Macy's parade-washing Toys R Us, as if those of us old enough to pay for kids' toys don't remember that the real Toys R Us was more than just a Macy's toy section. #MacysThanksgivingParade#ToysRUs
If end-stage capitalism has a motto, it's this: "Stop hitting yourself." The great failure of "voting with your wallet" is that you're casting ballots in a one party system (The Capitalism Party), and the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes.
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Aramark used funds from a custodian's union to bid against that union's members for contracts, in an attempt to break the union and force the workers to take a paycut to $11/hour:
Last Nov, publishing got excellent news: the planned merger of #PenguinRandomHouse (the largest publisher in the history of human civilization) with its immediate competitor #SimonAndSchuster would not be permitted, thanks to the #FTC's deftly argued case against the deal:
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Most spectacularly, they are known for buying and destroying #ToysRUs in a deal that saw them extract $200m from the company, leaving it bankrupt, with lifetime employees getting $0 in severance even as its executives paid themselves tens of millions in "performance bonuses":
The pillaging of Toys R Us isn't the worst thing KKR did, but it was the most brazen. KKR lit a beloved national chain on fire and then walked away, hands in pockets, whistling.
#PrivateEquity is quite a racket. #PE managers pile up other peoples' money - pension funds, plutes, other pools of money - and then "invest" it (buying businesses, loading them with debt, cutting wages, lowering quality and setting traps for customers). For this, they get an annual fee - 2% - of the money they manage, and a bonus for any profits they make.
Private equity is a cancer. Its profits come from buying productive firms, loading them with debt, abusing their suppliers, workers and customers, and driving them into ground, stiffing all of them - and the company's creditors. The #mafia have a name for this. They call it a "#BustOut":