See also the opiate crisis, which only officially became that once white communities in the “Heartland” started getting ravaged. Before then, not such a crisis.
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What do you do, Edward? 'Cause I know you’re not a lawyer.
That’s right.
There are four other chairs here.
Oh.
So what do you do?
I buy companies.
What kind of companies?
Uh, I buy companies that are in financial difficulty.
If they have problems, you must get 'em for a bargain, huh?
Well, the company I’m buying this week, I’m getting for the bargain price of about one billion.
A billion dollars?
Yes.
Wow. You must be really smart, huh? I only got through the eleventh grade. How far did you go in school ?
I went all the way.
Your folks must be really proud, huh ?
So you don’t actually have a billion dollars, huh ?No, I get some of it from banks, investors.
It’s not an easy thing to do.
And you don’t make anything and you don’t build anything.
No. No.
So what do you do with the companies once you buy them ?
I sell them.
Here, let me do that. You sell them.
Well, l… don’t sell the whole company; I break it up into pieces…
and then I sell that off; it’s worth more than the whole.So it’s sort of like, um, stealing cars and selling 'em for the parts, right ?
Yeah, sort of. But legal.
Worked as a pop culture joke in a 1990 blockbuster romcom
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Maybe that’s where I went wrong, by following the alternate philosophy…
Lloyd Dobler: I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.
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It’s not like we don’t all now how to fix this problem… pay workers more. It’s just that the people we hired to represent our best interests simply can’t be bothered to represent our best interests.
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Payless Shoes. Sears (with extra shadiness!). Most big companies that go under now aren’t from lack of popularity or ability to be profitable. They’re deliberately run into the ground.
It’s also a major problem in rental housing.
Gibson was right. The superrich (a.k.a. the guys that can afford to play in this arena) are no longer of the same species as the rest of us.
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Well, not necessarily deliberately; as I understand it, there’s a lot of entitled stupidity and fact-free ideology involved too. But the end result is the same, of course.
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I’d say negligently run into the ground. It’s not like it’s in the interest of the people who take over that the company fail, it’s just in their interest to strip the company so bare of assets. If it somehow doesn’t fail after that, that’s probably a win for the investors too.
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Check out the transition plans that are part-and-parcel of the business model of the investment capital firms.
- Acquire company using mostly other people’s money
- Squeeze cash out of said company to the very edge of failure
a. Note that this includes laying off boatloads of people and/or decreasing pay of those left
b. This also includes raiding pensions/defaulting on bonus terms & retirement matching - Pay ourselves and our friends with said cash.
- Allow company to slide into failure, while throwing hands up, “We tried!”
- Form new investment partnership, buy up assets of company on the cheap, bundle & sell at profit.
If that’s not deliberate, then what is?
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Americans have been too poor to survive for most of my life and I turn 50 next year. Where have you been?
<insert obligatory Clint Eastwood “Get off my lawn” GIF here>
no. i don’t think that’s right. that implies a market based capitalist solution.
my personal take is that we need to curb big money through higher taxes, we need to break big companies into smaller less efficient ones, we need to rein in things like predatory lending, and we need to divert existing expenditures from the military, from corporate subsidizes, and instead invest our pooled money into healthcare, green infrastructure, education, public transportation, and affordable housing.
it’s not that people earn too little. it’s that the privatization and monetization of everything under the sun has raised the cost of living sky high.
we can improve the quality of people’s lives without raising pay. and i believe focusing on income is almost guaranteed to further increase our collective pain.
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The irony being that that is at this point largely a jobs program.
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So very we live in first nations so many would fail for a 400 unexpected bill
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Sometimes, even less.
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