Columbia University Provost Katznelson's Russell Sage Foundation Connection: Part 3

 

Robber Baron Jay Gould's business partner, Russell Sage: Inherited Wealth from Sage endowed Russell Sage Foundation

The former long-time Russell Sage Foundation trustee and current Columbia University provost (who failed to immediately agree to meet all of the demands of the Graduate Workers of Columbia [GWC-UAW 2110] in the 2021 strike by Columbia’s academic workers), 2019-2020 Russell Sage Foundation “Olivia Sage Scholar” Ira Katznelson, may have claimed, historically, to be a supporter of the U.S. labor movement and U.S. working-class people.

Yet the Russell Sage Foundation is named for a super-rich U.S. capitalist who, by the time of his death in 1906, had accumulated an individual fortune of between $70 million and $100 million [equal to between $2 billion and $2.9 billion in 2021 U.S. dollars], by economically exploiting U.S. railroad workers, small farmers and, U.S. taxpayers, as well as by engaging in corporate stock and bond manipulation, in partnership with 19th-century U.S. Robber Baron Jay Gould.

As Richard Boyer and Herbert Morais indicated in their Labor’s Untold Story book, by the late 1880’s, Jay Gould and Russell Sage “had owned and pillaged the Union Pacific, the Wabash, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas, the Texas-Pacific, the Western Union Telegraph Company,…and a number of shorter Eastern railroads;” and it was their “practice to gain control of ruined railroads, usually through stock manipulation…, make a pretense of profitable operation, and then sell stocks and bonds based on that pretense before getting out just as the property failed again.” According, for example to Gustavus Myers’s History of the Great American Fortunes:

“Sage testified that he himself had begun buying Union Pacific stock in 1868 or 1869. One of the railroads that Gould, Sage…and their accessories bought as individuals, and then sold to themselves as directors of the Union Pacific, was the Kansas Pacific…Its chief assets were an issue of Government bonds, and a land grant of 3 million acres in Kansas and Colorado…In the juggling exchange of stocks and bonds and the fraudulent diversion of funds, they stole…more than $20,000,000 [equal to around $431 million in 2021 U.S. dollars]…The frauds of the Union Pacific Railroad Company, under the direction of Gould, Sage…were truly gigantic.

“Millions of acres of public land were stolen outright. No less than seven million acres were sold without any patent from the Government. Coal lands of inestimable value were fraudulently seized. Millions of dollars were fraudulently shuffled from one corporation to another…

“The Texas Pacific was one of the four main lines that Gould and Sage obtained control of by their well-known methods…Another of their lines was the Wabash, composed of…68 originally separate little railroads…Within 5 years of the time they gained hold of the Wabash, Gould and Sage had obtained a great series of privilege from various States, looted the railroads of millions of dollars, and then had thrown it into bankruptcy…Each new haul gave Gould and Sage a still greater supply of resources with which to manipulate other railroads and other public utility systems into their control…”

In addition, as the Internet Accuracy project noted, Russell Sage was also “a director of several New York banks, was a founding director of the Fifth Avenue Bank of New York City, and was president of New York's Standard Gaslight Company;” and he “was one of the largest stockholders of” of the “Manhattan Elevated Railway Company, Metropolitan Elevated Railway Company” and “many others.”

Gustavus Myers’s History of the Great American Fortunes book also recalled that, after holding a government position during the 1840’s in Troy (as an alderman of the Troy Common Council, until 1848) and occupying the Renssalaer County treasurer position in Upstate New York between 1844 and 1851 (before also being elected as an Upstate New York representative in the U.S. Congress between 1853 and 1857), Russell Sage had “gathered in his first notable amount of money.” He did so by “a transaction in which as a public official he betrayed the city of Troy into selling to himself for a small sum a railroad line” which “he later, according to a prearranged plan, sold to the New York Central consolidation at a very large profit.” And “there is nothing vague or conjectural regarding this…transaction” because “the facts are inscribed” in the “public record.”

At public expense, the City of Troy had built the 21-mile-long Troy & Schenectady Railroad in the early 1840’s to connect Troy, NY to Schenectady, NY. But later, in the early 1850’s, then-Renssalaer County Treasurer Sage persuaded the Troy Common Council (of which he had recently been a member) to sell its railroad line for $50,000 [equal to around $1.7 million in 2021 U.S. dollars] down, to a company headed by Sage; who then soon “sold it for $900,000 [equal to around $30.7 million in 2021 U.S. dollars] or so to a group of capitalists forming the New York Central Railroad combination.”

And Russell Sage also gained part of his excessive wealth from being a large stockholder in the 1860’s and 1870’s of the Pacific Mail Steamship Company that “obtained by bribery” large U.S. government subsidies “for carrying the mails between San Francisco and Asia via Honolulu,” according to The History of the Great American Fortunes.

(end of part 3. To be continued). (This article was first posted on the Upper West Side Patch website).

Columbia University Provost Katznelson's Russell Sage Foundation Connection: Part 2

 

Russell Sage Foundation headquarters building at 112 East 64th Street in Manhattan

The Russell Sage Foundation, whose board of trustees Columbia Provost Katznelson chaired between 1999 and 2002, claims to be a “non-profit” institution (despite it having an endowment of over $350 million in assets). But, according to its Form 990 financial filing for 2018, between Sept. 1, 2018 and Aug. 31, 2019, the Russell Sage Foundation collected over $15.5 million in total revenues, including over $11.5 million from its net investment income; and also including over $1.3 million from a “charitable” contribution it received from U.S. Multi-Billionaire Oligarch Bill Gates’s Gates Foundation, during this same time period.

In addition, according to a financial statement that’s posted on its website, in 2020 the Russell Sage Foundation had total revenues exceeding $52.5 million. Yet “the Foundation is exempt from federal taxes,” “is classified as a private foundation” and “the Foundation is further classified as an exempt operating foundation, and is therefore exempt from federal excise taxes;” although “the Foundation is subject to income taxes…on income derived from private equity partnership investments.”

According to the same 2020 financial statement, less than $27 million, of the over $350 million that the Russell Sage Foundation endowment has invested in stocks and bonds of corporations that exploit workers and consumers around the globe, is invested in “private equity partnership investments.” But over $328 million of the Russell Sage Foundation endowment is invested in either a domestic equities fund, an international equities fund, a commingled international equities trust fund or mutual funds--which produce dividends and interest income for the foundation, yet is apparently not subject to federal income or federal excise taxes.

So, for example, the “philanthropic” Columbia University-linked Russell Sage Foundation paid its president, Sheldon Danziger, a total annual compensation of between $594,000 and $623,000, and gave him an expense account of over $84,000, between Sept. 1, 2018 and Aug. 31, 2019; and, during the same period, it paid over $686,000 to firms like BlackRock and Silchester International Investors for “investment management services.” Yet the main tax that the “non-profit” Russell Sage Foundation (whose headquarters building is located at 112 East 64th Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side) paid between Sept. 1, 2018 and Aug. 31, 2019 was a real estate tax of less than $30,000.

The Russell Sage Foundation, incidentally, “was started with a $10 million [equal to around $280 million in 2021]  bequest by Mrs. Sage in 1907,” as G. William Domhoff recalled in his 1970 book The Higher Circles: The Governing Class In America. But “philanthropist” Mrs. Sage was the second wife and widow of a long-time business partner of 19th-century U.S. Robber Baron Jay Gould:  Russell Sage. And, according to Gustavus Myers’s A History of the Great American Fortunes, Russell Sage “had the reputation among the knowing of being an old hand at political and financial corruption.”

 (end of part 2. To be continued.) (This article was initially posted on the Upper West Side Patch website)

Columbia University Provost Katznelson's Russell Sage Foundation Connection: Part 1

 

Russell Sage Foundation headquarters building at 112 East 64th Street in Manhattan

On March 17, 2021 the then-striking Graduate Workers of Columbia [GWC-UAW 2110] union posted an update on its website, which noted that on March 16, 2021 the “Columbia community” had “received another email from the Provost Ira Katznelson mischaracterizing our negotiations and the ongoing strike of our union;” in which “the Provost blatantly misrepresents what transpired on the eve of our strike.”

Yet, besides now being a Columbia University interim provost and Columbia administration negotiator on the Upper West Side, Katznelson is a former chair of the “philanthropic” Russell Sage Foundation board of trustees who, as recently as 2020, was also a Russell Sage Foundation “Olivia Sage Scholar.”

For 10 years—between 1992 and 2002—Columbia Provost Katznelson sat on the Russell Sage Foundation’s board of trustees; and for 3 of those 10 years—between 1999 and 2002—Columbia’s current provost was the chair of this foundation’s board of trustees.

In addition, besides also being a Russell Sage Foundation “Visiting Scholar” during the 1991-1992 academic year before he first joined the foundation’s board of trustees, Katznelson was a Russell Sage Foundation “Visiting Scholar” during the 2004-2005 academic year and a Russell Sage Foundation “Associate Scholar” during the 2009-2010 academic year—after he left the Russell Foundation board of trustees in 2003. And, according to the “philanthropic” Russell Sage Foundation’s website, its “Visiting Scholars” are currently paid with “salary support up to 50 percent of their academic year salary (up to a maximum of $125,000 for a full term.)”

Columbia University’s provost is not the only individual connected to the “non-profit” Upper West Side university (and neighborhood real estate developing institution and landlord) who, formerly or currently, has sat on the board of trustees of the “non-profit” Russell Sage Foundation, whose current assets exceed $350 million. Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Professor and Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company Trustee Nicholas Lemann, who was the Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism between 2003 and 2013, has been a foundation trustee since 2011 and is presently the vice-chair of the Russell Sage Foundation’s board of trustees.

In addition, between 2010 and 2020, a Columbia University provost between 2009 and 2011, Claude M. Steele, also sat on the Russell Sage Foundation board of trustees; and, like Columbia Provost Katznelson, is also a former chair of the same foundation’s board of trustees.

Historically, another individual connected to Columbia University for many years—former 1960’s Columbia College Dean and Columbia University Vice-President David B. Truman—also sat on the Russell Sage Foundation board of trustees from 1967 to 1981 and was the president of the Russell Sage Foundation between 1978 and 1979.

According to the Russell Sage Foundation’s Form 990 financial filing for 2018, between Sept. 1, 2018 and Aug. 31, 2019, Columbia Journalism School Professor Lemann was paid between $5,000 and $8,000 by the Russell Sage Foundation for being its board of trustees’ “vice-chair” and former Columbia Provost Steele was paid $6,500 for sitting on the same foundation’s board of trustees during that year.

And, not surprisingly, between Sept. 1, 2018 and Aug. 31, 2019, the “philanthropic” and federal tax-exempted Russell Sage Foundation gave between six and eleven tax-exempt “charitable” grants, totaling between $390,000 and $680,000, to either Columbia University or Teachers College of Columbia University, including: a grant of $75,000 to study “socioeconomic inequalities and children’s brain development;” a $34,295 grant to study “the impact of wealthy donor consortia on U.S. politics and public policy;” a grant of $86,825 to study “reclaiming lost data on American racial inequality 1865-1940;” a grant of $23,000 to study “the effect of state immigration policies on preschool enrollment of children of immigrants;” a grant of $83,651 to study “life course sociogenomic analysis of social inequalities in aging;” and a grant of $85,865 for “studying the Rikers Island Jail population.”

(end of part 1. To be continued) (This article was previously posted on the Upper West Side Patch website)

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