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.
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
@pluralistic The US is a late-stage enshittified country. People came there to share in a booming economy, now everyone gets shafted apart from some ceos of big corporations.
The dollars we save for retirement are flushed into the stock market casino, a game that is rigged against us, where we are always the suckers at the table:
Now, anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. We are living through a broad, multi-front counter-revolution to Reaganomics and neoliberal Democratic Party sellouts.
The @FTC and @ATJDOJ are dragging Big Tech and Big Meat and Big Publishing into court. We're seeing bans on #noncompete clauses, and high-profile government enforcers are publicly pledging never to work for corporate law-firms when they quit public service:
#HotLaborSummer is now #PerpetualLaborSeptember, with 75,000 #Kaiser@UnionCoalition workers walking out alongside the @UAW, @SAGAFTRA and 2,350 other groups of workers picketing, striking or protesting:
Your union pension dollars are probably funding the union-busting, child-labor-employing, civilization-destroying Gordon Gecko LARPers who are evicting you from the rental they bought and turned into a slum, and will murder you in a #hospice that they bought and turned into a slaughterhouse:
Public service union pensions have invested $650 million with PE funds. In 2001, the share of public union pensions invested in PE was 3.5%; today, it's 13%:
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:
Then there's #KKR, one of the most rapacious predators of the PE world. Half of the investors in KKR's #GlobalInfrastructureInvestorsIV fund are public sector pension funds. Those workers' money were spent to buy up #Refresco (#ArizonaIcedTea, #Tropicana juices, etc), a transaction that immediately precipitated a huge spike in on-the-job accidents as KKR cut safety and increased tempo:
The company uses #TRAPs ("TrainingRepaymentAgreementProvision") clauses to recreate indentured servitude, forcing workers to pay thousands of dollars to quit their jobs:
Why would a Petsmart employee want to quit? Petsmart's PE owner is #BCPartners, and under BC's management, workers have been forced to work impossible hours while overseeing cruel animal abuse.
That includes starving sick animals to death rather than euthanizing them, and then being made to sneak them into dumpsters on the way home from work so Petsmart doesn't have to pay for cremation. 24 of BC Partners' backers are public pension funds, including CalSTRS and the #NYCEmployeesRetirementSystem:
But the managers of these funds defend the practice, saying they "facilitate dialog" with the PE bosses on workers' behalf.
This isn't total nonsense. Once upon a time, public pension fund managers put pressure on investees to force them to divest from #Apartheid South Africa and tobacco companies. Even today, public pensions have successfully applied leverage to get fund managers to drop Russian investments after the invasion of Ukraine.
And public pensions pulled out of the private prison sector, tanking the valuation of some of the largest players.
But there's no evidence that this leverage is being applied to pensions' PE billions. It's not like PE is a great deal for these pensions. PE funds don't reliably outperform the market, especially after PE bosses' sky-high fees are clawed back:
What's more, PE is getting worse, pioneering new scams like inflating the value of companies after they buy and strip-mine them, even though there's no reason to think anyone would buy these hollow companies at the price that the PE companies assign to them for bookkeeping purposes:
To inject a little verisimilitude into this obvious fantasy, PE companies sell their portfolio companies to themselves at inflated prices, in a patently fraudulent shell-game:
What's more, PE funds aren't just bad bosses, they're also bad landlords. PE-backed funds have scooped up an appreciable fraction of America's housing stock, transforming good rentals into slums:
As the labor movement flexes its muscle, it needs to break this connection. Workers should not be paying for the bullet that their bosses put through their skulls.
My next novel is #TheLostCause, a hopeful tale of the climate emergency. As with all my audiobooks, Amazon refuses to sell this one, so I made my own indie audiobook and I'm pre-selling it right now through #Kickstarter:
Add comment