On August 26th, 2022, Abington Senior High School held a ceremony honoring the new Stephen Schwarzman Center for Science and Technology. The school district invited Abington alumni Stephen Schwarzman among others to visit the school. At the event were principals, school board members, students, and district employees there to welcome Schwarzman. Just outside the rest of them were two students, myself and Cloude, there to protest against Schwarzman’s arrival. My sign read “SCHWARZMAN PLANET KILLER”, and I received several questions asking why I would protest and how I think someone who gave the school $25 million could be a bad person.

Here is my response to those questions:

Stephen Schwarzman is a billionaire. He heads a firm called the Blackstone Group which is, according to them, worth $941 billion and deals in private equity, real estate, hedge funds, and credit (Blackstone). 

In 2019, during the Amazon rainforest fire, 3,500 square miles of forest were scorched from the earth (CBS). To put that into perspective, 3,500 square miles is about the size of Puerto Rico. The Blackstone Group is partially responsible for this due to their major stake in a company called “Hidrovias do Brazil” as well as their deforestation practices (Helmore).

BR-163 is a highway which goes through the Amazon rainforest and required some deforestation to modernize it. This contributed to the forest fire, leading to the Blackstone Group receiving criticism for involvement due to their stake in Hidrovias. In response to the criticism, they claimed “Hidrovias does not own, control or have any interest — direct or indirect — in the road in question (BR-163). This road has been operated by the Brazilian government since 1976. The company did not build this highway, nor are they paving it,” (Helmore). However, that statement is totally false because in Hirdovias’s 2018 earnings release, they include a section about BR-163 and talk about its “adverse” condition which caused Hirdovias to organize a study to determine how to “solve the problems faced by truckers and our customers” (Earnings). Paying for a study regarding the highway and solving problems faced by their customers shows that not only do they have some interest, but rather major interest. 

Now let’s take a look at Stephen Schwarzman’s money. The $25 million donation to Abington was quite the controversy in it of itself, which I won’t fully unpack here. According to Forbes, today, Stephen Schwarzman is worth $26.8 Billion (Forbes). To put that into perspective of how little that $25 million is to him, that is 0.09% of his net worth, or about 39 bucks to the average PA resident.

Schwarzman’s monetary donations, in the world’s largest plot twist, does not in fact all go to the education of Abington students. Stephen Schwarzman has been very active as a donor for the Republican Party, even landing himself a role in the Trump administration briefly as a domestic policy advisor (Nocera). Stephen Schwarzman has donated over $42 million to political campaigns nationwide in just this election cycle, in fact, on March 8th of this year, he donated $20 million to the Congressional Leadership Fund and $20 million more to the Senate Leadership Fund, both of which are specifically created to back Republican candidates running for office. In 2020, he donated $25 million to the Senate Leadership Fund (Open Secrets). Should someone with a greater investment in politics than our education wield such high honor by our school district? 

I’m sure most people in Abington have no idea who Stephen Schwarzman is. The Blackstone Group is likely an unknown name, and the Amazon rainforest fire is probably forgotten by most. The only thing we can do is learn about the man whose name is plastered on the walls.

Sources:

Blackstone Group: https://www.blackstone.com/the-firm/

CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-wildfires-brazil-spurns-20-million-aid-offer-from-g-7-nations-today-2019-08-27/

Earnings Release: https://s3.amazonaws.com/mz-filemanager/fae228ac-7a8d-42c0-b5f0-f59e1f66a99d/5154383b-2154-47d6-a7a2-4d0c21000f0f_Earnings%20Release%204Q18%20-%20English%20vIR.pdf

Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/profile/stephen-schwarzman/?sh=5d76a2a4234a

Helmore: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/sep/01/oatly-vegan-milk-sale-blackstone

Nocera: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-02-08/steve-schwarzman-explains-why-he-counsels-trump

Open Secrets: https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?cand=&cycle=&employ=&name=Stephen+Schwarzman&order=desc&sort=A&state=&zip=