Some notable reviews given (via Waterstones website) to newly-published “Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy” by investigative journalists Claire #Provost and Matt #Kennard.
Noam Chomsky: “This wide-ranging inquiry-based on intensive on-the-ground investigation-unearths 'a parallel world, outside of scrutiny...with very real consequences. An ugly world, out of control, unaccountable, but with overwhelming power. It ranges from investor-state legal systems to intricate systems of corporate welfare that aid elites and investors. Always concealed in elaborate devices of seeming to do good. Silent Coup is a highly revealing expose of the hidden real world.”
Jayati Ghosh: “Silent Coup is a crime story: a gripping description of the murky legal, and regulatory structures and policy changes that privilege big corporations. It's a tragedy, outlining the terrible consequences for people and nature, for democracy and accountability. It's a lesson in economics, providing fascinating and important insights into the functioning of global capitalism today. But finally it's also a story of hope, about apparently powerless people resisting these trends in the struggle for better and more just futures. Don't miss this.”
Vadana Shiva: “Silent Coup is investigative journalism at its best. It shows us how corporations rule the world: suing sovereign, democratic governments in invisible courts to erode constitutions and the democratic rights they enshrine-and writing laws and treaties to privatise the earth's resources and public goods. Sovereign communities and countries are being displaced by sovereign companies and the supranational systems they have built to establish their control, creating in the process our age of corporate colonialism. The book is vital reading for all who care for human freedom, human rights and democracy.”
A Scotsman and business writer named Bertie Charles Forbes founded Forbes magazine in 1917 and was famous for epigrams on the business of life. [..] Forbes died in 1954, long before the current batch of plunderers had begun amassing their fortunes and depleting the treasure of others. But he knew their kind when he said: “The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.”
This book is really, just amazing...
By mid-2022, almost four hundred ten thousand corporate retirees were trusting Athene to provide them with a prosperous retirement. They’d been given no choice in the matter—their former companies had sold their pensions to Athene [Apollo, Leon Black] without giving them the right to object. #privateEquity#theseAreThePlunderers
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[N.E. Massachusetts Nashoba Valley Medical Center] has been owned by a for-profit company as well as a private equity firm. Private equity is worse, [A longtime nurse] said. “Even when you say something is unsafe there’s little change that comes out of it,” [the healthcare worker] said of her privateer managers…
“Private equity–backed health care has been a disaster for patients and for doctors,” said Mark Reiter, residency program director of emergency medicine at the University of Tennessee. “Many decisions are made for what’s going to maximize profits for the private equity company, rather than what is best for the patient, what is best for the community.”
“When COVID-19 hit, hospitals owned by private equity firms were among the first to cut their workers’ pay and benefits because their operations could no longer generate profits on elective surgical procedures delayed due to the pandemic.”
Excerpt From
These Are the Plunderers
Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner
“The growing sophistication of the nursing home industry has enabled some owners to leverage and direct assets in a manner that maximizes profits without meaningful accountability for nursing home quality.”
Excerpt From
These Are the Plunderers
Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner
“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.”
“A 2021 nursing home study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research [..] showed nursing homes owned by private equity firms experienced 10 % more resident deaths than occurred in facilities not owned by private equity. Some twenty thousand additional lives were lost at private equity–backed nursing homes during the years studied of 2005 to 2017..”
“Congress eased other rules for wealthy investors and investment funds. The Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 cut capital gains taxes from 28 percent to 20 percent and raised the amounts exempted from estate tax levies. The administration also made it easier for foreign private investment funds to invest in the U.S. without subjecting their profits to U.S. taxes.”
“A key goal of the Clinton administration, which took over in 1992, was removing constraints on banks established after the Great Depression of the 1930s. Robert Rubin, a former Goldman Sachs partner who was Clinton’s treasury secretary, led the charge in early 1995 to abolish Glass-Steagall, the legislation that had protected the financial system from excess risk for sixty years…
It took until 1999 for Rubin to finish the job, but after he did, he went on to earn tens of millions at Citigroup, an institution that benefitted from his activities and had to be bailed out three times by taxpayers in 2008.”
1988 RJR Nabisco $25 buyout: “Everyone knew LBOs [Leveraged Buyouts] meant deep cuts in research and every other imaginable budget, all sacrificed to pay off debt. Proponents insisted that companies forced to meet steep debt payments grew lean and mean. On one thing they all agreed: The executives who launched LBOs got filthy rich.”
These Are the Plunderers
Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner
‘Charles Tate, a founder of buyout firm Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst, noted, with clarity: “When you put too much debt on a company, it becomes dysfunctional, when a company is spending its whole time trying to meet the next interest payment, it can’t concentrate on the business.”’
These Are the Plunderers
Gretchen Morgenson & Joshua Rosner
"Why are so many doctors being forced to take out payday loans to make ends meet? Trying to answer this question led us to a giant monopoly that's been slowly plundering every part of our health care system."
It's expensive to be poor. It's ironic but true. You get charges and fees for everything. Higher interest rates. Overdraft fees. Late fees. Having only enough to buy what you need right now instead of buying in bulk. Losing your job because you can't afford to get your car fixed. Losing your car because you don't have a job. Even your mental faculties are drained, as you are forced to continually eat low-nutrition foods, "sleep" in miserable conditions, and be exposed to toxins and lack of medical treatment. The lack of liquidity wipes you out. Life really does kick you while you're down.
You can't tell someone trapped in that vicious cycle to "just" get a job or "just" make responsible decisions. Sometimes, no amount of good decision-making can stop the vortex sucking them down. So the next time you are tempted to place moral judgment on someone who lives in poverty, think twice.
Signed, someone who has been both a Have and a Have-Not.
@hosford42 This is such a great description of how our system treats those who are less fortunate. It's a trap. And there are industries that thrive on exploiting the poor. The fact I live in Los Angeles makes the car scenario particularly easy to understand. I'm retired, but how people who depend on a low paying job can afford to commute is beyond me. #PredatoryCapitalism#Poverty