In the early 1990s, New School University Trustee Bernard Schwartz was apparently one of the leading “Masters of War” in the Big Apple. According to Forbes magazine, in 1992 the then-68-year-old Loral Corporation chairman and CEO took home a salary and bonus of $5.23 million, plus $11.5 million in stock gains and other compensation from the Loral Corporation’s weapons manufacturing operations.
In the early 1990s, New School University Trustee Schwartz’s Manhattan-based Loral Corporation developed and manufactured airborne electronic warfare systems and equipment. Schwartz’s company also then produced or upgraded some 130,000 guidance control systems for AIM-9P Sidewinder, a short-range air-to-air missile. In the late 1980s or early 1990s, New School University Trustee Schwartz’s Loral Corporation also purchased IBM’s Federal Systems weapons-manufacturing subsidiary, LTV’s Missile Division, Ford Aerospace, Goodyear Aerospace and the Electron-Optical weapons-manufacturing subsidiary of Honeywell.
Before apparently divesting Loral Corporation’s weapons manufacturing operations in the late 1990s, New School Trustee Schwartz and another Loral Corporation director , Thomas Stanton Jr., also apparently sat in the 1980s on the corporate board of Reliance Group Holdings/Telemundo, when it was the parent company of a Spanish-language television station in the New York City metropolitan area, WNJU-TV/Channel 47 in the 1980s.
(Downtown 3/2/94)
New School Trustee Schwartz has also apparently been using the wealth he obtained from producing weapons to bankroll the campaigns of a lot of U.S. politicians. Between 2000 and 2008, for example, New School Trustee Schwartz contributed over $3.5 million to the campaign chests of various U.S. politicians—although New School University is a “tax-exempt” institution that is supposed to be prohibited from engaging in partisan political politics.
For more information about New School University Trustee Bernard Schwartz’s historic corporate connections and historic links to the U.S. war machine, you can check out the following link:
http://www.loral.com/company/leadership/bernard-schwartz.shtml
Thanks for doing this!
ReplyDeleteI was reading the "Who Rules Columbia" pamphlet a few days ago and was thinking about parallels to my own (former?) school.
Millard is a big deal, but Schwartz built Loral from the ground up. And there would be no L3 without Loral - all the units from Lockheed that were spun off to form it were bought just one year earlier from Loral.
I confronted this asshole at a Schwartz Center talk (yeah, he has an institute named after him) about what he'd created last year. He's about a thousand years old, so he pretended not to hear me at first, but finally he said "I'm against this war, and I was against the last. I was just doing my duty, helping to make my country strong." I actually felt sorry for him; he looked terrified (I'm pretty small even by New School standards, I asked him about politely and was wearing a suit). I hope he can't sleep at night...
Hope to add more parts to "Who Rules New School?" article over next few months. Great that you confronted New School Trustee Schwartz last year over his historical and moral responsibility for helping to provide the U.S. War Machine with the high-technology weapons it needs to wage permanent war in the 21st-century.
ReplyDeleteThere's also the following interesting reference to New School Trustee Schwartz in Charle Lewis and the Center for Public Integrity's book "The Buying Of The President 2000":
"Almost as soon as Clinton and Gore took office in January 1993, the Chinese and U.S. corporations doing business in China began lobbying intensely to `educate' the new administration to look beyond the country's poor human-rights record. In the 1992 election, dozens of U.S. companies active in China had given millions of dollars to the Democratic Party. By May 1993 the President reversed his campaign posture and awarded Chima most-favored nation trade status...
"One of the most aggressive of those companies was Loral Space and Communications Ltd., which manufactures satellites and is headed by Bernard Schwartz. Loral and Schwartz have contributed at least $1.9 million to the Democratic Party since 1991 and are No. 7 on the Center's `Top 50 Patrons' list of soft-money donors.
"In 1994, Schwartz was awarded one of the coveted seats on the late Commerce Secretary Ronald Brown's trade mission to China. Brown helped Loral seal a multimillion-dollar mobile telephone satellite network deal in Beijing. Schwartz was understandably pleased, and a few weeks later White House Deputy Chief of Staff Harold Ickes wrote in a memo to the President that Schwartz `is prepared to do anything he can for the Administration.' And he did. In the 1995-96 election cycle, Loral and Schwartz gave the Democratic party more than $600,000, making Schwartz the largest single individual donor to the party that year...
"...No one can plausibly suggest--although the President, his aides, and Loral have vainly tried--that Schwartz and his satellite company did not get special consideration because of the cash.
"`I have never spoken to the President of the United States about my interest in this part of our business,' Schwartz told the Center. `I think it would be an abuse of the friendship.' He stressed that he has been a loyal, active Democrat since the 1950s and has never given money with a notion toward getting something back. `I'm feisty about this,' he said. `You know, I don't think it's any of your goddamned business. I am answering these things somewhat reluctantly because it really is none of your business whom I vote for and whom I give money to. I was chairman of a company that had 35,000 employees in the United States, representing one of the most significant industries in America. I could have access to anybody I wanted...'"