch house my 3 brothers and I grew up in, in suburban south Lansing, Michigan. It cost him $13,000, which was about twice what he made every year working a union job in a tool-and-die shop.
When my dad bought his home in the 1950s the median price of a single-family house was 2.2 times the median American family income. Today, the Fed says, the median house sells for $479,500 while the median American personal income is $41,000 — a ratio of more than ten-to-one between housing costs and annual income.
As the Zillow study notes:
“Across the country, the rent burden already exceeds the 32 percent [of median income] threshold in 100 of the 386 markets included in this analysis….”
And wherever housing prices become more than three times annual income, homelessness stalks communities like the grim reaper.
We’re told that America’s cities have seen this increase in housing costs since the 1950s in some part because of the growing wealth and population of this country. There were, after all, 168 million people in the US the year my dad bought his house; today there are 330 million.
And it’s true that we haven’t been building enough new housing, particularly low income housing, as 43 years of neoliberal Reaganomics have driven down wages and income for working class people relative to all of their expenses while stopping the construction of virtually any new government-subsidized low-income housing.
But that’s not the only, or even the main dynamic, driving housing prices into the stratosphere — and, as a consequence, the crisis in homelessness — over the past decade. You can thank speculation for much of that.
As the Zillow-funded study noted:
“This research demonstrates that the homeless population climbs faster when rent affordability — the share of income people spend on rent — crosses certain thresholds. In many areas beyond those thresholds, even modest rent increases can push thousands more Americans into homelessness.”
So, if it wasn’t always this way in America, how did we get here?
It started with a wave of foreign buyers over the past 30 years (particularly from China, Canada, Mexico, India and Colombia) who, in just the one single year of 2020, picked up over 154,000 homes as their way of parking money in America.
Which is part of why there are over 20 times more empty houses in America than there are homeless people.
As Marketwatch noted in an article titled “The Danger of Foreign Buyers Gobbling Up American Homes”:
“Unusual high appreciation of the aforementioned urban centers is due to the ever growing influx of foreign buyers — mostly wealthy Chinese — who view American residential real estate as the safest investment commodity. … According to a National Realtors Association survey, the Chinese spent $22 billion on U.S. housing in 12 months through March 2014…. [Other foreign buyers primarily include] Canadians, British, Indians and Mexicans.”
But foreign investment has been down for the past few years; what’s taken over and is really driving home prices today are massive, multi-billion-dollar US-based funds that sweep into neighborhoods and buy everything available, bidding against families and driving up housing prices.
It is, in other words, real estate speculators like Trump and his billionaire buddies.
As noted in a Wall Street Journal article titled “Meet Your New Landlord: Wall Street,” in just one suburb (Spring Hill) of Nashville, “In all of Spring Hill, four firms … own nearly 700 houses … [which] amounts to about 5% of all the houses in town.”
This is the tiniest tip of the iceberg.
“On the first Tuesday of each month,” notes the Journal article about a similar phenomenon in Atlanta, investors “toted duffels stuffed with millions of dollars in cashier’s checks made out in various denominations so they wouldn’t have to interrupt their buying spree with trips to the bank…”
The same thing is happening in cities and suburbs all across America; the investment goliaths use finely-tuned computer algorithms to sniff out houses they can turn into rental properties, making over-market and unbeatable cash bids often within minutes of a house hitting the market.
After stripping neighborhoods of homes families can buy, they then begin raising rents as high as the market will bear.
In the Nashville suburb of Spring Hill, for example, the vice-mayor, Bruce Hull, told the Journal you used to be able to rent “a three bedroom, two bath house for $1,000 a month.” Today, the Journal notes:
“The average rent for 148 single-family homes in Spring Hill owned by the big four [Wall Street investor] landlords was about $1,773 a month…”
Ryan Dezember, in his book Underwater: How Our American Dream of Homeownership Became a Nightmare, describes the story of a family trying to buy a home in Phoenix. Every time they entered a bid, they were outbid instantly, the price rising over and over, until finally the family’s father threw in the towel.
“Jacobs was bewildered,” writes Dezember. “Who was this aggressive bidder?”
Turns out it was Blackstone Group, now the world’s largest real estate investor. At the time they were buying $150 million worth of American houses every week, trying to spend over $10 billion. And that’s just a drop in the overall bucket.
In 2018, corporations bought 1 out of every 10 homes sold in America, according to Dezember, noting that, “Between 2006 and 2016, when the home ownership rate fell to its lowest level in fifty years, the number of renters grew by about a quarter.”
This all really took off around a decade ago, when Morgan Stanley published a 2011 report titled “The Rentership Society,” arguing that — in the wake of the 2008 Bush Housing Crash — snapping up houses and renting them back to people who otherwise would have wanted to buy them could be the newest and hottest investment opportunity for Wall Street’s billionaires and their funds.
Turns out, Morgan Stanley was right. Warren Buffett, KKR, and The Carlyle Group have all jumped into residential real estate, along with hundreds of smaller investment groups, and the National Home Rental Council has emerged as the industry’s premiere lobbying group, working to block rent control legislation and other efforts to regulate the industry.
As John Husing, the owner of Economics and Politics Inc., told The Tennessean newspaper:
“What you have are neighborhoods that are essentially unregulated apartment houses. It could be disastrous for the city.”
Meanwhile, as unionization levels here remain among the lowest in the developed world, the GOP’s ongoing war on working people continues to wipe out America’s families.
At the same time that housing prices, both to purchase and to rent, are being driven through the roof by foreign and Wall Street investors, a survey published by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health found that American families are in crisis.
Their study found:
— “Thirty-eight percent (38%) of [all] households across the nation report facing serious financial problems in the previous few months.
— “There is a sharp income divide in serious financial problems, as 59% of those with annual incomes below $50,000 report facing serious financial problems in the past few months, compared with 18% of households with annual incomes of $50,000 or more.
— “These serious financial problems are cited despite 67% of households reporting that in the past few months, they have received financial assistance from the government.
— “Another significant problem for many U.S. households is losing their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak. Nineteen percent (19%) of U.S. households report losing all of their savings during the COVID-19 outbreak and not currently having any savings to fall back on.
— “At the time the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) eviction ban expired, 27% of renters nationally reported serious problems paying their rent in the past few months.”
These are not separate issues, and they are driving an explosion in homelessness.
The Zillow study found similarly damning data:
— “Communities where people spend more than 32 percent of their income on rent can expect a more rapid increase in homelessness.
— “Income growth has not kept pace with rents, leading to an affordability crunch with cascading effects that, for people on the bottom economic rung, increases the risk of homelessness.
— “The areas that are most vulnerable to rising rents, unaffordability, and poverty hold 15 percent of the U.S. population — and 47 percent of people experiencing homelessness.”
The Zillow study makes grim reading and is worth checking out. In community after community, when rent prices exceed 32 percent of median household income, homeless exploded. It’s measurable, predictable, and is destroying what’s left of the American working class, particularly minorities.
The loss of affordable homes also locks otherwise middle class families out of the traditional way wealth is accumulated — through home ownership: over 61% of all American middle-income family wealth is their home’s equity. And as families are priced out of ownership and forced to rent, they become more vulnerable to long-term economic struggles and homelessness.
Housing is one of the primary essentials of life. Nobody in America should be without it, and for society to work, housing costs must track incomes in a way that makes housing both available and affordable.
This requires government intervention in the so-called “free market” that Trump and Musk call “big government.”
— Last year, Canada banned most foreign buyers from buying residential property as a way of controlling their housing inflation.
— New Zealand similarly passed their no-foreigners law (except for Singaporeans and Australians) in 2018.
— Thailand requires a minimum investment of $1.2 million and the equivalent of a green card.
— Greece bans most non-EU citizens from buying real estate in most of the country.
:{— To buy residential housing in Denmark, it must be your primary residence and you must have lived in the country for at least 5 years.
— Vietnam, Austria, Hungary, and Cyprus also heavily restrict who can buy residential property, where, and under what terms.
This isn’t rocket science; the problem could be easily fixed by Congress if there was a genuine willingness to protect our real estate market from the vultures who’ve been circling it for years.
Unfortunately, when Clarence Thomas was the deciding vote to allow billionaires and hedge funds to legally bribe members of Congress in Citizens United, he and his four fellow Republicans opened the floodgates to “contributions” and “gifts” from foreign and Wall Street interests to pay off legislators to ignore the problem.
Tragically, there’s no lobbying group for the interests of average homeowners or the homeless, and the problem is made worse every day by the growing inequality resulting from Reagan, Bush, and Trump tax and deregulation policies.
It wasn’t always this way in America, and it doesn’t have to continue.
Trump’s tough-guy snarl at Washington DC’s Mayor Bowser last week reminds us that homelessness isn’t just something that spontaneously occurs: it’s the direct result of government policies.
Policies promoted by Trump and Republicans over the past four decades.
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4. What about in California?
Lists of top single-family rental markets vary, but Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Jacksonville, Florida regularly come out on top. California does not appear to be a destination of choice for the nation’s largest investors. Less than 2% of single-family homes are owned by investors with 10 properties or more, statewide, according to the California Research Bureau.
What institutional investor-friendly markets have in common: Rapidly growing populations and relatively low real estate prices compared to rents.
“That does not describe California at all,” said Laurie Goodman, an economist at the Urban Institute.
When big investors do show up in California it’s disproportionately in the state’s quickly growing, still relatively affordable regions: the Inland Empire, the southern half of the San Joaquin Valley and the Sacramento suburbs. The county with the highest share of single-family homes owned by big investors is Fresno at 5.9%, according to the California Research Bureau.
Fresno is a bit of an unusual case, in that the largest single owner there, JD Home Rentals, is a local outfit whose portfolio of some 2,000 homes are clustered in that region.
Statewide, the largest single corporate owner is also the country’s biggest. Invitation Homes kicked off the corporate single-family rental rental trend when it started buying up distressed houses, rehabbing them and putting them on the rental market in 2012. Originally funded by theprivate equity giant Blackstone, the company has since become its own publicly traded company. The company owns 84,567 homes, of which 11,862 are in California, according to its most recent filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
5. Do corporate landlords cause rents to go up?
There are plenty of anecdotes of big investors sweeping into a neighborhood, only for rent hikes to follow. Do big investors cause rents to rise or do rising rents attract big landlords? When researchers have tried to disentangle those two trends, they’ve produced mixed results.
One national overview found that rising rents in a city reliably preceded an increase in single-family investor activity three months later. But they didn’t find that the reverse was true, implying that investors chase after rising rents, but don’t cause them.
“I think that the investor problem is kind of a boogeyman for the housing market.”
DARYL FAIRWEATHER, ECONOMIST, REDFIN
But another study found that single-family areas with higher concentrations of corporate ownership did, in fact, see modestly higher rents than comparable neighborhoods. These companies were able to exploit their relative control over a neighborhood’s housing stock to extract higher than fair-market rent from tenants, the researchers found. But the researchers also found a second explanation behind the rental run-up: By beefing up security across a slew of properties in the same area, they were able to lower crime rates and “enhance neighborhood quality.”
Many larger landlords also use rent-setting algorithms designed to squeeze the highest rent possible from new tenants. Defenders of the industry say those programs simply allow landlords to find an area’s market rent, though renters, prosecutors and federal regulators have argued that, at least in the apartment rental industry, it has amounted to illegal price-fixing.
6. Do big buyers take homeownership opportunities away from first-time buyers?
Every house that’s bought by a major investor and converted into a rental is one fewer opportunity for a would-be first-time buyer. That zero-sum trade off is particularly acute in places where few new homes are being built. A study out of Atlanta found that an influx of institutional investment in a neighborhood predicted a decline in the area’s homeownership rate. Likewise, a study in the Netherlands found that the reverse was true: When cities banned investors from converting homes into rentals, the number of first-time buyers shot up.
omfg fire whistleblower
https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-what-wall-street-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-its-grip-on-emergency-rooms/
no lnx
Here’s what Wall Street doesn’t want you to know about its grip on emergency rooms
Written by Eileen Appelbaum, Rosemary Batt / Independent Media Institute April 3, 2020
Doctor Ling Min is the first emergency room doctor to be fired for going public with his concerns about poor hospital emergency room safety practices and shortages of medical supplies and protective gear for health workers.
He won’t be the last.
Like many hospitals in the US, PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham Washington, where Ling Min worked for the past 17 years as an emergency room doctor, has outsourced the management and staffing of its emergency room.So, Min works on-site at the hospital’s ER, but he is employed by a physician staffing firm that runs the ER. These staffing firms are often behind the surprise medical bills for ER services that patients receive after their insurance company has paid the hospital and doctors, but not the excessive out-of-network charges billed by these outside staffing firms.
About a third of hospital emergency rooms are staffed by doctors on the payrolls of two physician staffing companies—TeamHealth and Envision Health—owned by Wall Street investment firms. Envision Healthcare employs 69,000 healthcare workers nationwide while TeamHealth employs 20,000. Private equity firm Blackstone Group owns TeamHealth, Kravis Kohlberg Roberts (KKR) owns Envision.
Care of the sick is not the mission of these companies; their mission is to make outsized profits for the private equity firms and its investors. Overcharging patients and insurance companies for providing urgent and desperately needed emergency medical care is bad enough. But it is unconscionable to muzzle doctors who speak out to advocate for the health of their patients and co-workers during the global pandemic that is rapidly spreading across the US.
Yet, that is what Blackstone-owned TeamHealth just did. Why would an experienced ER doctor be fired in the middle of a pandemic?One clue may be that Blackstone’s CEO, Stephen A. Schwarzman, is part of President Trump’s inner circle. He may not want to risk that relationship by allowing TeamHealth’s doctors to inform the public about Washington’s mishandling of the allocation of supplies and protective gear. The president might conclude that TeamHealth doctors didn’t appreciate him enough, and where would that leave Schwartzman?
PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center may have the distinction of being the first hospital to have a doctor outsourced from a physician staffing firm unceremoniously fired for telling the public the truth. But it won’t be the last. Hospitals are now telling doctors treating coronavirus patients they will be fired if they speak to the press.
The American Academy of Emergency Medicine protested Dr. Min’s ouster and questioned how TeamHealth is allowed to provide hospital services when the law requires that physician practices must be owned by a licensed medical practitioner. TeamHealth skirts the law by owning all the assets of the physician practices it acquires—the real estate, offices, equipment, supplies, inventory, and even accounts receivable.
On paper, the physician practices are owned by a doctor-led organization that TeamHealth has set up to comply with the law. But what does it mean to own a physician practice if the practice has no assets and no possibility to exist on its own?
The furor over patients hit by surprise medical bills revealed that TeamHealth controls the billing for the doctors it supplies to hospital emergency rooms. The firing of Doctor Ling Min pulls back the curtain and reveals that TeamHealth controls the doctors as well.
Eileen Appelbaum is the Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and visiting professor, School of Management, University of Leicester, UK.
Rosemary Batt is the Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work, Cornell University ILR School.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
no lnx wapo
Democracy Dies in Darkness
Global Opinions
Disgrace in the desert: The shameless return of business and government leaders to Saudi Arabia
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin during the Future Investment Initiative conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on Wednesday. (Hamad I Mohammed/Reuters)
By Ali AlAhmed
October 31, 2019
Ali AlAhmed is founder and director of the Institute for Gulf Affairs.
This week, many of the world’s business and government leaders have convened in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for the 2019 Future Investment Initiative, the Saudi regime’s annual money fest to promote doing business with the kingdom. Instead of the romanticized moniker “Davos in the Desert,” it would be better to call it a “Disgrace in the Desert.”
Last year’s event was shunned by most leading financiers due to disgust over the shocking murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi-born critic and Post contributing columnist.
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So, what has changed this year to entice President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and top executives of BlackRock, Blackstoneand Goldman Sachs to show up?
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Well, here’s what hasn’t changed: The CIA’s finding that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s effective ruler, was the one who ordered Khashoggi’s brutal execution in Istanbul. To date, none of those implicated has faced any serious punishment or accountability.
What has also not changed: Saudi Arabia remains not only a rogue state by most international standards — it also makes an unstable strategic partner for the United States and others, fundamentally incompatible with Western business practices. The entire kingdom is now controlled by a ruthless 30-something whose first instinct is to imprison, torture, expropriate and murder.
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UN Raporteur on housing
https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-april-1-2019/
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-housing-rights/global-investors-wreaking-havoc-on-low-income-renters-u-n-says-idUSKCN1R71L5
3/19
(Thomson Reuters Foundation) -Large investment firms are worsening global housing shortages by forcing vulnerable out of low-income homes and upgrading them for higher rents, said United Nations human rights experts, who appealed to countries to tighten up regulation.
These firms had become the world’s biggest landlords, and “converted homes into financial instruments and investments”, said Leilani Farha, U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, in a statement released Tuesday.
“Landlords have become faceless corporations wreaking havoc with tenants’ right to security and contributing to the global housing crisis,” she said.
Farha and Surya Deva, chairman of the U.N. Working Group on business and human rights, wrote to Blackstone Group LP, the world’s largest private equity firm, and authorities in Denmark, Ireland, Spain, Sweden, the United States and Czech Republic.[have laws that req action; US not sign treaties/agreement int'l]
Preferential tax laws and weak tenant protections in these countries have left vulnerable communities at risk of eviction and homelessness, they said.
“We remind all States, that while gold is a commodity, housing is not, it’s a human right,” they said.
Authorities must “regulate investment in residential real estate so that it supports the right to adequate housing and in no way undermines it. This cannot be left to the private sector to undertake on a voluntary basis,” they said.
In response, Blackstone - which owns the biggest U.S. home rental company - told the U.N. in a letter on March 25 that it had contributed to the availability of “well managed rental housing”.
“The injection of private capital is part of the solution to addressing the chronic undersupply of housing in major metropolitan centers around the world,” said Ken Caplan and Kathleen McCarthy, global co-heads of Blackstone Real Estate.
Globally, at least 150 million people, or about 2 percent of the population, are homeless, according to UN-Habitat, the U.N agency for urban development and human settlements.
More than a fifth of the world lacks adequate housing.
In their letter to the Czech Republic, Farha and Deva pointed to the increased vulnerability of the minority Roma community to evictions.
While in Ireland, the number of families on the social housing waiting list had doubled between 2005 and 2017 due to severe shortages, they said.
Global investors 'wreaking havoc' on low-income renters, U.N. ...
https://www.reuters.com › article › us-global-housing-rights › global-inves...
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U.N. blasts Blackstone Group for worsening the U.S. housing ...
https://www.cbsnews.com › MoneyWatch › Trending
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Missing: homeless | Must include:homeless
UN Observer Calls For 'Moratorium' On Criminalizing ... - KPBS
https://www.kpbs.org › news › aug › un-observer-calls-moratorium-crimin...
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How private equity eroded the right to housing | New ...
https://newint.org › 2019/06/19 › unitednations-leilanifarha-housing
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http://www.newsweek.com/real-estate-moguls-bankrolled-trump-victory-are-donating-big-his-reelection-798275
no link
Real estate moguls who helped bankroll Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election have contributed more than one-fifth of the money he has raised in a fund since the inauguration, according to a report.
Related: Trump Is ‘Definitely Still Involved’ in His Hotel Business, Employee Says
Donations from New York, Los Angeles and south Florida real estate interests accounted for at least 21 percent of the $16.4 million raised last year for the Trump Victory fund. A joint committee of the Trump campaign and the GOP, the fund allows individuals to give close to $450,000, The Real Deal reported on Thursday.
Some top donors to the fund had given generously during the 2016 election and Trump’s inauguration.
The biggest spender in 2017 was Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the New York City-based Blackstone Group, who donated $344,400to the fund after contributing $250,000 to Trump’s inaugural committee. Joseph Cayre of Midtown Equities and Bennett LeBow of Vector Group, both from New York, donated $170,000 and $135,000, respectively. Florida-based Nicholas Mastroianni, who founded a EB-5 visa fundraising group, contributed $150,000.
Several donors have publicly stated support for Trump’s policy priorities, particularly tax reform, which is expected to benefit the majority of commercial real estate investors.
...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/10/business/dealbook/starwood-waypoint-merger-blackstone.html
ACE report 2013? securitization // housing bust kpfa 3/22/18
big is sacramento mkt, bought fannie foreclose, know where dev will be
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https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/09/09/stephen-schwarzman-blackstone-group-trump-fracking
by Rob Galbraith and originally appeared on Eyes on the Ties.
By now, many people have heard of Stephen Schwarzman.
Some may know him as the billionaire founder and CEO of the Blackstone Group,a mammoth private equity firm that has its tentacles spread across numerous subsidiaries and companies.
Others may know Schwarzman as a close ally and advisor of Donald Trump, the chair the president’s recently disbanded Strategic and Policy Forum, who is set to profit handsomely from his relationship with the president.
Some may even know Schwarzman as the thrower of lavish, self-glorifying birthday parties — his last one includedfireworks, acrobats, live camels, celebrity performers, and a slew of high-profile guests, from David Koch to Jared Kushner, as well as several Trump cabinet members.
But fewer people know about Schwarzman the fracking profiteer, with billions invested in the fossil fuel industry that is fueling the climate crisis.
With this in mind, this installment of Eyes on the Ties “Frackateer of the Month” series shines a light on Schwarzman’s investments and influence within the oil and gas sector.
Finance, Fossil Fuels, and Trump
The oil and gas and high finance industries are deeply intertwined and dependent upon one another. Debt fuels the build-out of capital-intensive drilling projects and pipelines worldwide, while fossil fuels power global commerce, which Wall Street financiers make their living from betting on.
Through Blackstone Group, Schwarzman has bet billions of dollars on the oil and gas industry, buying interests in drilling fields, fracking companies, major pipeline projects, power plants and export facilities. Earlier this month the *Wall Street Journal* reported that Blackstone’s investment in the Energy Transfer Partners’ controversial Rover Pipeline brought its oil and gas investments up to $7 billion. The next week, *Bloomberg* reported that Blackstone had acquired Harvest Fund Advisors, an oil and gas investment firm with $10 billion in assets, for an undisclosed sum.
These wagers have occurred amid rhetoric from President Donald Trump promising to “unleash” the energy industry in the United States. As mentioned above, Schwarzman occupied a key Trump advisory role, leading a council of CEOs advising the president on economic issues until blowback from Trump’s sympathetic comments about white supremacists led Trump to dissolve the council.
Blackstone has already benefited from Trump’s energy policy. Trump reversed the Obama administration block of the Dakota Access Pipeline — which Blackstone has invested in — and has filled vacancies on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission with appointees who are all but certain to continue the agency’s practice of rubber-stamping pipeline projects.
If Trump continues to make good on his pledge to expand fracking and pipeline infrastructure, Blackstone’s oil and gas bets could prove incredibly lucrative for Schwarzman, whose $425 million 2016 pay packagemainly came in the form of stock dividends.
Blackstone’s Energy Bets
Blackstone’s billions of dollars worth of oil and gas investments span nearly every industry sector and include several extremely controversial pipelines being constructed by Energy Transfer Partners.
It was widely reported when Blackstone recently bought a 32.4 percent stake in ETP’s Rover Pipeline from West Virginia and Pennsylvania through Ohio to Michigan and Canada. Rover has been beset by problems throughout its construction: the pipeline has reportedly racked up more environmental violations than any other major pipeline in the past two years, leading to several government-ordered construction stoppages. Just before Blackstone bought into Rover, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission stopped drilling on certain segments of the pipeline after ETP spilled 2 million gallons of drilling fluid, polluting wetlands in Ohio.
Blackstone also has a considerable stake in the Dakota Access Pipeline through its acquisition of Harvest Fund Advisors, a financial firm focused on investing in oil and gas infrastructure. According to regulatory filings, Harvest Fund owns 16.6 percent of outstanding shares of Energy Transfer Partners, which is a 38.25 percent owner of Dakota Access and 3.9 percent of outstanding shares of Energy Transfer Equity, ETP’s parent organization. Harvest Fund Advisors also owns 4.4 percent of outstanding shares of MPLX LP, a subsidiary of Marathon Petroleum that is a partial Dakota Access owner through a joint venture with Enbridge.
Dakota Access — which was halted by former President Barack Obama after months of public outcry over the threat the pipeline posed to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, only to be resumed once Donald Trump took office — went into service in June 2017.
Blackstone’s stake in ETP through Harvest Fund also means that it owns a stake in the controversial Bayou Bridge Pipelineplanned along the southern coast of Louisiana. Bayou Bridge will bring crude oil from a hub Nederland, Texas (which is connected to Dakota Access by the Energy Transfer Crude Oil Pipeline) to refineries in St. James parish, Louisiana. The pipeline, which is co-owned by ETP and Phillips 66, has inspired protests similar to those against Dakota Access as well as a lawsuit on behalf of the communities that will bear the brunt of the pipeline’s negative impacts.
These pipeline interests, and other Blackstone oil and gas investments can be seen in the map embedded below:
Beyond pipelines, Blackstone is invested in the fracking operations that extract oil and gas from the ground. The firm entered into a joint partnership with Sanchez Resources to buy a $2.3 billion interest in drilling fields in the Eagle Ford Shale in Texas. In 2016, Blackstone invested $250 million in the Appalachian driller Huntley & Huntley. Earlier this spring, Vine Resources, a company formed by Blackstone to drill acreage it had purchased from Royal Dutch Shell, filed paperwork to make an initial public offering.
In the downstream sector, Blackstone is a major backer of Cheniere Energy’s Sabine Pass liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility, in which it invested $2 billion in 2012 and which was approved to start exporting gas by the Obama administration. The firm also bought three natural gas power plants from American Electric Power for $2.17 billion in late 2016, in a deal that also included a coal plant.
Schwarzman’s 'Trump Edge' Could Bring a Big Payday
Though he did not endorse Trump or donate to his campaign, Stephen Schwarzman quickly insinuated himself into the president’s circle of advisors.
In December 2016, less than a month after the election and more than a month before Trump’s inauguration, Blackstone issued a press release announcing that Schwarzman had agreed to chair the “President’s Strategic and Policy Forum,” a council of business elites advising Trump on “his plan to bring back jobs and Make America Great Again.”
According to the *New York Times*, the forum was Schwarzman’s conception, and Schwarzman told *Bloomberg* that he personally chose all of its members for Trump to listen and learn from. Those members included former GE CEO Jack Welch, a vociferous climate change denier; Adebayo Ogunlesi, director of African offshore drilling company Kosmos energy and chairman and managing partner of Global Infrastructure Partners, a private equity fund set up by Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs with many oil and gas investments; and Daniel Yergin, who operates an oil and gas industry consulting firm.
The council’s assignment — “cutting the government red tape that is holding back our businesses” — was a good fit for Schwarzman’s ethos; he once said that Obama administration taxes on private equity firms were “like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
The Strategic and Policy Forum only met a handful of times before it disbanded in August 2017 amid public furor over remarks Trump made sympathizing with the organizers of a violent white supremacist rally that left a counter-protester dead.
While the council was meeting, however, Schwarzman appears to have enjoyed wide access to and influence over the president. In April, *Politico*reported that Trump and Schwarzman talked “several times a week” and the *New York Times*reported after the council disbanded that “Schwarzman, of all council members, maintained the most consistent contact with the president.”
Trump’s policies have been a major boon for many of Blackstone’s businesses. In February, Trump canceled implementation of the fiduciary rule, which would have required firms like Blackstone to act in the best financial interest of their clients. That day, Trump boasted to Schwarzman that “we’re getting rid of your regulations.” During Trump’s May visit to Saudi Arabia, the Saudi sovereign wealth fund announced a joint plan with Blackstone to invest $40 billion in infrastructure projects, primarily in the United States.
Trump’s efforts to “unleash” the oil and gas industry in the United States have been especially beneficial for Blackstone, which, as described above, has dramatically ramped up its oil and gas investments.
Four days after taking office, Trump reversed former-President Obama’s December 4, 2016 decision to stop construction of Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access Pipeline, issuing a memorandum ordering the Army Corps of Engineers to “review and approve in an expedited manner” all “requests for approval to construct and operate the DAPL.” Though a judge ruled in June 2017 that Army Corps of Engineers February 2017 approval for the pipeline “failed to adequately consider the impacts of an oil spill on Standing Rock’s fishing and hunting rights and on environmental justice,” Dakota Access remains in operation, generating revenue for Blackstone and its other owners.
Trump has also restored the quorum on the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), appointing two industry-friendly commissioners — former Mitch McConnell staffer Neil Chatterjee and former Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner Robert Powelson — to the agency in charge of approving pipeline projects. Under the chairmanship of Chatterjee, who led the Republican campaign to approve TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline, and with Powelson, who sat on a business councilpushing for an expansion of oil and gas infrastructure in Philadelphia, FERC appears primed to resume its rate of approving nearly 100 percent of pipeline applications that come before it.
Other Trump actions that will benefit Blackstone’s oil and gas investments include permitting oil drilling in the Arctic Circle, ramping up the sale of oil and gas drilling leases on public lands, and pulling out of the Paris climate accord.
Though Trump’s proposed Muslim ban and his rejection of international action on climate change led several business leaders to quit the Schwarzman-helmed council, the Blackstone CEO stood by the president until the council dissolved in the wake of Trump’s response to the white supremacist violence in Charlottesville. Schwarzman later issued a statementcondemning “bigotry, hatred and extremism,” though he supported the president’s comments blaming “many sides” for the violence at the right-wing rally the day afterwards. “I thought he was talking about the violence on both sides,” Schwarzman told *Bloomberg* at a party in the Hamptons. “I don’t think it was a far-reaching statement.”
While it remains to be seen if Schwarzman’s influence over Trump will outlast the disbandment of the Strategic and Policy Council, there has been no indication that Trump plans to abandon his agenda of deregulation and drilling bonanza. If this remains the case, then Schwarzman’s massive oil and gas bets are sure to bring him some big returns.
==
https://www.opensecrets.org/usearch/?q=blackstone+group&cx=010677907462955562473%3Anlldkv0jvam&cof=FORID%3A11
Organization(1 result)
Lobbying Client(1 result)
- Blackstone Group 2016
- Blackstone Group2016
Top Contributor to Member(167 results)
- Blackstone Group to Al Franken (D) in 2016
- Blackstone Group to Amy Klobuchar (D) in 2016
- Blackstone Group to Barbara Comstock (R) in 2016
- Blackstone Group to Ben Cardin (D) in 2016
- Blackstone Group to Bill Cassidy (R) in 2016
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- Blackstone Group to California District 17 candidates in 2016
- Blackstone Group to Delaware District 1 candidates in 2016
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- Blackstone Group to DNC in 2016
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==
BlackRock, founded in 1988 as Blackstone Financial Management, is "an independent, global investment manager" providing services to "many of the world's largest pension funds and insurance companies."[1][2]
In 2011 the company reported $9,081,000,000 in revenues.[3]
Ties to Pete Peterson's "Fix the Debt"
The Campaign to Fix the Debt is the latest incarnation of a decades-long effort by former Nixon man turned Wall Street billionaire Pete Peterson to slash earned benefit programs such as Social Security and Medicare under the guise of fixing the nation's "debt problem." BlackRock is part of the Campaign to Fix the Debt as of February 2013.
This article is part of the Center for Media and Democracy's investigation of Pete Peterson's Campaign to "Fix the Debt." Please visit our main SourceWatch page on Fix the Debt.
Financial Crisis
According to Vanity Fair, BlackRock is "far and away the largest money manager on the planet," a distinction it earned in December 2009 following the finalization of a $13.5 billion acquisition of Barclays Global Investors.[4][5] Blackrock CEO Larry Fink "watches funds equal to a little less than four times the current U.S. budget."[6]
Additionally, Vanity Fair[7] comments: "A global colossus—with $3.3 trillion in assets under its direct management and another $9 trillion it supports—BlackRock manages about $1 trillion of pension and retirement funds for millions of Americans and oversees the investments of scores of institutions around the world: from state and local governments to college endowments, from Fortune 500 companies to the sovereign-wealth funds of, among others, Abu Dhabi and Singapore." At the time of the Deepwater Horizon blowout, Blackrock was the single largest shareholder of BP.[8]
BlackRock and its CEO, Fink, both gained from the 2008 financial crisis and the bailouts that followed. Vanity Fair continues, saying:[9] "Today, through an array of government contracts, BlackRock has effectively become the leading manager of Washington’s bailout of Wall Street." BlackRock oversees $130 billion in toxic assets for the U.S. government (assets the U.S. government "took on" in the Bear Stearns sale and the A.I.G. rescue). Additionally, BlackRock provides services to Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the New York Fed.
Personnel
Global Executive Committee
- Laurence D. Fink, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
- Robert S. Kapito, President
- Barbara Novick, Vice Chairman
- Kendrick R. Wilson III , Vice Chairman
- Philipp Hildebrand, Vice Chairman
- N. J. Charrington, Senior Managing Director - Chairman of Europe, Middle East & Africa
- Robert W. Fairbairn, Senior Managing Director
- Peter R. Fisher, Senior Managing Director
- Rob Goldstein, Senior Managing Director
- Bennett W. Golub, Ph.D.. Senior Managing Director - Chief Risk Officer
- Charles S. Hallac, Senior Managing Director - Chief Operating Officer
- Ken Kroner, Senior Managing Director
- J. Richard Kushel, Deputy Chief Operating Officer
- Matthew Mallow. Senior Managing Director - General Counsel
- Mark McCombe. Senior Managing Director - Chairman of Asia-Pacific
- Patrick Olson, Senior Managing Director - GEC Secretary
- Ann Marie Petach, Senior Managing Director - Chief Financial Officer
- Quintin Price, Senior Managing Director
- Linda Gosden Robinson, Senior Managing Director and Global Head of Marketing and Communications
- Amy Schioldager, Senior Managing Director
- Jeffrey A. Smith, Ph.D., Senior Managing Director - Head of Human Resources
- Derek Stein, Senior Managing Director
Board of Directors
As of January 2013[10]
- Laurence D. Fink, Chairman & Chief Executive Officer, BlackRock, Inc.
- Abdlatif Y. Al-Hamad, Director General/Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development
- Mathis Cabiallavetta, Vice Chairman of Swiss Re
- Dennis D. Dammerman, Former Vice Chairman of the Board and Executive Officer, General Electric Company and Chairman and CEO, General Electric Capital Services, Inc.
- William S. Demchak, Senior Vice Chairman, The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. and PNC Bank
- Jessica Einhorn, Former Dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University
- Fabrizio Freda, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Estée Lauder Companies
- Murry S. Gerber, Executive Chairman, EQT Corporation
- James Grosfeld, Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Pulte Homes, Inc.
- Robert S. Kapito, President, BlackRock, Inc.
- David H. Komansky, Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc.
- Sir Deryck Maughan, Partner and Head of Financial Institutions Group,Kohlberg Kravis Roberts
- Thomas K. Montag, Co-Chief Operating Officer, Bank of America
- Thomas H. O’Brien, Former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc.
- James E. Rohr, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, The PNC Financial Services Group, Inc.
- Ivan G. Seidenberg, Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer, Verizon Communications
- Marco Antonio Slim Domit, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer of Grupo Financiero Inbursa
- John Varley, Former Chief Executive, Barclays PLC
- Susan L. Wagner, Former Vice Chairman of BlackRock
Former directors include[11]
- Kenneth B. Dunn
- Robert E. Diamond, Jr.
- Linda Gosden Robinson
Contact Information
US Office
BlackRock
Park Avenue Plaza
55 East 52nd Street
New York, NY 10055
Articles and resources
Related SourceWatch articles
- BlackRock Investment Management
- Blackrock World Mining Trust plc
- Deepwater Horizon
- BP
- Larry Fink
- Ralph Schlosstein - former president
- Keith Anderson - cofounder - went on to work for Soros
- Michelle Edkins - MD
Featured SourceWatch Articles on Fix the Debt
- Fix the Debt Portal Page
- Fix the Debt's Leadership
- Fix the Debt's Partner Groups
- Fix the Debt's State Chapters
- Fix the Debt's Lobbyists
- Fix the Debt's Parent Group
- Fix the Debt's Corporations
- Pete Peterson
- Peter G. Peterson Foundation
- America Speaks
- Simpson-Bowles Commission
- Erskine Bowles
- Alan Simpson
- Social Security
- Medicare
- Medicaid
References
- BlackRock, "History" organizational website, accessed January 2013
- BlackRock, "Who is BlackRock?", organizational website, accessed January 2013
- BlackRock, "2011 Annual Report: Financial Highlights", organizational document.
- Graydon Carter, "Wild on the Street", Vanity Fair, April 2010, Accessed August 8, 2010.
- Suzanna Andrews, "Larry Fink’s $12 Trillion Shadow", Vanity Fair, April 2010, Accessed August 8, 2010
- Graydon Carter, "Wild on the Street", Vanity Fair, April 2010, Accessed August 8, 2010.
- Suzanna Andrews, "Larry Fink’s $12 Trillion Shadow", Vanity Fair, April 2010, Accessed August 8, 2010
- John Collins Rudolf, "Just How British is BP?", New York Times, June 14, 2010, Accessed August 8, 2010
- Suzanna Andrews, "Larry Fink’s $12 Trillion Shadow", Vanity Fair, April 2010, Accessed August 8, 2010
- BlackRock, Corporate Governance - Management & Directors, organizational website, accessed January 2013
- 1. Peter Phillips and Kimberly Soeiro, "Exposing the Transnational Ruling Class: The Global 1%", Dissident Voice, August 16th, 2012.
- ### External resources
External articles
- Graydon Carter, "Wild on the Street", Vanity Fair, April 2010.
- Suzanna Andrews, "Larry Fink’s $12 Trillion Shadow", Vanity Fair, April 2010
ven if it might be the case that incarceration rates don’t necessarily correlate with corruption, they do necessarily reflect the extent to which a given nation’s government is (by means of its laws and its enforcement of those laws) at war against its own population; and, so, technically speaking, incarceration rates (the percentage of the population who are in prison) are supposed to reflect the prevalence of law-breaking within a given nation.
After all, by definition, people are presumed to be in prison for law-breaking, irrespective of whether the given nation’s laws are just — and if they’re not just, then this fact reflects even more strongly that the nation itself is corrupt. So, a high incarceration rate does strongly tend to go along with a nation’s being highly corrupt, in more than merely a technical sense — it’s almost more like being the definitive measure of “corruption.” So, the correlation between incarceration rates and corruption must be assumed to be high, and any measure of corruption which fails to at least include countries’ incarceration rates should be rejected.
Out of the world’s 223 countries, the U.S. has the world’s second-highest incarceration rate: 698 per 100,000, just behind #1 Seychelles, with 799 per 100,000. Seychelles doesn’t even have as many as 100,000 people (but only 90,024 — as many people as are in the city of Temple, Texas). By contrast, the U.S. has 322,369,319; so, the U.S. is surely the global leader in imprisonment. And, furthermore, #3, St. Kitts and Nevis, with an incarceration rate of 607 per 100,000, has only 54,961 people (as many people as are in the city of Columbus, Indiana). The only other country that might actually be close to the U.S. in imprisoning its own people is North Korea, which could even beat out the U.S. there, but wouldn’t likely beat tiny Seychelles: North Korea is estimated to have “600-800 people incarcerated per 100,000,” and a total population of “24,895,000.”
Thus, for imprisonments, the U.S. really does have no close second: it’s the unquestionable global market-leader, for prisons and prisoners.
And this brings us to the market-leader for prisons within America itself, and to the stunning corruption that stands behind it. So, here’s that extraordinary example, and the story behind its corruption, which will provide a closeup view of America’s general corruption, from the top (including the government itself) on down:
In order to protect the profits of privately run prisons in the U.S. (where “Sixty-two percent of detention beds are administered by private prison corporations,” meaning that most U.S. prisoners are being ‘served’ by for-profit corporations in for-profit-run prisons), the U.S. federal government is refusing to honor Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) requests by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which is trying to find out why people are being imprisoned as illegal immigrants who ought not to be. Wrongly imprisoned people are a device by which private prison-operating companies keep their prison beds occupied and thus drawing income from the U.S. government, just like a high occupancy-rate is essential for a hotelier’s profitability.
But unlike in the hotel trade, this coercive bed-occupancy produces more than mere profits; it produces also distressed families, of those individuals who are yanked and unjustifiably imprisoned, families suffering needlessly.
It turns out that U.S. federal laws, passed mainly by the Republicans, but also with votes from corrupt Democrats, require (in H.R.3547) the U.S. government to pay for “a level of not less than 34,000 detention beds” for ‘illegal immigrants.’ (You can see that requirement being cited by the Republican interrogator of an Obama Administration official, Department of Homeland Security, at 1:03:00- in this video, where the Obama official is being criticized for not locking up enough people to meet the law’s requirements.) (Republicans and other conservatives love to punish people, irrespective of justice; so, they want at least those 34,000 prisoners. To be concerned about justice, as the CCR is, is to be ‘soft on crime,’ as Republicans view it.
Instead of justice, Republicans seek revenge; thus, for example, Republicans overwhelmingly support torture against ‘terrorist’ suspects; Democrats overwhelmingly oppose it. Torture greatly reduces the trustworthiness of a suspect’s statements, but it always serves as a vent for revenge, even when the suspect actually had nothing to do with terrorism; so, Republicans strongly approve of torture. Similarly, the most-conservative Muslims approve of beheading ‘infidels.’ Conservatives everywhere, and in every faith, support harsh punishments; and the U.S. is a conservative country; so, sentences are long, and the conditions are harsh.)
However, the Obama Administration itself, even as it locks up, on some days, just shy of the legally mandated minimum of 34,000 accused ‘illegal immigrants’ (which shortfall is here drawing the ire of that congressional Republican in the video), is also actively blocking CCR from access to the information about how the government and private corporations set rates for immigration detention beds and facilities. CCR argues that private profits are being given higher priority by the Administration than is the welfare of the public; and, thus, that the General Welfare Clause of the U.S. Constitution is being violated here.
The Obama administration says that it won’t release the information, because to do so would “harm corporations competitively.”
CCR claims, and the Obama administration is opposing their claim, that "there is essentially no competitive market in government contracts that could be harmed by the release of information, that there should be nothing proprietary about the terms of a government contract, and that the public has a right to understand how Congress funds immigration detention and how that funding is influenced.”
The Obama administration is arguing that if this same cost-information were being requested concerning any of the 38% of government-run prisons, then the FOIA request would be complied with, but that contracting-out or privatizing that function has freed the government from any such obligation.
However, CCR is concerned specifically about that profit-motive here — that the revolving door between government service and the private sector might itself be a key part of the explanation for the government’s requiring that at least 34,000 people will be in prison for, or awaiting trial on charges of, ‘illegal immigration.’ CCR contends that the only reason why people should be imprisoned in America is that they’ve actually broken laws for which the correct punishment is a prison term. But the position of the U.S. government is contrary: if the beneficiary of someone’s imprisonment is a private corporation, the public shouldn’t necessarily be allowed to know what’s going on, nor why. And, so, that’s the issue here. Does a private corporation’s privacy-right exceed the public’s right-to-know? The government says yes; CCR says no. CCR argues that to privatize is not to immunize: the government has the same obligations to the public, regardless of how it has chosen to carry out its obligations — either directly, or else by contracting them out (such as here). The Obama Administration argues that a private corporation is private, protected from the public’s scrutiny — and that the corporation’s only obligations are to the government, not to the public; thus, no such FOIA requests will be honored.
Here’s what’s not in dispute about the case: the man who, in the first Obama Administration, was the head of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations, David Venturella, is now the top sales official at GEO Group, which is "the world's leading provider of correctional detention, and residential treatment services around the globe” — and that’s also the first thing GEO says about itself, on its own “Who We Are” page. And Mr. Venturella is now being cited by the Obama Administration as an ‘expert,’ in order to deny CCA’s FOIA request.
As a GEO official, Venturella claims in his 22 December 2015 declaration in the court case, that, “the winning proposal in almost every Federal procurement competition is awarded to the lowest priced bidder,” and that, “The disclosure of GEO’s proprietary bed-day rates and staffing plans would result in substantial competitive financial harm to GEO.” He claims that, “Even with access to their larger competitors’ staffing plans, the smaller private companies do not have access to the capital needed to compete to win a large facility.” In other words: he pretends that GEO is one of “the smaller private companies.” But then he goes on to say (just in case a reader might happen to consider GEO not to be one of “the smaller private companies"): "The second stage would be acrimonious competition between the larger organizations, public and private, that will very likely lead to their withdrawal from the detention market as well, thereby leaving ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] with no viable detention service providers.” Venturella assumes here that ICE cannot itself own and operate its prisons. (He doesn’t say why; he merely assumes that it’s the case — perhaps that everything should be privatized, and must be privatized, so ICE shouldn’t run its own prisons.) And, he also is vaguely threatening there to abandon this market. He’s actually suggesting that, if the government were to require this information about cost and profitability to be released to CCA, then GEO might no longer even bid on this business — regardless of how profitable it is to them. And, he says, this would leave ICE “with no viable detention service providers.”
So: that (ridiculously and multiply false) argument is the reason why injustices to defendants in the U.S. immigration system must continue, Venturella, the salesman for GEO (his title is “Senior Vice President”), is here arguing. And, the U.S. government doesn’t challenge it, but instead unquestioningly accepts it.
Essentially, the Obama Administration is joining with GEO arguing that the profitability of private prison companies is more important than any injustices that might happen to be caused by Congress’s establishment of an arbitrary fixed and stable minimum number of prisoners every day — and, since the head of the top prison-company is saying that profits would be threatened by adhering to FOIA in this particular matter, the Freedom Of Information Act request in this case must be denied.
The basic argument, in other words, is that privatization is more important than the U.S. Constitution and its General Welfare Clause.
How close are these contractors to the government?
Here are five of the seven members of the Board of Directors of GEO:
One is “Former Director, Federal Bureau of Prisons.”
Another is “Former Under Secretary United States Air Force.”
Another is “Executive Director, National League of Cities.”
Another is “Chairman and CEO of ElectedFace Inc.,” which “will connect people to their elected officials in every political district.”
Another is George C. Zoley, the company’s founder and CEO, who is also “America’s Highest Paid ‘Corrections Officer.’” In fact: "GEO Group's revenue in 2012 exceeded $1.4 billion and CMD [Center for Media and Democracy] estimates that 86% of this money came out of the pockets of taxpayers. CMD's investigation of GEO Group unearthed how the company's cost-cutting strategies lead to a vicious cycle where lower wages and benefits for workers, high employee turnover, insufficient training, and under-staffing results in poor oversight and mistreatment of detained persons, increased violence, and riots.” (If so, then that would add to the misery that’s produced by the improper imprisonments.)
“According to Nasdaq, major investors in GEO Group include: Vanguard, BlackRock, Scopia Capital (a hedge fund run by Jeremy Mindich and Matt Sirovich) Barclays Global Investors, Bank of New York Mellon, and more.[132] George Zoley, CEO of GEO, is a major stockholder with over 500,000 shares.[133] For more on investors, see Ray Downs, ‘Who's Getting Rich Off the Prison-Industrial Complex?' Vice, June 2013.”
Privatization is very profitable. But not for everybody. Only for the well-connected. For everybody else, it’s just more poor and abused workers, and unjustly imprisoned people. But virtually all Republicans, and also the Obama Administration and other corrupt Democrats (and Obama will get his enrichment after he leaves office), think that privatization is necessary — even more necessary than is adherence to the U.S. Constitution, or than a justly ruled nation, and a prosperous public.
This type of government fits with America’s extraordinarily high incarceration rate. Looking under the hood of one dysfunctional car, one finds a dysfunctional motor.
But a few U.S. officials do whatever they can to reduce the country’s corruption. For example, the “Immigration Detention Bed Quota Timeline” shows that, in September 2015, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders (who probably is the U.S. federal government’s leading campaigner against corruption) “introduces the Justice is Not for Sale Act of 2015, which seeks to end the bed quota among other criminal justice and immigration detention reforms. The bill is the first effort in the U.S. Senate to eliminate the bed quota. In addition, Reps. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ), Keith Ellison (D-MN), and Bobby Rush (D-IL) introduce the bill in the U.S. House of Representatives.”
Those are the most progressive members of the U.S. Congress. Arrayed against them are the billions of dollars in political propaganda that cause the number of such progressives to be extremely few in the U.S. government. For that bill to pass in Congress, practically all conservatives would first have to become replaced by progressives, and by other supposed non-conservatives (called ‘liberals’), in Congress. Sanders says that it would require “a political revolution,” and he’s correct on that. But that’s the least likely type of “revolution” the U.S. might have. Perhaps Sanders knows this but doesn’t want to shock people, who are too indoctrinated to be able to accept the uncomfortably ugly truth, that things are probably already be too far gone for that type of “revolution” to be sufficient (even if feasible).
Everyone in Congress knows that this is the reality. On December 28, Huffington Post bannered, “Why Jon Stewart Fought So Hard For 9/11 Responders: The former ‘Daily Show’ host went to Capitol Hill twice to help the people who had risked their lives get access to health care. It left him disgusted.” He was shocked at how psychopathic almost all of the members of Congress are. Apparently, the closer you get to it, the worse it smells.
omg:
ppl who lost homes in crash now rent, but now same banks are selling rent futures derivatives. blackstone
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/12/blackstones-big-bet-on-rental-homes/
great systems infographic
From Bloomberg:
The Blackstone Group LP, the world’s largest private equity firm, became the largest owner of rental homes in the U.S. , acquiring 41,000 homes in the past two years. In October, Blackstone offered the first-ever “rental-home-backed” security on Wall Street. The bond is backed by just a fraction — 3,207 — of the rental properties owned by Blackstone. Monthly rent checks from the properties will be used to service the $479.1 million security.
buying up houses on cheap;
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175731/tomgram%3A_laura_gottesdiener%2C_the_backyard_shock_doctrine/foreclosure 10 mil ppl DN
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/6/a_dream_foreclosed_as_obama_touts
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/6/california_city_threatens_to_use_eminent
open secrets heavy hitter
CONTRIBUTIONS
$3,780,412
ranks 72 of 20,963
LOBBYING
$6,513,544 (2012)
$8,358,918 (2011)
ranks 66 of 4,374 in 2012
OUTSIDE SPENDING
$0
MEMBERS
INVESTED
Explain these rankings to meCONTRIBUTIONS: $3,780,412
Contributions to candidates: $1,575,128
Contributions to Leadership PACs: $134,000
Contributions to parties: $1,920,234
Contributions to 527 committees: $55,050
Contributions to outside spending groups: $225,000
Top Recipients
| Recipient | Total | From Indivs | From Orgs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Republican National Cmte | $672,600 | $667,600 | $5,000 |
| DNC Services Corp | $544,700 | $544,700 | $0 |
| Romney, Mitt | $366,775 | $356,775 | $10,000 |
| National Republican Senatorial Cmte | $315,284 | $285,284 | $30,000 |
| Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte | $247,400 | $232,400 | $15,000 |
 Restore Our Future | $225,000 | $225,000 | $0 |
 Obama, Barack | $146,331 | $146,331 | $0 |
 National Republican Congressional Cmte | $103,400 | $103,400 | $0 |
 Tester, Jon | $64,000 | $64,000 | $0 |
 Gillibrand, Kirsten | $63,500 | $56,000 | $7,500 |
TopCandidate Recipients, 2011-2012
| Mitt Romney (R) |  $366,775 |
|---|---|
| Barack Obama (D) |  $146,331 |
| Jon Tester (D-MT) |  $64,000 |
| Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) |  $63,500 |
| Scott Brown (R-MA) |  $57,750 |
The total of contributions to candidates from Blackstone Group individuals is 4 times larger than contributions from PACs
Client Profile: Summary, 2013
Lobbying by related organizations:
Client Profile: Summary, 2013
A special interest's lobbying activity may go up or down over time, depending on how much attention the federal government is giving their issues. Particularly active clients often retain multiple lobbying firms, each with a team of lobbyists, to press their case for them.
Total Lobbying Expenditures: $2,796,035
Subtotal for Subsidiary Hilton Worldwide: $1,140,000
Subtotal for Parent Blackstone Group: $560,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment: $460,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Apria Healthcare: $400,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Orbitz Worldwide: $236,035
Blackstone Group Lobbying by Industry| Industry | Total |
| Securities & Investment | $560,000 |
|---|---|
| Health Services/HMOs | $400,000 |
| Recreation/Live Entertainment | $460,000 |
| Lodging/Tourism | $1,376,035 |
Itemized Lobbying Expenses for Blackstone Group| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| Blackstone Group | $470,000 | - |
|---|---|---|
| Capitol Counsel | - | $470,000 |
| Tompkins Strategies | - | $90,000 |
| $560,000 |
Lobbying Expenses Reported by Subsidiary Apria Healthcare| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| Apria Healthcare | $400,000 | |
|---|---|---|
| Balto, David | $24,000 | |
| Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock | $90,000 | |
| Nickles Group | $145,000 |
Lobbying Expenses Reported by Subsidiary Hilton Worldwide| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| Hilton Worldwide | $1,140,000 | |
|---|---|---|
| Capitol Counsel | $90,000 | |
| Lugar Hellmann Group | $90,000 | |
| Quinn Gillespie & Assoc | $130,000 | |
| Venable LLP | $150,000 |
Lobbying Expenses Reported by Subsidiary Orbitz Worldwide| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| Orbitz Worldwide | $236,035 |
Lobbying Expenses Reported by Subsidiary SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment | $460,000 | |
|---|---|---|
| Bryan Cave LLP | $90,000 | |
| OB-C Group | $110,000 |
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Blackstone_Group
The Blackstone Group is a private investment banking firm and describes itself as a "leading global investment and advisory firm." The Blackstone Group was founded in 1985 by a group of four, including Peter G. Peterson and Stephen A. Schwarzman.
The Blackstone Group has ties to American International Group, Inc. (AIG) and Kissinger Associates, Inc./Henry Kissinger. According to the Blackstone website, AIG acquired a 7% non-voting interest in the company in 1998 for $150 million "and committed to invest $1.2 billion in future Blackstone-sponsored funds".
"Blackstone has developed strategic alliances with some of the largest and most sophisticated international financial institutions. In addition to AIG, they include Kissinger Associates, Roland Berger & Partner, GmbH, and Scandinaviska Enskilda Banken," the website states. [1]
The company's Blackstone Alternative Asset Management unit handles $1 billion in hedge funds for pension giant CalPERS.
John Forbes Kerry 2004 campaign 'adviser' Roger C. Altman was Vice Chairman of The Blackstone Group from 1987 through 1992 "where he led that firm's merger advisory business". [2]
In December 2001, The Blackstone Group was appointed as Enron's principal financial advisor with regard to its financial restructuring.[3] The company also advised Enron on "the Sale of its North American Power and Gas Trading Business to UBS". [4]Template:Deadlink
The Blackstone Group is also handling the restructuring of Global Crossing. [5]
Contents [hide] |
Political contributions
Stephen A. Schwarzman, the Chairman, CEO, and Co-founder of Blackstone Group, is a Bush Pioneer (see Bush's Rangers) having raised at least $100,000 for Bush in the 2004 presidential election. ^[1]^
Lobbying
Blackstone Group spent $940,000 for lobbying in 2006. Five lobbying firms were used. ^[2]^
Board
Accessed October 2012: ^[3]^
- Stephen A. Schwarzman - Chairman, CEO & Co-Founder
- Hamilton E. James - President & Chief Operating Officer
- J. Tomilson Hill - Vice Chairman, The Blackstone Group; President & Chief Executive Officer of Blackstone Alternative Asset Management
- Joseph Baratta (B) - Global Head of Private Equity
- Bennett J. Goodman - Senior Managing Director & Co-Founder of GSO Capital Partners
- Jonathan D. Gray - Senior Managing Director & Global Head of Real Estate
- Joan Solotar - Senior Managing Director & Head of External Relations & Strategy
- Laurence A. Tosi - Senior Managing Director & Chief Financial Officer
- John G. Finley - Senior Managing Director & Chief Legal Officer
- Richard Jenrette - Retired Chairman and CEO, The Equitable Life Assurance Society, Founder, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Inc.
- Jay O. Light - Dean Emeritus, Harvard Business School
- Brian Mulroney - Former Prime Minister of Canada
- William G. Parrett - Retired CEO and Senior Partner, Deloitte (Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu)
Senior Advisors
Accessed October 2012: ^[4]^
- Claudio Boada, Lodewijk de Vink, Rupert de Vink, Juergen Dormann, Gerard Errera, Bill Gray, Bob Friedman, Jill Greenthal, Arthur Higgins, Yuji Kage, Dmitri Kushaev, Philippe Meyer, Doug Rogers, Paul "Chip" Schorr, John Schreiber, Yong Kyu Shin, Douglas Steenland, Jean-Michel Steg, Mike S. Zafirovski
Personnel (2007)
Key executives: ^[5]^
- Stephen A. Schwarzman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
- Peter G. Peterson, Senior Chairman
- Hamilton E. James, President, Chief Operating Officer
- Michael A. Puglisi, Chief Financial Officer
Selected board members: ^[6]^
- J. Tomilson Hill, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Funds of Hedge Funds group
- Brian Mulroney, Member of the Board of Directors of Archer Daniels Midland Company
- Lord Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild, Deputy Chairman of British Sky Broadcasting Group
Contact information
New York
The Blackstone Group
345 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10154
USA
Phone: +1 212 583 5000
Fax: +1 212 583 5712
London
The Blackstone Group International Limited
Stirling Square
5-7 Carlton Gardens
4th Floor
London, SW1Y 5AD
U.K.
Phone: +44 20 7451 4000
Fax: +44 20 7451 4038
Web: http://www.blackstone.com
Resources and articles
Related Sourcewatch articles
- Thomas S. Middleton
- Robert L. Friedman, Senior Managing Director
- Jitesh Gadhia, Senior Managing Director in London
- Sir Ronald Grierson - advisor
- Private equity financing for coal plants in India
- Southern Cross Healthcare
- Ivan Pictet
References
- ↑ Pioneers and Rangers, Texans for Public Justice, accessed July 2007.
- ↑ Blackstone Group lobbying expenses, Open Secrets.
- ↑ Blackstone Group Board, organizational web page, accessed October 5, 2012.
- ↑ Blackstone Group Senior Advisors, organizational web page, accessed October 5, 2012.
- ↑ Blackstone Group Officers, Blackstone Group, accessed July 2007.
- ↑ Board and Committees, Blackstone Group, accessed July 2007.
External links
- Enron, "Enron files voluntary petitions for Chapter 11 re-organizations; sues Dynegy for breach of contract, seeking damages of at least $10 billion", Press Release, December 2, 2001.
- Simon Romera, "Global's Filings Failed to Note Business Link To Its Adviser", New York Times, March 20, 2002.
- Stonebridge International, "Board of Advisers: Roger C. Altman", undated, accessed February 25, 2004.
- Interactive Social Network Diagram!!!
oops, see also black$tone gp
omg:
ppl who lost homes in crash now rent, but now same banks are selling rent futures derivatives. blackstone
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/12/blackstones-big-bet-on-rental-homes/
great systems infographic
From Bloomberg:
The Blackstone Group LP, the world’s largest private equity firm, became the largest owner of rental homes in the U.S. , acquiring 41,000 homes in the past two years. In October, Blackstone offered the first-ever “rental-home-backed” security on Wall Street. The bond is backed by just a fraction — 3,207 — of the rental properties owned by Blackstone. Monthly rent checks from the properties will be used to service the $479.1 million security.
buying up houses on cheap;
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175731/tomgram%3A_laura_gottesdiener%2C_the_backyard_shock_doctrine/foreclosure 10 mil ppl DN
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/6/a_dream_foreclosed_as_obama_touts
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/6/california_city_threatens_to_use_eminent
open secrets heavy hitter
CONTRIBUTIONS
$3,780,412
ranks 72 of 20,963
LOBBYING
$6,513,544 (2012)
$8,358,918 (2011)
ranks 66 of 4,374 in 2012
OUTSIDE SPENDING
$0
MEMBERS
INVESTED
CONTRIBUTIONS: $3,780,412
Contributions to candidates: $1,575,128
Contributions to Leadership PACs: $134,000
Contributions to parties: $1,920,234
Contributions to 527 committees: $55,050
Contributions to outside spending groups: $225,000
Top Recipients
| Recipient | Total | From Indivs | From Orgs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Republican National Cmte | $672,600 | $667,600 | $5,000 |
| DNC Services Corp | $544,700 | $544,700 | $0 |
| Romney, Mitt | $366,775 | $356,775 | $10,000 |
| National Republican Senatorial Cmte | $315,284 | $285,284 | $30,000 |
| Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte | $247,400 | $232,400 | $15,000 |
| Restore Our Future | $225,000 | $225,000 | $0 |
| Obama, Barack | $146,331 | $146,331 | $0 |
 National Republican Congressional Cmte | $103,400 | $103,400 | $0 |
 Tester, Jon | $64,000 | $64,000 | $0 |
 Gillibrand, Kirsten | $63,500 | $56,000 | $7,500 |
TopCandidate Recipients, 2011-2012
| Mitt Romney (R) |  $366,775 |
|---|---|
| Barack Obama (D) |  $146,331 |
| Jon Tester (D-MT) |  $64,000 |
| Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) |  $63,500 |
| Scott Brown (R-MA) |  $57,750 |
The total of contributions to candidates from Blackstone Group individuals is 4 times larger than contributions from PACs
Client Profile: Summary, 2013
Lobbying by related organizations:
Client Profile: Summary, 2013
A special interest's lobbying activity may go up or down over time, depending on how much attention the federal government is giving their issues. Particularly active clients often retain multiple lobbying firms, each with a team of lobbyists, to press their case for them.
Total Lobbying Expenditures: $2,796,035
Subtotal for Subsidiary Hilton Worldwide: $1,140,000
Subtotal for Parent Blackstone Group: $560,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment: $460,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Apria Healthcare: $400,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Orbitz Worldwide: $236,035
Blackstone Group Lobbying by Industry| Industry | Total |
| Securities & Investment | $560,000 |
|---|---|
| Health Services/HMOs | $400,000 |
| Recreation/Live Entertainment | $460,000 |
| Lodging/Tourism | $1,376,035 |
Itemized Lobbying Expenses for Blackstone Group| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| Blackstone Group | $470,000 | - |
|---|---|---|
| Capitol Counsel | - | $470,000 |
| Tompkins Strategies | - | $90,000 |
| $560,000 |
Lobbying Expenses Reported by Subsidiary Apria Healthcare| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| Apria Healthcare | $400,000 | |
|---|---|---|
| Balto, David | $24,000 | |
| Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock | $90,000 | |
| Nickles Group | $145,000 |
Lobbying Expenses Reported by Subsidiary Hilton Worldwide| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| Hilton Worldwide | $1,140,000 | |
|---|---|---|
| Capitol Counsel | $90,000 | |
| Lugar Hellmann Group | $90,000 | |
| Quinn Gillespie & Assoc | $130,000 | |
| Venable LLP | $150,000 |
Lobbying Expenses Reported by Subsidiary Orbitz Worldwide| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| Orbitz Worldwide | $236,035 |
Lobbying Expenses Reported by Subsidiary SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment | $460,000 | |
|---|---|---|
| Bryan Cave LLP | $90,000 | |
| OB-C Group | $110,000 |
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Blackstone_Group
The Blackstone Group is a private investment banking firm and describes itself as a "leading global investment and advisory firm." The Blackstone Group was founded in 1985 by a group of four, including Peter G. Peterson and Stephen A. Schwarzman.
The Blackstone Group has ties to American International Group, Inc. (AIG) and Kissinger Associates, Inc./Henry Kissinger. According to the Blackstone website, AIG acquired a 7% non-voting interest in the company in 1998 for $150 million "and committed to invest $1.2 billion in future Blackstone-sponsored funds".
"Blackstone has developed strategic alliances with some of the largest and most sophisticated international financial institutions. In addition to AIG, they include Kissinger Associates, Roland Berger & Partner, GmbH, and Scandinaviska Enskilda Banken," the website states. [1]
The company's Blackstone Alternative Asset Management unit handles $1 billion in hedge funds for pension giant CalPERS.
John Forbes Kerry 2004 campaign 'adviser' Roger C. Altman was Vice Chairman of The Blackstone Group from 1987 through 1992 "where he led that firm's merger advisory business". [2]
In December 2001, The Blackstone Group was appointed as Enron's principal financial advisor with regard to its financial restructuring.[3] The company also advised Enron on "the Sale of its North American Power and Gas Trading Business to UBS". [4]Template:Deadlink
The Blackstone Group is also handling the restructuring of Global Crossing. [5]
Contents [hide] |
Political contributions
Stephen A. Schwarzman, the Chairman, CEO, and Co-founder of Blackstone Group, is a Bush Pioneer (see Bush's Rangers) having raised at least $100,000 for Bush in the 2004 presidential election. ^[1]^
Lobbying
Blackstone Group spent $940,000 for lobbying in 2006. Five lobbying firms were used. ^[2]^
Board
Accessed October 2012: ^[3]^
- Stephen A. Schwarzman - Chairman, CEO & Co-Founder
- Hamilton E. James - President & Chief Operating Officer
- J. Tomilson Hill - Vice Chairman, The Blackstone Group; President & Chief Executive Officer of Blackstone Alternative Asset Management
- Joseph Baratta (B) - Global Head of Private Equity
- Bennett J. Goodman - Senior Managing Director & Co-Founder of GSO Capital Partners
- Jonathan D. Gray - Senior Managing Director & Global Head of Real Estate
- Joan Solotar - Senior Managing Director & Head of External Relations & Strategy
- Laurence A. Tosi - Senior Managing Director & Chief Financial Officer
- John G. Finley - Senior Managing Director & Chief Legal Officer
- Richard Jenrette - Retired Chairman and CEO, The Equitable Life Assurance Society, Founder, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Inc.
- Jay O. Light - Dean Emeritus, Harvard Business School
- Brian Mulroney - Former Prime Minister of Canada
- William G. Parrett - Retired CEO and Senior Partner, Deloitte (Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu)
Senior Advisors
Accessed October 2012: ^[4]^
- Claudio Boada, Lodewijk de Vink, Rupert de Vink, Juergen Dormann, Gerard Errera, Bill Gray, Bob Friedman, Jill Greenthal, Arthur Higgins, Yuji Kage, Dmitri Kushaev, Philippe Meyer, Doug Rogers, Paul "Chip" Schorr, John Schreiber, Yong Kyu Shin, Douglas Steenland, Jean-Michel Steg, Mike S. Zafirovski
Personnel (2007)
Key executives: ^[5]^
- Stephen A. Schwarzman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
- Peter G. Peterson, Senior Chairman
- Hamilton E. James, President, Chief Operating Officer
- Michael A. Puglisi, Chief Financial Officer
Selected board members: ^[6]^
- J. Tomilson Hill, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Funds of Hedge Funds group
- Brian Mulroney, Member of the Board of Directors of Archer Daniels Midland Company
- Lord Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild, Deputy Chairman of British Sky Broadcasting Group
Contact information
New York
The Blackstone Group
345 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10154
USA
Phone: +1 212 583 5000
Fax: +1 212 583 5712
London
The Blackstone Group International Limited
Stirling Square
5-7 Carlton Gardens
4th Floor
London, SW1Y 5AD
U.K.
Phone: +44 20 7451 4000
Fax: +44 20 7451 4038
Web: http://www.blackstone.com
Resources and articles
Related Sourcewatch articles
- Thomas S. Middleton
- Robert L. Friedman, Senior Managing Director
- Jitesh Gadhia, Senior Managing Director in London
- Sir Ronald Grierson - advisor
- Private equity financing for coal plants in India
- Southern Cross Healthcare
- Ivan Pictet
References
- ↑ Pioneers and Rangers, Texans for Public Justice, accessed July 2007.
- ↑ Blackstone Group lobbying expenses, Open Secrets.
- ↑ Blackstone Group Board, organizational web page, accessed October 5, 2012.
- ↑ Blackstone Group Senior Advisors, organizational web page, accessed October 5, 2012.
- ↑ Blackstone Group Officers, Blackstone Group, accessed July 2007.
- ↑ Board and Committees, Blackstone Group, accessed July 2007.
External links
- Enron, "Enron files voluntary petitions for Chapter 11 re-organizations; sues Dynegy for breach of contract, seeking damages of at least $10 billion", Press Release, December 2, 2001.
- Simon Romera, "Global's Filings Failed to Note Business Link To Its Adviser", New York Times, March 20, 2002.
- Stonebridge International, "Board of Advisers: Roger C. Altman", undated, accessed February 25, 2004.
- Interactive Social Network Diagram!!!
oops, see also black$tone gp
omg:
ppl who lost homes in crash now rent, but now same banks are selling rent futures derivatives. blackstone
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/12/blackstones-big-bet-on-rental-homes/
great systems infographic
From Bloomberg:
The Blackstone Group LP, the world’s largest private equity firm, became the largest owner of rental homes in the U.S. , acquiring 41,000 homes in the past two years. In October, Blackstone offered the first-ever “rental-home-backed” security on Wall Street. The bond is backed by just a fraction — 3,207 — of the rental properties owned by Blackstone. Monthly rent checks from the properties will be used to service the $479.1 million security.
buying up houses on cheap;
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175731/tomgram%3A_laura_gottesdiener%2C_the_backyard_shock_doctrine/foreclosure 10 mil ppl DN
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/6/a_dream_foreclosed_as_obama_touts
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/8/6/california_city_threatens_to_use_eminent
open secrets heavy hitter
CONTRIBUTIONS
$3,780,412
ranks 72 of 20,963
LOBBYING
$6,513,544 (2012)
$8,358,918 (2011)
ranks 66 of 4,374 in 2012
OUTSIDE SPENDING
$0
MEMBERS
INVESTED
CONTRIBUTIONS: $3,780,412
Contributions to candidates: $1,575,128
Contributions to Leadership PACs: $134,000
Contributions to parties: $1,920,234
Contributions to 527 committees: $55,050
Contributions to outside spending groups: $225,000
Top Recipients
| Recipient | Total | From Indivs | From Orgs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Republican National Cmte | $672,600 | $667,600 | $5,000 |
| DNC Services Corp | $544,700 | $544,700 | $0 |
| Romney, Mitt | $366,775 | $356,775 | $10,000 |
| National Republican Senatorial Cmte | $315,284 | $285,284 | $30,000 |
| Democratic Senatorial Campaign Cmte | $247,400 | $232,400 | $15,000 |
| Restore Our Future | $225,000 | $225,000 | $0 |
| Obama, Barack | $146,331 | $146,331 | $0 |
 National Republican Congressional Cmte | $103,400 | $103,400 | $0 |
 Tester, Jon | $64,000 | $64,000 | $0 |
 Gillibrand, Kirsten | $63,500 | $56,000 | $7,500 |
TopCandidate Recipients, 2011-2012
| Mitt Romney (R) |  $366,775 |
|---|---|
| Barack Obama (D) |  $146,331 |
| Jon Tester (D-MT) |  $64,000 |
| Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) |  $63,500 |
| Scott Brown (R-MA) |  $57,750 |
The total of contributions to candidates from Blackstone Group individuals is 4 times larger than contributions from PACs
Client Profile: Summary, 2013
Lobbying by related organizations:
Client Profile: Summary, 2013
A special interest's lobbying activity may go up or down over time, depending on how much attention the federal government is giving their issues. Particularly active clients often retain multiple lobbying firms, each with a team of lobbyists, to press their case for them.
Total Lobbying Expenditures: $2,796,035
Subtotal for Subsidiary Hilton Worldwide: $1,140,000
Subtotal for Parent Blackstone Group: $560,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment: $460,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Apria Healthcare: $400,000
Subtotal for Subsidiary Orbitz Worldwide: $236,035
Blackstone Group Lobbying by Industry| Industry | Total |
| Securities & Investment | $560,000 |
|---|---|
| Health Services/HMOs | $400,000 |
| Recreation/Live Entertainment | $460,000 |
| Lodging/Tourism | $1,376,035 |
Itemized Lobbying Expenses for Blackstone Group| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| Blackstone Group | $470,000 | - |
|---|---|---|
| Capitol Counsel | - | $470,000 |
| Tompkins Strategies | - | $90,000 |
| $560,000 |
Lobbying Expenses Reported by Subsidiary Apria Healthcare| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| Apria Healthcare | $400,000 | |
|---|---|---|
| Balto, David | $24,000 | |
| Fierce, Isakowitz & Blalock | $90,000 | |
| Nickles Group | $145,000 |
Lobbying Expenses Reported by Subsidiary Hilton Worldwide| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| Hilton Worldwide | $1,140,000 | |
|---|---|---|
| Capitol Counsel | $90,000 | |
| Lugar Hellmann Group | $90,000 | |
| Quinn Gillespie & Assoc | $130,000 | |
| Venable LLP | $150,000 |
Lobbying Expenses Reported by Subsidiary Orbitz Worldwide| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| Orbitz Worldwide | $236,035 |
Lobbying Expenses Reported by Subsidiary SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment| Firms Hired | Total Reported by Filer | Reported Contract Expenses (included in Total Reported by Filer) |
| SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment | $460,000 | |
|---|---|---|
| Bryan Cave LLP | $90,000 | |
| OB-C Group | $110,000 |
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Blackstone_Group
The Blackstone Group is a private investment banking firm and describes itself as a "leading global investment and advisory firm." The Blackstone Group was founded in 1985 by a group of four, including Peter G. Peterson and Stephen A. Schwarzman.
The Blackstone Group has ties to American International Group, Inc. (AIG) and Kissinger Associates, Inc./Henry Kissinger. According to the Blackstone website, AIG acquired a 7% non-voting interest in the company in 1998 for $150 million "and committed to invest $1.2 billion in future Blackstone-sponsored funds".
"Blackstone has developed strategic alliances with some of the largest and most sophisticated international financial institutions. In addition to AIG, they include Kissinger Associates, Roland Berger & Partner, GmbH, and Scandinaviska Enskilda Banken," the website states. [1]
The company's Blackstone Alternative Asset Management unit handles $1 billion in hedge funds for pension giant CalPERS.
John Forbes Kerry 2004 campaign 'adviser' Roger C. Altman was Vice Chairman of The Blackstone Group from 1987 through 1992 "where he led that firm's merger advisory business". [2]
In December 2001, The Blackstone Group was appointed as Enron's principal financial advisor with regard to its financial restructuring.[3] The company also advised Enron on "the Sale of its North American Power and Gas Trading Business to UBS". [4]Template:Deadlink
The Blackstone Group is also handling the restructuring of Global Crossing. [5]
Contents [hide] |
Political contributions
Stephen A. Schwarzman, the Chairman, CEO, and Co-founder of Blackstone Group, is a Bush Pioneer (see Bush's Rangers) having raised at least $100,000 for Bush in the 2004 presidential election. ^[1]^
Lobbying
Blackstone Group spent $940,000 for lobbying in 2006. Five lobbying firms were used. ^[2]^
Board
Accessed October 2012: ^[3]^
- Stephen A. Schwarzman - Chairman, CEO & Co-Founder
- Hamilton E. James - President & Chief Operating Officer
- J. Tomilson Hill - Vice Chairman, The Blackstone Group; President & Chief Executive Officer of Blackstone Alternative Asset Management
- Joseph Baratta (B) - Global Head of Private Equity
- Bennett J. Goodman - Senior Managing Director & Co-Founder of GSO Capital Partners
- Jonathan D. Gray - Senior Managing Director & Global Head of Real Estate
- Joan Solotar - Senior Managing Director & Head of External Relations & Strategy
- Laurence A. Tosi - Senior Managing Director & Chief Financial Officer
- John G. Finley - Senior Managing Director & Chief Legal Officer
- Richard Jenrette - Retired Chairman and CEO, The Equitable Life Assurance Society, Founder, Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette, Inc.
- Jay O. Light - Dean Emeritus, Harvard Business School
- Brian Mulroney - Former Prime Minister of Canada
- William G. Parrett - Retired CEO and Senior Partner, Deloitte (Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu)
Senior Advisors
Accessed October 2012: ^[4]^
- Claudio Boada, Lodewijk de Vink, Rupert de Vink, Juergen Dormann, Gerard Errera, Bill Gray, Bob Friedman, Jill Greenthal, Arthur Higgins, Yuji Kage, Dmitri Kushaev, Philippe Meyer, Doug Rogers, Paul "Chip" Schorr, John Schreiber, Yong Kyu Shin, Douglas Steenland, Jean-Michel Steg, Mike S. Zafirovski
Personnel (2007)
Key executives: ^[5]^
- Stephen A. Schwarzman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
- Peter G. Peterson, Senior Chairman
- Hamilton E. James, President, Chief Operating Officer
- Michael A. Puglisi, Chief Financial Officer
Selected board members: ^[6]^
- J. Tomilson Hill, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Funds of Hedge Funds group
- Brian Mulroney, Member of the Board of Directors of Archer Daniels Midland Company
- Lord Nathaniel Charles Jacob Rothschild, Deputy Chairman of British Sky Broadcasting Group
Contact information
New York
The Blackstone Group
345 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10154
USA
Phone: +1 212 583 5000
Fax: +1 212 583 5712
London
The Blackstone Group International Limited
Stirling Square
5-7 Carlton Gardens
4th Floor
London, SW1Y 5AD
U.K.
Phone: +44 20 7451 4000
Fax: +44 20 7451 4038
Web: http://www.blackstone.com
Resources and articles
Related Sourcewatch articles
- Thomas S. Middleton
- Robert L. Friedman, Senior Managing Director
- Jitesh Gadhia, Senior Managing Director in London
- Sir Ronald Grierson - advisor
- Private equity financing for coal plants in India
- Southern Cross Healthcare
- Ivan Pictet
References
- ↑ Pioneers and Rangers, Texans for Public Justice, accessed July 2007.
- ↑ Blackstone Group lobbying expenses, Open Secrets.
- ↑ Blackstone Group Board, organizational web page, accessed October 5, 2012.
- ↑ Blackstone Group Senior Advisors, organizational web page, accessed October 5, 2012.
- ↑ Blackstone Group Officers, Blackstone Group, accessed July 2007.
- ↑ Board and Committees, Blackstone Group, accessed July 2007.
External links
- Enron, "Enron files voluntary petitions for Chapter 11 re-organizations; sues Dynegy for breach of contract, seeking damages of at least $10 billion", Press Release, December 2, 2001.
- Simon Romera, "Global's Filings Failed to Note Business Link To Its Adviser", New York Times, March 20, 2002.
- Stonebridge International, "Board of Advisers: Roger C. Altman", undated, accessed February 25, 2004.
- Interactive Social Network Diagram!!!