On this day, 27 March 1942, France’s Vichy government issued the barbershop decree, demanding that barbers collect cut hair and donate it to the war effort to make slippers and sweaters. The rebellious Zazous refused and grew their hair long. Zazous were anti-fascist youths who wore dapper suits, listened to jazz and swing music by largely black musicians and fought with fascists on the street. Police rounded them up, and Vichy fascist youth groups hunted them down and cut their hair. More info in our podcast episode about youth resistance to Nazism during World War II: https://ift.tt/2Jf1GkZhttps://ift.tt/2WyofqX
On this day, 27 March 1984, a previous far right attack in New Zealand occurred when a suitcase bomb exploded in the foyer of the union Trades Hall in Wellington, killing Ernie Abbott, union member and caretaker. Ernie’s beloved dog, Patches, was badly burned in the explosion but survived. The perpetrators of this anti-worker act of terrorism were never caught, despite the antiterrorism police headquarters being the building on the other side of the street. Ernie had a huge funeral service, and during it workers across the country downed tools, stopping all inter-island ferry travel. https://ift.tt/2OsQtAq
The web blew up at the same time as the Reagan/Clinton/Bush financial
bombs were detonating, leading to a huge private equity bubble in which
super-wealthy Americans used debt financing and other forms of financial
engineering to buy out successful companies, then hollowed them out, selling off their real-estate and plant, loading them up with debt, and raiding their reserve funds.
This meant that when the internet came along and started to challenge
their markets, these incumbent firms were offering inferior products and
had no money and no ability to borrow in order to pursue experiments to
adapt to the changing market. These century-old companies had weathered
many transitions in their history – the internet’s insurmountable
challenges were as much the fault of debt-loading as they were anything
inherent to the net.
A new analysis in the Financial Times found that the majority of
companies that were acquired in leveraged hedge-fund buyouts “have
either defaulted, gone bankrupt or are in distress.”
The stories of these firms are bananas: they’re taken private, then put
through IPOs, then taken private again, then thrown at the public
markets again. At each turn, the fund managers and at least
some of their investors take home giant paychecks – and the companies’
fortunes get worse and worse.
The internet was always going to challenge these businesses, but they
went up against the net having been cruelly flensed of their assets,
reserves, and will to live.
