Elizabeth Warren HQ: She's Got A Plan!

[Secure Da Bag]

not all items are equal though so just saying 15 items isn't telling the whole story. before 2020 would those 15 items have cost $200? doesn't sound like essentials either, greedflation only works if we keep getting gouged on non-essentials and paying it like we don't have a choice.

if you're telling that food, water, and toilet paper are non-essentials, then you got it, breh

 

[88m3]

she gave a great speech in Washington Square park I got to attend

I wish she was more vocal right now


the left treated her despicably during the primary, she would've been an excellent president

 

[hashmander]

if you're telling that food, water, and toilet paper are non-essentials, then you got it, breh

breh i shop at costco and for 15 essential items to cost that much it would have to be 15 of the charmin 30 mega roll packs.

and again not all food is equal. there are different grades of beef, salmon, etc. i'm just saying that those 15 items didn't jump from $100 to $350. they were always expensive items. everyone has seen food increases. what use to cost me $200 now costs me $250.

 

[AquaCityBoy]

https://archive.is/e0lXX

I'm old enough to remember when the corporate media and boot licking c00ns on the coli tried to act like inflation had nothing to do with price gouging at all.

 

[the cac mamba]

embarrassing

 

[winb83]

embarrassing

A sandwich shop monopoly? That sounds laughable. Jersey Mike's better than all of those places anyway.

 

[bnew]

A sandwich shop monopoly? That sounds laughable. Jersey Mike's better than all of those places anyway.

How Private Equity has Pillaged America and How we can take it Back.

I heard this guy on The Daily Zeitgeist podcast a few weeks ago and was fascinated by this: Listen: iHeartRadio Unsupported Country Article: Private Equity is Out of Control and Looting America. This Prosecutor Says We Can Fix It. One of my favorite NYC restaurants had become understaffed...

www.thecoli.com

I heard this guy on The Daily Zeitgeist podcast a few weeks ago and was fascinated by this:

Listen: iHeartRadio Unsupported Country


Article: Private Equity is Out of Control and Looting America. This Prosecutor Says We Can Fix It.

One of my favorite NYC restaurants had become understaffed and dirty – a shadow of its former self. I learned an interesting fact: a couple of years ago, a private equity firm had bought the local chain. The same type of firm that had already ruined my beloved neighborhood grocer. The kind that was rapidly taking over vet clinics, dental offices, and gyms on every block – though you wouldn’t know it unless you did some sleuthing.

Price hikes, deteriorating conditions, and poor service — along with a certain slickness of marketing — could be signs that ownership of a business you count on has transferred to one or more firms in a rapidly-expanding Wall Street industry. Names like KKR, Carlyle, and Blackstone tend to fly under the radar, but they’re everywhere, making more money, gaining more influence, and some would argue, wreaking more havoc than anything else on Wall Street.

Federal prosecutor Brendan Ballou provides the scrutiny that an industry with this much economic and political power should invite in his provocative new book, “Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan To Pillage America.” He reveals how private equity will transform our lives over the next decade in ways as profound as Big Tech did in the last, and not for the better unless we change how it does business.

Financier William Simon got the idea for private equity back in the seventies. Simon, a Nixon administration official and right-winger whose heart’s desire was to free finance and corporations from regulation, left Washington to execute the first “leveraged buyout.” He and a partner bought an old greeting card company on mostly borrowed funds, extracted huge fees, and then sold it for enormous profit in a rising market. People like “junk bond king” Michael Milken took notice and started following the model. In the go-go eighties, the Washington Post noted that “greed and debt” had combined to “create the hottest game on Wall Street today.”

Until things went bust. The leveraged buyout industry got a nasty reputation as the “robber barons of the eighties” and retreated.

But there was just too much money to be made. The industry went on to rebrand itself as “private equity” and expanded following the 2008 financial crisis into many of the less regulated corners of finance – some previously occupied by the great investment banks. After yet another run of bad press – you might recall when Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital was denounced as a profiteering predator in the 2012 election — the industry started to rebrand itself once again. Today some of the big firms call themselves “global investment businesses” or “alternative asset management businesses.”

Ballou warns that whatever you call them, many have become incentivized to do great harm to consumers, workers, and taxpayers– and they’re doing it with the help of lavishly-funded political allies.

Advocates say private equity makes companies more efficient when they buy them, but Ballou finds that their real specialty isn’t managing companies – they often screw that up, big-time – but finding legal and regulatory holes that allow them to make profits quickly and shift the risks and costs to somebody else – somebody like you. He criticizes the current business model as far too focused on short-termism and extractive practices.

But, you might ask, isn’t this just capitalism? Nobody said it was pretty.

According to Ballou, this is something different – an industry that has metastasized into a job-killing, business-destroying, community-crushing machine the likes of which we haven’t seen since the money trusts of the nineteenth century. In other words, it’s predatory capitalism on steroids. Most worrisome of all, in Ballou’s view, is the fact that these firms have almost no accountability to the U.S. legal system.

Some liken private equity firms to vultures picking the bones of dying companies, which you could argue is a necessary activity. But Ballou points out that many private equity firms now target healthy companies, leaving them gutted, unproductive, or even bankrupt. Whether it’s Bain, Apollo, or Sun Capital, each firm has its preferred tactics for extracting money from the businesses they buy up, too often hurting the most vulnerable people, like nursing home residents, who can’t fight back. When they buy up rental properties, watch out for evictions. When they target doctors’ offices, expect to pay more for care. They might even be cutting corners at your hospital’s emergency room (the horror stories will make you research your local ER). And they really, really want to get their hands on your 401 (k).

The founders of these companies have become absurdly rich – we’re talking multi-multi-billionaires — so their power in American politics is tremendous. Not only do they influence the political system — increasingly, they are the political system. Just ask men like Timothy Geithner, Newt Gingrich, Paul Ryan, and David Petraeus, all now working in private equity. It’s more than a revolving door between Washington and Wall Street. As Forbes magazine highlights, it’s a “passionate love affair.”

Free from pesky regulations and out of reach of the law, the private equity industry has become so wildly profitable that celebrities like Will Smith and sports stars like Serena Williams are tripping over each other to get in on the action. Last year, Kim Kardashian announced a partnership with a former Carlyle partner to start her own private equity firm!

This trillion-dollar industry owns companies employing millions of Americans, and, Ballou argues, it is hurting us with the active assistance of our government. In the following interview, the prosecutor shares with the Institute for New Economic Thinking his insights and prescriptions for getting this industry under control. (Ballou’s book, and this interview, are made in his personal capacity and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Department of Justice).

---

Lynn Parramore: Private equity is something of a mystery to most people. What do we need to understand about these firms and what they’re up to?

Brendan Ballou: “Private equity” is a term that people might be embarrassed to say they don’t really have a clear idea about. I confess that I didn’t until after I started writing the book.

The basic business model is actually very simple. A private equity firm uses a little bit of its own money, a little bit of investors’ money, and a whole lot of borrowed money to buy companies. Then it tries to impose operational or financial changes with the ambition of selling them for a profit a few years later.

It’s a simple idea but it has three basic problems. One is that private equity firms tend to invest in the short term to get a return on their investment in just a few years. The second is that they tend to load up the companies that they buy with a lot of debt and extract a lot of fees from them. The third is that private equity firms tend not to be held legally responsible for the actions of their portfolio companies.

All this means you’re on a very short timeline with a very risky leverage model and you’re not necessarily going to be held responsible if things go bad, leading to business strategies that can be very extractive and hurt consumers and employees.

LP: This industry, known as “leveraged buyouts” in the eighties, got a negative image and retreated for a while. After rebranding, the model re-emerged as “private equity,” which took off and expanded into whole new areas after the 2008 financial crisis. Why should be concerned about this expansion?

BB: Private equity firms are increasingly taking on the role that the great investment banks used to have before the crisis. For instance, they have moved into private credit, which is an alternative to the public stock market. A company can get a large loan without necessarily making the sort of disclosures that you would have on the public capital market.

The challenge is that private equity firms are vastly less regulated than investment banks, which are generally considered either banks or bank holding companies. What this means is that private equity firms are doing a lot of the work that these companies did prior to the financial crisis. but they’re doing it with even less oversight.

LP: That doesn’t sound good.

BB: It’s concerning. One of the really interesting things to see is how private equity firms often don’t even describe themselves as private equity firms anymore.

 

[Geek Nasty]

It's crazy how these companies just take wild risk with money and the moment it doesn't go their way government bailout. If there aren't any consequences why not take those risk. You'd be stupid not to as there isn't really a downside.

I've been watching some economist interviews on youtube, they use the phrase "ending the Fed Put" meaning Chairman Powell is trying to end the policy of bailing out Wall Street every time shyt goes south. Keeping interest rates high is a part of that. It's counter-intuitive but it's better for working class people in the long run if rates are higher. It's already possible to save at a reasonable amount now without stocks.

 

[the cac mamba]

I've been watching some economist interviews on youtube, they use the phrase "ending the Fed Put" meaning Chairman Powell is trying to end the policy of bailing out Wall Street every time shyt goes south. Keeping interest rates high is a part of that. It's counter-intuitive but it's better for working class people in the long run if rates are higher. It's already possible to save at a reasonable amount now without stocks.

bank's paying me 5 percent interest. it's paying my mortgage every month i said fukk stocks, im all cash for now until the next crash

 

[Hood Critic]

A sandwich shop monopoly? That sounds laughable. Jersey Mike's better than all of those places anyway.

That's cap

 

[winb83]

That's cap

You think Subway and Jimmy John's are better than Jersey Mike's? Subway is trash and Jimmy John's is solid.

 

[Hood Critic]

You think Subway and Jimmy John's are better than Jersey Mike's? Subway is trash and Jimmy John's is solid.

I think McAlister's is better than all of them and I'd put Jimmy Johns at last place.

 

[bnew]

Senator Warren calls out Apple for shutting down Beeper's 'iMessage to Android' solution | TechCrunch

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is throwing her weight behind Beeper, the app that allowed Android users to message iPhone users via iMessage,

techcrunch.com

Senator Warren calls out Apple for shutting down Beeper’s ‘iMessage to Android’ solution​

Sarah Perez@sarahpereztc / 5:49 PM EST•December 10, 2023

Image Credits: Beeper

U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) is throwing her weight behind Beeper, the app that allowed Android users to message iPhone users via iMessage, until Apple shut it down. Warren, an advocate for stricter antitrust enforcement, postedher support for Beeper on X (formerly Twitter) and questioned why Apple would restrict a competitor. The post indicates Apple’s move has now caught the attention of legislators, who are in a position to regulate Big Tech through policymaking.

“Green bubble texts are less secure. So why would Apple block a new app allowing Android users to chat with iPhone users on iMessage?,” Warren’s post read, citing The Verge’s report noting that Apple had blocked Beeper from operating, as TechCrunch also reported. “Big Tech executives are protecting profits by squashing competitors. Chatting between different platforms should be easy and secure,” she said.



Apple on Friday had taken action against Beeper, a startup that had reverse engineered the iMessage protocol to allow Android users to have blue bubble conversations with Apple device owners on iMessage.

In explaining its decision to cut off Beeper’s access to its servers, Apple said that it took “steps to steps to protect our users by blocking techniques that exploit fake credentials in order to gain access to iMessage.” It also suggested that Beeper’s techniques “posed significant risks to user security and privacy, including the potential for metadata exposure and enabling unwanted messages, spam, and phishing attacks.”

In addition, Cupertino-based tech giant argued against Beeper’s security, saying it was not able to verify that messages sent through unauthorized means were able to maintain the end-to-end encryption iMessage offers.

Beeper, however, claims it was able to offer the same level of encryption as iMessage uses, but did not put its app through a third-party security audit prior to its launch, which would have strengthened its argument.

Over the weekend, Beeper’s team has been working to enable its app, Beeper Mini, to continue to operate. As of its most recent update on Sunday, the startup posted that work continues on the outage and it hopes to “have good news to share soon.”



Founded a few years ago by Pebble smartwatch founder, now Beeper CEO Eric Migicovsky, Beeper had employed a technical solution discovered by a teenager that involved reverse engineering the iMessage protocol. Prior to this, Beeper had been developing a broader solution that aggregated all users’ chat apps into a single interface — a software solution that’s since been renamed Beeper Cloud. Beeper Mini, then, became an app that focused solely on bringing iMessage to Android for $1.99/month, with the intention of expanding its capabilities over time.

But before Beeper Mini had a chance to get off the ground, Apple put it out of operation. It’s unclear what, if any, future Beeper Mini may now have, given that Apple has figured out how to identify Beeper users.

 

[the cac mamba]

 

[Geek Nasty]

Goddamn I’m glad I’m not on social media, I’d say something to get cancelled