“Expecting to extract what they can from the investments over only a few years, the pirates [private equity] don’t care about the long-term impact these operations will have. By the time of any reckoning, they plan to have taken their profits and left the scene.”
Excerpt From
These Are the Plunderers
Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner
In municipalities where public water systems went private: “A 2021 report by the Association of Environmental Authorities, a public utility nonprofit, said the average annual bill for privately owned water systems in the U.S. was 60 percent higher than that of publicly owned systems: $501 versus $315. And in privatized arrangements, low-income households spent 1.55 percent more of their income on water than they did if they were in a public utility’s area.”
“The crisis of corporatization has really reached a peak in emergency medicine.[..] During the pandemic, we had doctors getting pay cuts from these corporate entities and denying physicians due process, which is their right, when they spoke about patient safety. Your typical emergency physician is afraid to speak up for fear of termination.”
today,we at @fattoquotidiano run an investigation on what will happen to some of the most sensitive #data of Italian citizens,if the U.S.investment fund #KKR buys our biggest telecom #TIM.
We quote,among others,#BruceSchneier and #JacobAppelbaum (Italian):
Long before they became recently known for sucking Toys R Us dry, KKR drained what was then RJR Nabisco. Now @pluralistic explains how those vampire barbarians are at the publisher's gate:
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:
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:
So while there was no question that a PRH takeover of Simon & Schuster would be bad for writers and readers, it was also clear that S&S - and indeed, all of the Big Five publishers - would be under pressure from the monopolies in their own supply chain. What's more, it was clear that S&S couldn't remain tethered to Paramount, its current owner.
Last week, Paramount announced that it was going to flip S&S to #KKR, one of the world's most notorious #PrivateEquity companies.
Critics Rip Private Equity Firm's Deal to Buy Simon & Schuster as 'Dark Day for #Publishing'
"I guess all of corporate book publishing is beholden to investors above all else but this really makes it blatant," said one literary podcaster.
American literati recoiled in howls of articulate indignation Monday following news that multinational mass media conglomerate Paramount Global has agreed to sell venerable publishing house Simon & Schuster to #KKR"
Paramount has agreed to sell Simon & Schuster to private equity firm KKR for $1.6 billion in cash, after more than three years of trying to offload the book publishing powerhouse.
Let's review a little of KKR's track record, shall we? Most spectacularly, they are known for buying and destroying Toys R Us 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. They didn't even bother to clear their former employees' sensitive personnel records out of the unlocked filing cabinets before they scarpered:
But as flashy as the Toys R Us caper was, it wasn't the worst. Private equity funds specialize in buying up businesses, loading them with debts, paying themselves, and then leaving them to collapse. They're sometimes called vulture capitalists, but they're really vampire capitalists:
Given a choice, PE companies don't want to prey on sick businesses – they preferentially drain off value from thriving ones, preferably ones that we must use, which is why PE – and KKR in particular – loves to buy health care companies.
Heard of the "surprise billing epidemic"? That's where you go to a hospital that's covered by your insurer, only to discover – after the fact – that the emergency room is operated by a separate, PE-backed company that charges you thousands for junk fees. KKR and Blackstone invented this scam, then funneled millions into fighting the No Surprises Act, which more-or-less killed it:
KKR took one of the nation's largest healthcare providers, Envision, hostage to surprise billing, making it dependent on these fraudulent payments. When Congress finally acted to end this scam, KKR was able to take to the nation's editorial pages and damn Congress for recklessly endangering all the patients who relied on it:
I wouldn't be surprised - they have plenty of money to pay someone to keep that page clean.
I also found out after this post that they're in the active process of acquiring Simon and Schuster. Cory Doctorow (aka @pluralistic) has a great writeup on them here.
Ich habe mich gefragt warum eigentlich die Springerpresse so stark gegen Habeck und den sogenannten "Heizungshammer" schießt. Ich hätte es mir ja denken können. Follow the money to the source of the stink. (1/4)
Die Propaganda des Gas- Kohle und Öl-Netzwerks (#KKR#FDP#Springer) hat es teilweise geschafft deutsche Wahlen und Wahlumfrsgen zu beeinflussen mit Fake News über "Heizungsverbot".
Die Dringlichkeit der Energiewende ist zwar Konsens, aber keine andere Partei ausser den Grünen traut sich es wirklich anzugehen.
Springers Hauptanteilseigner KKR ist laut 'climate risks scorecard' drittgrösster Übeltäter unter Private-Equity-Investoren mit Portfolios fossiler Brennstoffen:
Paramount to sell Simon & Schuster to KKR for $1.6 Billion Cash (www.cnn.com)
Paramount has agreed to sell Simon & Schuster to private equity firm KKR for $1.6 billion in cash, after more than three years of trying to offload the book publishing powerhouse.
The Coming Enshittification of Public Libraries (open.substack.com)
Global investment vampires have positioned themselves to suck our libraries dry