“If anyone can refute me — show me I’m making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective — I’ll gladly change. It’s the truth I’m after, and the truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (6.21)
Private equity’s favorite shell game is to take over profitable
businesses, sell off their assets, con banks into loaning them hundreds
of millions of dollars, cash out in the form of bonuses and dividends,
then let the businesses fail and default on their debts.
The result is the retail apocalypse,
where predatory giants like Walmart and Amazon are able to topple their
vulture-capitalist-weakened prey, creating a feedback loop that
enriches the shareholder class and destroys American businesses, leaving
workers high and dry.
The (current) poster child for this con game is Toys R Us,
whose private equity owners borrowed more than $5 billion to buy the
company (with a $400 million annual debt service plan). The new owners
quickly took the company into bankruptcy, defaulting on that giant debt,
after paying themselves $200 million (including tens of millions in performance bonuses to the C-suite in the same year the company declared bankruptcy).
Now the company has announced that it will also default on all severance
payouts to the company’s 30,000 employees, including employees who
worked at the company for decades, skipping Christmas and Thanksgiving
with their families to staff the stores, now slated to get literally not
one penny.
“There is nothing in the world that is not mysterious, but the mystery is more evident in certain things than in others: in the sea, in the eyes of the elders, in the color yellow, and in music.” – Jorge Luis Borges, Atlas
The Senate will not vote on any legislation to protect U.S. elections from foreign interference, a Republican committee chair said, despite the consensus of the intelligence community that Russia will once again seek to hack election systems and manipulate American voters in 2020.
The reason, said Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) on Wednesday, is that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has decided not to bring any election security bills to the floor for a vote. […]
