New York University’s ties
to Trump, Wall Street banks and Gulf monarchies
By Sandy English
29 March 2017
This month, New York University’s Student Activities
Board (SAB) rejected the International Youth and Students for Social Equality’s
(IYSSE) application for club status and denied the subsequent appeal—for the
second straight semester. The decision is an act of political censorship aimed
at blocking the development of a socialist, anti-war group on campus.
Several of the students on the SAB publicly
boast on social media of their connections to the Democratic Party, corporate
media and banks. The character of the SAB itself is a reflection of the university’s
administration, which is deeply integrated with the political establishment and
Wall Street. While such connections are common at major universities, the
process is particularly marked in New York City, the home of Wall Street, where
the cost of living has grown to such an extent that workers, including those
employed by NYU, can no longer afford to live in Manhattan.
The careers and personal lives of NYU’s Board of
Trustees personify the marriage between finance, the government and the
military.
The Board of Trustees is currently comprised of
66 members, most of whom are billionaires or multimillionaires. They nominate
and elect themselves. They make staffing decisions on senior administrators,
including the president of the university (who sits on the board), currently
Andrew Hamilton. They have final say over all investments, including the
disposition of NYU’s massive real estate holdings, as well as faculty salaries
and curriculum decisions.
Most members of the Board of Trustees are New
Yorkers, and they or their families have risen in wealth and power as the
standard of living of the majority of New Yorkers has declined in the last 40
years. Some board members or their families have been intimately involved in
attacks on the social and economic rights of the working class in New York and
internationally.
The wealthiest board members make major
financial contributions to both Democratic and Republican politicians,
frequently to both parties at the same time, and most play some sort of
political role. Often this takes place behind the scenes, but sometimes it is
quite visible, such as John Paulson and Lawrence Fink, who sit on Trump’s
Council of Economic Advisers, and Gary Cohn, who is a member of the Trump
administration.
The corporatization of the university was
spearheaded by the board under the chairmanship of billionaire Laurence A.
Tisch (1923-2003), its chairman from 1978 to 1998, after whom the Tisch School
of the Arts is named.
It was under Tisch that NYU changed itself from
a modest commuter school to a corporate educational institution. It had raised
over a billion dollars by 1995 and began to attract students form outside of
New York City, largely based on its location in lower Manhattan. Over the
course of the previous decade, it had purchased, erected or renovated 22
buildings. Tisch played the leading role in raising the money from wealthy New
Yorkers.
Tisch and his younger brother Robert
(1926-2005), after whom the Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality,
Training and Sports Management at NYU is named, built up the highly profitable
chain of movie theaters and hotels, Loew's. By the time of Laurence Tisch’s
death, the conglomerate included 14 hotels, 67 movie theaters, CNA Financial,
the watchmaker Bulova, and Lorillard. The younger Tisch brother eventually
became the owner of the New York Giants football team.
Laurence Tisch is best known for acquiring a
controlling stake in the broadcast network CBS in 1986 and ruthlessly cutting
jobs and selling off its assets. In 1987, CBS records was sold to Sony for $2
billion. In 1995, when Westinghouse bought CBS, Laurence Tisch made $2.5
billion. At NYU he raised over $2 billion, including $40 million of his
family’s own money.
Just as significantly, the Tisch family played a
leading role in imposing austerity on the backs of the working class in New
York after its near-bankruptcy in 1975, when the city was governed by the
bankers through the unelected Emergency Financial Control Board.
Robert Tisch was a member of the 1976
Business/Labor Working Group on Jobs and Economic Revitalization (B/LWG), led
by David Rockefeller (brother of the then-US Vice President Nelson
Rockefeller). The group also included a number of trade union leaders.
Robert Tisch also founded the Association for a
Better New York with real estate magnate Lew Rudin in 1971, one of the most
powerful employers organizations in the city. The Rudin family is represented
today on the Board of Trustees by Lew Rudin’s son, William, the manager of the
family’s real estate empire. William Rudin is a leading member of the Real
Estate Board of New York, the realtors’ organization that has ensured that New
York City housing would be unaffordable for millions of its residents.
The B/LWG pioneered the social counterrevolution
that became a national ruling class policy after the election of Jimmy Carter
in 1976 and Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Robert Tisch eventually assumed the chairmanship
of the employers organization, New York City Partnership, also founded by David
Rockefeller. It was this group that pressured politicians such as Democratic
Mayor David Dinkins in 1990 to abandon proposals to raise taxes, and demanded
that they “cut spending” in the form of mass layoffs of city workers.
In this way, the Tisch family prepared New York
City for Rudy Giuliani, who as mayor implemented the final transformation of
New York into a city suited to the needs of the very rich and the upper-middle
class.
The Tisch family fortune is estimated at $6
billion. Today the Tisches are represented on the Board by Laurence’s son
Daniel, who leads the investment arm of the family business.
After Laurence Tisch retired in 1998, his lawyer
and protégé, Martin Lipton, took over as chair. Lipton had become a trustee in
1976. Lipton substantively transformed NYU itself into a bastion of inequality.
Lipton can best be described as one of the chief
advisers to the capitalist class in the period of the mergers and acquisitions
boom, in which wealth was not created by production but by looting the assets
of other corporations. His firm, Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, has
regularly earned top money for its partners ($6.5 million per partner in 2015).
The firm has represented such socially destructive corporations as AT&T,
Halliburton, JP Morgan Chase and Monsanto. Fellow trustees Larry A. Silverstein
and his daughter Lisa, New York real estate developers, are also Wachtell and
Lipton clients.
Wachtell and Lipton Partner George T. Conway,
III, Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway’s husband, has been nominated by the
president to head the Civil Division of the Justice Department, where he will
be tasked with defending Trump’s reactionary immigration policies.
Lipton is associated with the hiring of
University President John Sexton and the relentless expansion of NYU’s real
estate holdings, including the infamous NYU 2031 plan that proposed to
redevelop swaths of Greenwich Village.
In the Lipton period, the Board of Trustees
lavished privileges on star faculty and administrators. The levels of
inequality within the university itself grew. This is the period when a
majority of the faculty became temporary employees and students paid ever
greater amounts in tuition.
In 2015, the Faculty Against the Sexton Plan
(FASP) summarized the price gouging, particularly for international students,
and the delivery of inferior health care to students in the first part of its
document, The Art of the
Gouge.
In 2013, by reviewing the university’s tax
records, NYU professors exposed the astronomical loans and other perks that were
given to star faculty and administrators.
For example, the university loaned NYU Executive
Vice President of Operations Jacob Lew over a million dollars to purchase a
house in Manhattan and a $685,000 severance payment when he left NYU to take a
job at Citigroup in 2006. In 2003, Lew played a critical role in undermining
graduate students’ collective bargaining rights. In 2012, Obama chose him as
treasury secretary and in 2013 as White House Chief of Staff.
Sexton himself received an annual salary of $1.5
million, and the university loaned him $650,000 to purchase a Fire Island
summer home. NYU remodeled two university apartments for Sexton’s son, Jed, and
the university kept an apartment
available, at discounted rent, for Harvard Professor Henry Louis
Gates Jr., a good friend of Sexton’s, even though Gates had no professional
affiliation with NYU. When he began his retirement in 2015, Sexton was given a
$2.5 million “length of service” bonus. As of last year, he began receiving
$800,000 a year in retirement income.
The Lipton-Sexton regime also saw the opening of
16 satellite campuses, including those in repressive regimes such as Abu Dhabi,
the Persian Gulf sheikdom where workers, mostly from South Asia, are horribly
exploited and freedom of expression is routinely repressed by the state.
These facts would have seemed astonishing in any
other period of American history, but they are simply the most advanced
symptoms of decay in higher education in the age of intense social inequality.
They show how integrated NYU has become with the ruling elite and its political
representatives. The inherently anti-democratic character of NYU student and
faculty life can be summed up by a look at the wealth and power of some of the
other members of the Board of Trustees.
William R. Berkley is a billionaire chief of the Fortune 500 property-casualty
insurance company, W.R. Berkley, based in Greenwich, Connecticut, and the
current chair of the Board of Trustees. His attitude toward public education
can be seen from his chairmanship of Achievement First, a string of charter
schools in New York and Connecticut. He is also the director of the First
Marblehead Corporation, one of the leading American private student loan
companies.
Gary D. Cohn had been Goldman Sachs’ number-two man, in line to succeed the
CEO, since 2006. He recently left the investment bank to head Donald Trump’s
National Economic Council. He has declared, according to the Financial
Times, “his determination to scythe back financial regulation.”
Cohn was one of a handful of bankers who played
the paramount role in knocking over the first dominoes that accelerated the
subprime mortgage crisis of 2008 and drove the worldwide financial crash of
September 15, 2008.
The NYU Pevaroff Cohn Professorship in Child and
Adolescent Psychiatry is named after him and his wife.
Laurence Fink, CEO of BlackRock, is one of the most powerful Wall Street and
Washington figures on the Board of Trustees
Fink’s BlackRock manages $5.1 trillion in assets
and is a top shareholder in major banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank
of America, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. The firm manages 93
percent of the largest retirement plans in the US. The Wall
Street Journal reported
Fink was paid $26 million in 2015.
During the 2016 election, it was widely reported
that Fink, a Democrat, had expectations of becoming treasury secretary in a
Hillary Clinton administration. He even hired a prominent Clinton staffer from
the State Department. His party affiliation, however, did not prevent him from
joining Donald Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum.
Kenneth Langone, after whom the Langone Medical Center was named after a $200
million donation, founded Home Depot in 1978, which has made him a billionaire.
He sat on its board until the crash of 2008. He has been on the board of
General Electric, and now sits on the boards of Invemed and Yum! Brands, the
owner of KFC and Taco Bell.
Langone was a top donor to the presidential
campaigns of Republican New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in 2012 and 2016.
Langone sits on the board of the influential think tank, the Center for
Strategic and International Studies.
John Paulson is a billionaire hedge fund manager who made billions of dollars
on the purchase of credit default swaps with the collapse of the housing bubble
in 2008. In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused him, along
with Goldman Sachs, of creating financial products designed to fail.
Below are a few other members of the NYU Board
of Trustees. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it gives an indication
of how completely the most parasitic layers of American capitalism dominate the
university. It is noteworthy that they are comprised of both Democrats and
Republicans, and that many have given freely to both parties.
● Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair is worth an estimated $2.7 billion. He
is the CEO of Mashreq Group and was Speaker of the House of the Federal
National Council (FNC) in the United Arab Emirates from 2007 until 2011;
● Steven M. Cohen, a former
aide to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo;
● Real estate magnate Larry
A. Silverstein, who leased the World Trade Center buildings
shortly before the attacks of September 11, 2001, and his daughter Lisa
Silverstein;
● Judy Steinhardt, the wife
of billionaire hedge fund investor Michael Steinhardt . The Steinhardts keep a private zoo of
camels, wallabies, zebras and other animals at their 51-acre estate in Bedford,
New York;
● Tamara Winn, the daughter of billionaire Ira
Rennert, who made his wealth primarily from junk bonds. Rennert is the owner of
what is reportedly the country’s largest home in Sagaponack, Long Island,
although his daughter lives in a Manhattan residence costing a mere $35
million;
● Shelby White, the widow of Wall Street financier
Leon Levy, whose million-dollar donations to NYU were received with hostility
by archeology professors, who say that White routinely purchased antiquities
that may have been stolen;
● Anthony Welters, a major “bundler” of donations to
Barack Obama in 2012 and recipient of government contracts under the Obama
administration;
● Billionaire Charles Zegar, a founding
partner of Bloomberg, LLP with former NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The IYSSE will continue waging its campaign
against the corporatization of the university and its anti-democratic
censorship, regardless of whether the financial lords and ladies on the Board
of Trustees have given their approval.
THE
CONSPIRACY OF TRAITORS:
THE
CLINTON-OBAMA PLAN TO DESTROY DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA FOR GLOBALIST BILLIONAIRES
INCLUDING THEIR PAYMASTER GEORGE SOROS!
"When it comes to Islamic
terror or shariah imposition, Obama and other globalists preach a type of
defenselessness and impotence: something we have to abide. For many liberals,
virtue signaling, the epitome of vanity,
is more important than saving lives, even the lives of their countrymen."
Many making the accusations of xenophobia live in rarified societies and neighborhoods or in high-end and fashionable apartment buildings with security guards and doormen, immune from the consequences of Open Borders, loss of manual jobs, overseas nation-building, and the harmful effects arising from perfunctory background checks and superficial vetting.
AFTER DESTROYING
THE DEMOCRAT PARTY and the AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS, OBAMA NOW VOWS TO BUILD A
PRO-MUSLIM DICTATORSHIP FUNDED BY GEORGE SOROS AND OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERS.
Barack Obama and his henchmen would not have been
emboldened in their ostensible machinations to undermine an election and then a
presidency if it were not for the fecklessness of the Republican Party and the
blind eye as well as the tacit support of the mainstream media.
*
In what’s
shaping up to be a highly unusual post-presidency, Obama isn’t just staying
behind in Washington. He’s working behind the scenes to set up what will
effectively be a shadow government to not only protect his threatened legacy,
but to sabotage the incoming administration and its popular “America First”
agenda.
MEDICAID SLASHED!
TRUMPERNOMICS: IMPLEMENTING SEVERE
OBAMA-CLINTONOMICS TO SERVE THE SUPER RICH!
“The Republican proposal builds on the
core features of Obamacare, designed to boost the profits of the private
insurers and slash health care costs for the government and big business.”
*
“The lifetime costs of Social Security and Medicare
benefits of illegal immigrant beneficiaries of President Obama’s executive amnesty
would be well over a trillion dollars, according to Heritage Foundation expert Robert
Rector’s prepared testimony for a House panel obtained in advance by Breitbart
News.”
SWAMP DWELLER TRUMP ASSAULTS MEDICAID AND MEDICARE
Opponent of Medicaid,
Medicare sworn in as Health and Human Services secretary
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