We Americans have a bottomless capability for working off of assumptions about other countries that we’d never apply to ourselves, even if they should. One way to tease out this tendency is to apply the tropes of the foreign correspondent — it has an exotic ring to it, no? — to the United States. Slate has a delightful, occasional feature, “If It Happened There” that reverses the roles. I’m going to steal the idea here.
NEW YORK — The powerful American oligarch Stephen Schwarzman is facing intensifying criticism for his refusal to disavow the former President Donald Trump, the right-wing populist who was defeated for re-election and incited a violent uprising in the country’s capital.
After pouring tens of millions of dollars into the effort to keep Mr. Trump’s Republican Party in power, Mr. Schwarzman chided the Jan. 6 insurrection in which Trump partisans sought to head off the victory of now-President Joseph Biden, but stopped short of calling out Mr. Trump.
The public relations-minded efforts of the oligarch, whose net worth is estimated at $22 billion, have since run into difficulties. A prominent journalist called for stripping his name from the New York Public Library. And students who received financial assistance from Mr. Schwarzman to study in China, dubbed “Schwarzman Scholars” in an attempt to echo the prestige of Rhodes Scholars, have demanded the oligarch curb his political giving. He has refused.
Mr. Schwarzman’s proximity to Mr. Trump stands out among fellow oligarchs like Jeff Bezos, whose empire includes e-retailer Amazon and the largest newspaper in the capital, The Washington Post. Mr. Bezos tangled with Mr. Trump during his four years in power over lucrative government contracts. Mr. Schwarzman, by contrast, met frequently with Mr. Trump and obtained valuable favors, like preservation of a tax loophole.
Though Mr. Schwarzman does not have the $100 billion-plus fortunes of the top-tier of billionaires, his wealth has been instrumental in allowing Republicans, now in opposition, to finance expensive electoral campaigns. The oligarch pumped cash into a slush fund maintained by the Republican legislative leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell, in the ill-fated effort to preserve their power in the upper chamber of the American legislature.
Private equity, the Wall Street industry in which Mr. Schwarzman amassed his money, has also fallen into disrepute. It has emerged that it has less to do with business acumen than complex financial engineering designed to strip and monetize assets and raise prices for consumers. It also rested on political influence, now greatly diminished since the election of Mr. Biden.
You get the idea.
Once we identify Schwarzman as an oligarch, a lot of other things — the political sway that underpins the money, the image-maintenance via philanthropy, the shady business — seem to fit right in. This picture is entirely accurate.
But as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting pointed out in a report that is little more (I mean no disrespect) than an analysis of media hits, you won’t find any American oligarchs here. But you do find Russians. Occasionally Ukrainians, Khazaks, a couple of Hungarians and Georgians. In other words, a Slavic billionaire is an oligarch. A generation ago, I suspect they were probably most likely to be landowners in Latin America. But never Americans. Google the word “oligarch” and you actually get the definition “(especially in Russia) a very rich business leader with a great deal of political influence.”
And yet, we have a government that, by any reasonable measure, has been substantially run on behalf of a relatively small number of extraordinarily wealth people for some time. Schwarzman’s fortune alone rests on favorable tax treatment for his own profits, liability protections that insulate his own money from his business failures and, most recently, the support of debt markets given by the Federal Reserve.
Jimmy Carter, in between building houses for poor people and teaching Sunday school, saw it in 2015, before Schwarzman brown-nosed his way into the good graces of Donald Trump. The American political system, he said is
.. just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president. And the same thing applies to governors and U.S. senators and congress members. So now we’ve just seen a complete subversion of our political system as a payoff to major contributors, who want and expect and sometimes get favors for themselves after the election’s over.
Bezos, Zuckerberg, Gates, Bloomberg — all the billionaires — when have they not touched politics for the said of winning or preserving favors? Why do they not deserve mention in the same breath as Deripaska, Vekselberg, Abramovich, Pinchuk? Why do we find it so hard to acknowledge the political nature of their money?
One reason is surely that we have made money the measure of merit in the United States, even when merit is a facade buttressed by political influence. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, in her first Senate campaign, demanded that wealthy people pay their fair share in taxes because the success they enjoyed rested on a physical and educational infrastructure that the rest of us paid for. The billionaires took it a step further, manipulating and profiting from a legal infrastructure their own influence created, from their proximity to power.
American oligarch. Russian oligarch. The formulate for combining power with money and money with power is the same.