Unfolding Scandal: Spitzer versus Schwarzman

by Pratap Chatterjee

Global Research, March 15, 2008
CorpWatch - 2008-03-13

The news this week is deeply ironic: the main building of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street will be engraved with the name of Stephen A. Schwarzman, while the periodicals inside may sadly chronicle Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York state, as Client Number 9 of a prostitution ring. Both men made their name on Wall Street: Schwarzman rose from his first job in investment banking at Lehman Brothers to run the Blackstone Group, a private equity firm, that has allowed him to stash away an estimated $4 billion today, while Spitzer got corporations from Samsung to investment bankers like Lehman Brothers to return almost the same amount to the public trust.

The Wall Street financier is now giving $100 million to support a worthy cause that taxpayers cannot afford: a new library to lend books, wireless Internet access and new rooms for children and teenagers, to attract as many as three million new users, most of whom are expected to be from low-income minority groups. It will be financed by the profits that Schwarzman made at Blackstone by exploiting tax loopholes to cut his tax rate from 35 percent to 15 percent, costing the U.S. taxpayer tens of millions of dollars.Doubtless one of the books that will be available at the new library will be the play Julius Ceasar, where Mark Anthony is quoted as saying: “The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.â€