In 2019, I interrupted private equity emperor Stephen Schwarzman as he addressed several hundred of his and my Yale classmates at our 50th-year reunion dinner under a great white tent on the college's Old Campus.

"That's enough, Steve, You've dispossessed tens of thousands of Americans out of their homes," I announced in my stentorian, second-bass Yale Glee Club voice, rising from a seat at a table not far from the dais, where Schwarzman was holding forth self- indulgently about a donation he'd made.

"Well, it looks like someone has had a few too many," Schwarzman responded — somewhat lamely, I thought. But more than half of my classmates in the room leapt to their feet and applauded him as I turned my back to them and sauntered out into the night.

An hour later, I returned and learned that more than a few classmates had felt as I did but hadn't done much more than squirm.

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They knew that Schwarzman and another Yale alumnus, Steve Mnuchin, the future treasury secretary, had indeed foreclosed on properties whose residents had been hoodwinked into over-leveraging their purchases in ways that doomed their ownership, as I recounted in the New Republic a few months after confronting him.

After my outburst that evening, our class website carried a frank discussion of the incident. Schwarzman didn't join in; I’d been criticizing his premises and practices since 2017 in the Washington Monthly, Dissent and other venues, and I criticized him with renewed purpose days after the........

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