Housing is the same way. Homes get bought up to extract maximum rent or turned into Airbnb units. Individuals and families get outbid so all the homes go to people wanting investment property or to corporations. Everything is about getting rich now. You’re nobody if you’re not trying to make a killing. When did this become our moral code?
I'm an attorney and dreamed of becoming one since I was 7. I knew I'd never go into private practice. I have been an attorney serving the poor at non-profits for 19 years now. During a period of unemployment, I worked for a private firm for 7 months. The pressure to bill (just to keep our lights on) was debilitating. Sure, I now earn the same as a teacher in my area doing this work (with massive student loan debt). But I never bill clients. However, no one believes an attorney (well, lots of us attorneys) earn this paltry wage. Well, that's what society has deemed is the worth of those who represent the poor. It's so very sad. (btw- I went to undergrad in central IL!)
You're are a TOTAL STUD in my book! People like you restore my faith in Humanity! THANK YOU for what you do, and keep up the stellar work! You might appreciate the YouTube channel, "Invisible People", which chronicles the true life experiences of the Homeless. There are a lot of amazing people on there! Some you might want to represent!
I wrote about hedge funds recently myself after I had to pay my vet $135 for amoxicillin for my cat, on top of the $300 I have to pay to take him into her office for an attack of gastroenteritis. I’ll be paying on that for quite a while because I also owe my eye doctor $326 for a routine eye exam. Didn’t even need a new glasses prescription. Vets used to be cheap! Are there more kittens these days because people can’t afford to get their cats neutered?
Here in Chicago we have a stellar example of the predatory nature of a hedge fund: Sears no longer exists. A company that had been around longer than I was alive vanished into smoke. All of its many warehouses have been converted into luxury flats! How can you tell? Take the architecture tour by boat along the Chicago River and the tour leader will point all of them out to you. Any building that looks like a warehouse with balconies was once a site of Sears or some other company.
It makes me sick to my stomach. Why are these bandit operations legal? We cracked down in highway robbery, why not this modern day version of it? Highwaymen are not romantic. They are thieves, villains!
I work in rescue and there are certainly a lot more dogs and cats in shelters and more in kill shelters than in the last ten years simply because people can't afford vet care, so people give them up thinking they'll get care, but instead they are killed.
I’ve seen pieces in YouTube about animals being left at the vet’s because the owners couldn’t pay the vet bill. It’s shameful. It must be really terrible to give up a sick family pet because you can’t afford to pay the bill.
Important commentary and observations, Michelle. I couldn't agree more. When I taught the 'social stratification' section of my Intro Sociology classes, it felt like an uphill battle trying to help my students see the 'larger picture' - that high prices, and reduced services were the result of larger social structural factors that are largely invisible to the average person...
I don't understand why these businesses are not made illegal. Companies should not be forced into making money for investors who hijacked their management under deceitful means and pretenses.
That, unfortunately, has a very simple answer: the hedge funds can afford lobbyists not just make sure it remains legal, but to cut their obligations to the rest of society. You might as well ask my favorite question, “Why can’t we spay and neuter MBAs fresh out of college before they can cause REAL damage?”
They are doing the same thing with residential properties but not in the obvious “buy property to rent back to people at inflated rates” kind of way, though there is some of that, but in a more secretive way. They are buying up and consolidating all the home services that we need to maintain our houses! Plumbing, electricians, HVAC, lawn care, roofers… all of the small companies are being bought out by private equity and being consolidated into large companies, where the rates are being jacked up to almost unaffordable prices. But they also own finance companies so they will finance that water heater replacement over five years… and that furnace over another five three years later and pretty soon, they “own” your home without ever having to buy it.
While Congress is looking at limiting corporations owning residential properties, they are buying up all the services on the sly.
A while ago I read an article about New Orleans describing how private equity firms bought whole blocks of houses after Katrina and the people who once lived in warm, friendly neighborhoods found themselves unable to live in their own neighborhoods anymore. These houses sit vacant a lot of the time. They are run as air b&b’s. So in a time when there are housing shortages everywhere, these homes and others like them sit vacant and/or overpriced. Another evil.
While national antics grab all the oxygen, this is where bad players are sucking up all the wealth… “oh, you’re imagining things…” no… no, we’re not. Some of us are just paying attention to what needs paying attention to. It ain’t glamorous, it’s grueling trying to track all this stuff… anyway…
Obscure but critical hedge fund buyout that is gonna hurt a lot of smaller businesses who have migrated to the cloud and away from their own servers… Broadcom bought out VMWare and immediately hacked the price up…. Almost all cloud providers that aren’t the big three (AWS, GCP and Azure) all built their cloud server management on VMWare.. it’s the same as buying your own home but the only plumbers are ones owned by hedge funds… it’s gonna squeeze and squeeze and squeeze these competitors … it’s … not good for tech… and users and … it’s just not good…
Michelle, I can't believe I missed this excellent post and great responses earlier. FYI, the newsletter BIG by Matt Stoller covers all the weird rollups and monopolies, as well as the legal action and legislation against monopolization.
In 1971, I was a grad student, and paid for pre-natal and delivery and become the sole bread winner on a TA stipend, a part time job for a couple of months and no debt, student or otherwise. (No trust fund, either.) But back then we didn’t have the world’s most profitable healthcare system.
I remember being on unemployment several times in the 1960s. I could actually pay the rent on the apartment where my husband and I lived and buy groceries without having to resort to food stamps. He made minimum wage working in a bookstore. We still had enough extra to buy the occasional ounce of pot (perhaps I shouldn’t say that—it was cheap and weak, compared to the legal stuff available in Chicago now). Also, we didn’t own a TV. We had friends instead of media.
When I was in grad school (less than a decade ago), I could barely afford groceries on the stipend. I worked a second job (definitely against the department rules) to keep myself afloat and have some financial buffer-- and that was without having to financially support anyone else!
Thank you for exposing the cruelty of private equity companies. About 6 months ago, I started reading about private equity firms. It was confusing. Was it one of those complicated economic things that I should just ignore? But the more I learned, the more angry I became. Around this time my cat became ill, needing a vet. I took the cat to a vet clinic my daughter recommended. My cat had to stay in the hospital 3 nights at $500/night!! I smelled something fishy, which stinks. I did a search. Was this clinic owned by a private equity firm? Yes! My cat is better thanks to the vets and staff who love animals. But I felt ripped off and helpless because of the private equity company ownership and management. The question now is how can we fight the private equity companies?
One thing I’m going to do is attempt to find owner-operated providers when possible. Beyond that, this is balled up with political and monetary infrastructure. Anti-trust enforcement, higher marginal tax rates and cheaper education would all help, i think. If you didn’t owe half a million to get the advanced training, you might be more able to open your own practice. It’s complicated and most of us don’t know enough about it.
I think private equity cannot be understood without considering the context of general economic decline. The production of oil--and thus of net usable energy (things like tar sands and "renewables" do not provide enough *net* energy after the energy cost of getting the energy)--peaked in 2005, and net energy is the foundation of *all* economic activity in an industrial society. After peak oil there is no growth, with no growth, there is no return on investments, with no return on investments there is no economy, no profit to be made in producing or doing anything. The indiustrial economy must always, always grow to outpace the costs of the maintenance of its own infrastructure and provide surplus value left over to fund the expansion of production. The past twenty years have seen the use of increasingly desperate measures to preserve the illusion of growth, to keep people with capital to invest thinking that there is a point to investing it. Private equity expansion is only one of many such measures. Increasingly more of the world's wealth and economic output is a giant fugazi, a simulacrum of economic activity based on turning smaller numbers into bigger numbers with nothing real actually being made or done. Things aren't really getting more expensive, everyone and everything is getting poorer while the dollar values continue to "grow" through the gradual inflation of all currency towards worthlessness.
Similar here in UK. Not quite so bad -yet. My Mum went off on her Awfully Big Adventure 9 years ago so I know it was about then that we stopped having a family doctor GP who would do call outs and knew you,your siblings,your parents,even grandparents maybe,your family and personal history,without once needing to glance at a computer screen,which they didn't have anyway. Yes,Dr Roche,Dr Hepburn,Dr Cussens,Dr Buckley,you were all great,even you Dr Adamson with your brusque "pull yourself together" vibe.
I'm an American, and I live in Italy. I have ten animals and I can afford it. On Friday, my vet came to my house to euthanize my dog and it cost €130. I know it's much much more in the USA. My dog was under multiple cancer treatments for five years, surgeries, radiation, and chemo and it didn't break the bank. I didn't have to worry treatment would bankrupt me. I rescue senior and hospice dogs. There is no way I could do this stateside. I see the vet bills from senior rescues in the states and it's appalling. So even though my earning power is much less in Italy than in thr USA, my spending power is greater. And as for human Healthcare, it isn't a for profit system. I don't have to worry my insurance is invested in funding genocide in Palestine.
THEY (no I don't know exactly who they are) are actually succeeding in turning US into consumer products and economic units. Active = good. Inactive = Useless Eater= Bad. I hear that term,the U E one actually being used these days and by "nice" politicos who obviously have NO IDEA where it originates.(Because they've been through the British Education System).
I am not an economist so this is a lay person’s version of what we should do:
Vigorously pursue anti-trust enforcement.
Raise the top marginal tax rates to 1950-ish levels.
Establish a system in which the profit is taken from healthcare. Single payer, probably.
Shore up SS. I think right now, middle-class people with 401’s are handing over a lot of money that ends up in these kinds of investments. (I’d love to hear from a real economist about this! Am I right?)
Fund all education from pre-school through college with federal money. That’s another whole topic, but I think that would change a lot, including real estate, and it would mean young people would not start out with heavy financial chains holding them back and making them feel they need to make a killing. Perhaps people would decide it’s OK to just have a life if they weren’t terrified about paying back student loans and then immediately piling up cash for retirement. We need a safety net! (See previous post on the book “Holding It Together).
You are correct about the 401k's. Blame Reagan for his absolute batshit policy agenda of moving the country's retirement strategy completely away from pensions and into.... managed portfolios of stocks, bonds, and "financial products." Yeah, you read that right. Remember when Hillary described "the big banks" as being "too big to fail" and ignorant liberal doodbros ate her lunch for it?
Yeah okay sure, except if you give one iota of a fuck what becomes of Grandpa, if you let the hedge fund that holds his 401k go under, he's going to literally lose his shirt - through no fault of his own, and his retirement home is not going to hesitate to dump him out on his ass the instant it doesn't receive its monthly check from his disbursement.
I'm not a real economist, just a former startup CEO who had to see into that world as a consequence of raising venture capital and listen - it's evil. It's beyond evil. It's the utility company knowing that turning off this old lady's power will turn off her oxygen tank, and doing it any goddamn way - for "non-payment." And this is explicitly permitted by state and local government, because Republicans. Just one example of myriad examples...
I'm not an economist either, and in my opinion most economists are so thoroughly indoctrinated in neoliberal capitalism and the theory of shareholder supremacy that they are basically useless when it comes to envisioning something new.
Some of us are promoting the idea of a new Collaborative Economy. It's made up of three movements.
1. The cooperative movement
2. The sharing economy movement
3. The change-maker movement
Here's a great Ted Talk (12 min) on the collaborative economy
I like your idea! Here in Oregon Bob Moore transferred his business, Bob’s Red Mill, to his employees through an employee stock ownership plan. That occurred in February 2010 and the company is strong, selling products at reasonable prices.
In recent years it really does feel that anyone approaching something with a pure motive, anyone who prioritizes making the world better instead of shittier, and anyone who adheres to a code of personal ethics in their day-to-day dealings is now just a sucker ready to be milked by those who have zero interest in any of those things.
Housing is the same way. Homes get bought up to extract maximum rent or turned into Airbnb units. Individuals and families get outbid so all the homes go to people wanting investment property or to corporations. Everything is about getting rich now. You’re nobody if you’re not trying to make a killing. When did this become our moral code?
Exactly this. And it's completely unsustainable. It would literally take 5 Earths to sustain this type of culture.
I am thankful to live in Cheaplandia.
I'm an attorney and dreamed of becoming one since I was 7. I knew I'd never go into private practice. I have been an attorney serving the poor at non-profits for 19 years now. During a period of unemployment, I worked for a private firm for 7 months. The pressure to bill (just to keep our lights on) was debilitating. Sure, I now earn the same as a teacher in my area doing this work (with massive student loan debt). But I never bill clients. However, no one believes an attorney (well, lots of us attorneys) earn this paltry wage. Well, that's what society has deemed is the worth of those who represent the poor. It's so very sad. (btw- I went to undergrad in central IL!)
There’s a huge difference between an attorney at a huge practice and somebody working at non-profits. Thank you for doing this.
I went to EIU. You?
IC in Jacksonville 😀
I'm from a small town not far from there.
You're are a TOTAL STUD in my book! People like you restore my faith in Humanity! THANK YOU for what you do, and keep up the stellar work! You might appreciate the YouTube channel, "Invisible People", which chronicles the true life experiences of the Homeless. There are a lot of amazing people on there! Some you might want to represent!
I wrote about hedge funds recently myself after I had to pay my vet $135 for amoxicillin for my cat, on top of the $300 I have to pay to take him into her office for an attack of gastroenteritis. I’ll be paying on that for quite a while because I also owe my eye doctor $326 for a routine eye exam. Didn’t even need a new glasses prescription. Vets used to be cheap! Are there more kittens these days because people can’t afford to get their cats neutered?
Here in Chicago we have a stellar example of the predatory nature of a hedge fund: Sears no longer exists. A company that had been around longer than I was alive vanished into smoke. All of its many warehouses have been converted into luxury flats! How can you tell? Take the architecture tour by boat along the Chicago River and the tour leader will point all of them out to you. Any building that looks like a warehouse with balconies was once a site of Sears or some other company.
It makes me sick to my stomach. Why are these bandit operations legal? We cracked down in highway robbery, why not this modern day version of it? Highwaymen are not romantic. They are thieves, villains!
I work in rescue and there are certainly a lot more dogs and cats in shelters and more in kill shelters than in the last ten years simply because people can't afford vet care, so people give them up thinking they'll get care, but instead they are killed.
That’s heartbreaking
I’ve seen pieces in YouTube about animals being left at the vet’s because the owners couldn’t pay the vet bill. It’s shameful. It must be really terrible to give up a sick family pet because you can’t afford to pay the bill.
There’s got to be a better way.
Important commentary and observations, Michelle. I couldn't agree more. When I taught the 'social stratification' section of my Intro Sociology classes, it felt like an uphill battle trying to help my students see the 'larger picture' - that high prices, and reduced services were the result of larger social structural factors that are largely invisible to the average person...
I wish they taught that in high schools! It takes many years for some to understand and clearly the majority of Americans do not.
I don't understand why these businesses are not made illegal. Companies should not be forced into making money for investors who hijacked their management under deceitful means and pretenses.
That, unfortunately, has a very simple answer: the hedge funds can afford lobbyists not just make sure it remains legal, but to cut their obligations to the rest of society. You might as well ask my favorite question, “Why can’t we spay and neuter MBAs fresh out of college before they can cause REAL damage?”
Bravísimo! You are SO funny!!
They are doing the same thing with residential properties but not in the obvious “buy property to rent back to people at inflated rates” kind of way, though there is some of that, but in a more secretive way. They are buying up and consolidating all the home services that we need to maintain our houses! Plumbing, electricians, HVAC, lawn care, roofers… all of the small companies are being bought out by private equity and being consolidated into large companies, where the rates are being jacked up to almost unaffordable prices. But they also own finance companies so they will finance that water heater replacement over five years… and that furnace over another five three years later and pretty soon, they “own” your home without ever having to buy it.
While Congress is looking at limiting corporations owning residential properties, they are buying up all the services on the sly.
A while ago I read an article about New Orleans describing how private equity firms bought whole blocks of houses after Katrina and the people who once lived in warm, friendly neighborhoods found themselves unable to live in their own neighborhoods anymore. These houses sit vacant a lot of the time. They are run as air b&b’s. So in a time when there are housing shortages everywhere, these homes and others like them sit vacant and/or overpriced. Another evil.
Not enough people know about these things -- we are all distracted by a thousand other things. THIS is what is screwing us all over, though.
While national antics grab all the oxygen, this is where bad players are sucking up all the wealth… “oh, you’re imagining things…” no… no, we’re not. Some of us are just paying attention to what needs paying attention to. It ain’t glamorous, it’s grueling trying to track all this stuff… anyway…
You're exactly right. If you ask 99 people out of 100 what is causing higher prices, they'll say it's inflation, and they'll blame greedy corporations or workers, depending on their politics. It's far more complicated than that, but the big factors are things like hedge funds, private equity and pharmacy benefit managers. I'm positive there are more things I just plain do not know about. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/21/business/prescription-drug-costs-pbm.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6U0.MymG.eTF17dRZt41O&smid=url-share
Obscure but critical hedge fund buyout that is gonna hurt a lot of smaller businesses who have migrated to the cloud and away from their own servers… Broadcom bought out VMWare and immediately hacked the price up…. Almost all cloud providers that aren’t the big three (AWS, GCP and Azure) all built their cloud server management on VMWare.. it’s the same as buying your own home but the only plumbers are ones owned by hedge funds… it’s gonna squeeze and squeeze and squeeze these competitors … it’s … not good for tech… and users and … it’s just not good…
And nobody knows a thing about it.
Michelle, I can't believe I missed this excellent post and great responses earlier. FYI, the newsletter BIG by Matt Stoller covers all the weird rollups and monopolies, as well as the legal action and legislation against monopolization.
Thank you!
In 1971, I was a grad student, and paid for pre-natal and delivery and become the sole bread winner on a TA stipend, a part time job for a couple of months and no debt, student or otherwise. (No trust fund, either.) But back then we didn’t have the world’s most profitable healthcare system.
Oh man. My uncle was a teacher in the 1960s. His district paid him to get his masters degree. The stipend supported his wife and children!
I remember being on unemployment several times in the 1960s. I could actually pay the rent on the apartment where my husband and I lived and buy groceries without having to resort to food stamps. He made minimum wage working in a bookstore. We still had enough extra to buy the occasional ounce of pot (perhaps I shouldn’t say that—it was cheap and weak, compared to the legal stuff available in Chicago now). Also, we didn’t own a TV. We had friends instead of media.
Good times, in retrospect
They were.
When I was in grad school (less than a decade ago), I could barely afford groceries on the stipend. I worked a second job (definitely against the department rules) to keep myself afloat and have some financial buffer-- and that was without having to financially support anyone else!
You definitely know what I mean, then.
Thank you for exposing the cruelty of private equity companies. About 6 months ago, I started reading about private equity firms. It was confusing. Was it one of those complicated economic things that I should just ignore? But the more I learned, the more angry I became. Around this time my cat became ill, needing a vet. I took the cat to a vet clinic my daughter recommended. My cat had to stay in the hospital 3 nights at $500/night!! I smelled something fishy, which stinks. I did a search. Was this clinic owned by a private equity firm? Yes! My cat is better thanks to the vets and staff who love animals. But I felt ripped off and helpless because of the private equity company ownership and management. The question now is how can we fight the private equity companies?
One thing I’m going to do is attempt to find owner-operated providers when possible. Beyond that, this is balled up with political and monetary infrastructure. Anti-trust enforcement, higher marginal tax rates and cheaper education would all help, i think. If you didn’t owe half a million to get the advanced training, you might be more able to open your own practice. It’s complicated and most of us don’t know enough about it.
I think private equity cannot be understood without considering the context of general economic decline. The production of oil--and thus of net usable energy (things like tar sands and "renewables" do not provide enough *net* energy after the energy cost of getting the energy)--peaked in 2005, and net energy is the foundation of *all* economic activity in an industrial society. After peak oil there is no growth, with no growth, there is no return on investments, with no return on investments there is no economy, no profit to be made in producing or doing anything. The indiustrial economy must always, always grow to outpace the costs of the maintenance of its own infrastructure and provide surplus value left over to fund the expansion of production. The past twenty years have seen the use of increasingly desperate measures to preserve the illusion of growth, to keep people with capital to invest thinking that there is a point to investing it. Private equity expansion is only one of many such measures. Increasingly more of the world's wealth and economic output is a giant fugazi, a simulacrum of economic activity based on turning smaller numbers into bigger numbers with nothing real actually being made or done. Things aren't really getting more expensive, everyone and everything is getting poorer while the dollar values continue to "grow" through the gradual inflation of all currency towards worthlessness.
Similar here in UK. Not quite so bad -yet. My Mum went off on her Awfully Big Adventure 9 years ago so I know it was about then that we stopped having a family doctor GP who would do call outs and knew you,your siblings,your parents,even grandparents maybe,your family and personal history,without once needing to glance at a computer screen,which they didn't have anyway. Yes,Dr Roche,Dr Hepburn,Dr Cussens,Dr Buckley,you were all great,even you Dr Adamson with your brusque "pull yourself together" vibe.
I'm an American, and I live in Italy. I have ten animals and I can afford it. On Friday, my vet came to my house to euthanize my dog and it cost €130. I know it's much much more in the USA. My dog was under multiple cancer treatments for five years, surgeries, radiation, and chemo and it didn't break the bank. I didn't have to worry treatment would bankrupt me. I rescue senior and hospice dogs. There is no way I could do this stateside. I see the vet bills from senior rescues in the states and it's appalling. So even though my earning power is much less in Italy than in thr USA, my spending power is greater. And as for human Healthcare, it isn't a for profit system. I don't have to worry my insurance is invested in funding genocide in Palestine.
Hedge funds are evil and must be taxed out of existence worldwide!
Just jail them. On what pretext? You're Ugly!
“I feel like a product being hustled down the assembly line as quickly as possible.” Such a good line. That’s exactly the feeling!
THEY (no I don't know exactly who they are) are actually succeeding in turning US into consumer products and economic units. Active = good. Inactive = Useless Eater= Bad. I hear that term,the U E one actually being used these days and by "nice" politicos who obviously have NO IDEA where it originates.(Because they've been through the British Education System).
Excellent article. This is a perfect example of the impacts of Economic Extractionism.
Any thoughts about how worker and nonprofit cooperatives might replace or at least provide an alternative to this parasitic system?
I am not an economist so this is a lay person’s version of what we should do:
Vigorously pursue anti-trust enforcement.
Raise the top marginal tax rates to 1950-ish levels.
Establish a system in which the profit is taken from healthcare. Single payer, probably.
Shore up SS. I think right now, middle-class people with 401’s are handing over a lot of money that ends up in these kinds of investments. (I’d love to hear from a real economist about this! Am I right?)
Fund all education from pre-school through college with federal money. That’s another whole topic, but I think that would change a lot, including real estate, and it would mean young people would not start out with heavy financial chains holding them back and making them feel they need to make a killing. Perhaps people would decide it’s OK to just have a life if they weren’t terrified about paying back student loans and then immediately piling up cash for retirement. We need a safety net! (See previous post on the book “Holding It Together).
You are correct about the 401k's. Blame Reagan for his absolute batshit policy agenda of moving the country's retirement strategy completely away from pensions and into.... managed portfolios of stocks, bonds, and "financial products." Yeah, you read that right. Remember when Hillary described "the big banks" as being "too big to fail" and ignorant liberal doodbros ate her lunch for it?
Yeah okay sure, except if you give one iota of a fuck what becomes of Grandpa, if you let the hedge fund that holds his 401k go under, he's going to literally lose his shirt - through no fault of his own, and his retirement home is not going to hesitate to dump him out on his ass the instant it doesn't receive its monthly check from his disbursement.
I'm not a real economist, just a former startup CEO who had to see into that world as a consequence of raising venture capital and listen - it's evil. It's beyond evil. It's the utility company knowing that turning off this old lady's power will turn off her oxygen tank, and doing it any goddamn way - for "non-payment." And this is explicitly permitted by state and local government, because Republicans. Just one example of myriad examples...
All excellent ideas! Agreed.
I'm not an economist either, and in my opinion most economists are so thoroughly indoctrinated in neoliberal capitalism and the theory of shareholder supremacy that they are basically useless when it comes to envisioning something new.
Some of us are promoting the idea of a new Collaborative Economy. It's made up of three movements.
1. The cooperative movement
2. The sharing economy movement
3. The change-maker movement
Here's a great Ted Talk (12 min) on the collaborative economy
https://youtu.be/ya6zndBObHY?si=ArSMp4EXl6Cv1pQm
I like your idea! Here in Oregon Bob Moore transferred his business, Bob’s Red Mill, to his employees through an employee stock ownership plan. That occurred in February 2010 and the company is strong, selling products at reasonable prices.
That business structure is typically called a co-op. ;)
This is such a scourge on civilization.
In recent years it really does feel that anyone approaching something with a pure motive, anyone who prioritizes making the world better instead of shittier, and anyone who adheres to a code of personal ethics in their day-to-day dealings is now just a sucker ready to be milked by those who have zero interest in any of those things.
This is 100 percent true.