Private Equity Investments

The World's Rich Now Control All Our Money
I've been hearing the term "private equity investment companies" for several months now, first hearing about them in terms of one of these "companies" being able to buy the national debt of Zambia for pennies on the dollar and then bring a pay-now-or-we-own-your-asses demand on the whole country to either pay up the debt in full, now with added interest charges set by the private company (in this case a US private equity group run by an American spoiled rich brat), or they'll take them to a court (in this case these scoundrels went to a British court), get a favorable decision and leave the whole nation of Zambia in debt to this bunch of corporate thieves for the rest of their existence--I mean this private equity bunch gets control of the country's wealth this way--they even get hold of Zambian land. So I'd heard about these firms in that instance but not until this morning did I connect them to a nationwide conspiracy (yep, folks, that's what it is; look conspiracy up in the "little dic" and see what it says) to redesign the largest cities in this country to conform to the way they do it in oh so free and democratic Europe, where the center cities are populated by the country's wealthy and the suburbs and outlands are left to the poor. There are no middle classes in Europe. There's no middle-class in this country either. You either rich or you're poor in this country--I don't give a shit if you think you're rich, like the rich in my family--my brother thought he was rich enough to hang with the really rich but they wiped my brother out right off the bat--these bastards know suckers--most of the wealth my brother hung out with was mercantile wealth--Dallas, Texas, once the mercantile capital of the Southwest (Lyndon "Big Balls" Johnson when he ran for president against J.F.K. declared Texas was now more a western state than it was a southern state--yep, Mr. Come Let Us Reason Together said we wuz certainly the gateway to the Great Southwest, the first notch in the Great Sunbelt, the Sunbelt states being the radically rightwing states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern California (notice, not Northern California) because Southern California is where all the Dust Bowl refugees from Nebrasky, Kansas, Okie-homa, Arkie-sas, Lawsbanana (thanks Ray), and Tex-ass all split to when the bankers started foreclosing on their lands--some said the bankers caused the dust storms).

The world's richest woman at one time, Hettie Green, "the Witch of Wall Street," believed bankers to be total crooks and she never kept her money in banks. She put her money in stocks and bonds declaring that the true owners of this country's industries and banks were the stockholders, the shareholders, the owners of these behemoth corporations whose executives and ex-executives are running and ruining this country and trying to run the whole damn world to boot--except, shareholders don't really have much to say about what executives and boards do in terms of politics and criminal shit. Ralph Nader, I know, I know, I hate Ralph Nader, too, though I don't know why, he's absolutely right about how shareholders are the owners of these corporations yet have little control in what goes on in their operations. Now, guess what, private equity companies are buying stocks--aha, and perhaps they'll soon takeover ownership of all companies and declare corporations now independent from shareholders--"we don't need Wall Street anymore"--and wham, down comes the government and down goes every working slob in the US of A into the gutters of poverty and debt-- and you bet back will come the poorhouses and debtors prisons and the pillory. We're are reverting back to the Dark Ages.

In changing the designs of US cities to fit the European models, these private equity firms are buying up property after property and immediately coverting it into housing for the rich, luxury apartment buildings, and then luxury hotels for the rich tourists who will now want to flock to New York City like they flock to London, Paris, Madrid, Roma--Tourists! Tourists! God I hate tourists. I never liked being a tourist when I traveled either; when I went to another country I went there to live a while--only in Mexico City did I feel comfortable--and only in New York City do I feel comfortable now but uncomfortableness is on the way--I know my time ain't long here on Broadway in the very heart of Manhattan Island where I've lived in peace for 25 years--but the private equity company who has backed my new owner/landlord has GRAND ideas for this old building--considered "unproductive" in its landmark state--you see, MONEY is the GOD of these DOGS--Fuck history; fuck culture; fuck all that--rich people are rich enough now to experience any culture, fantasy or real, they can afford--I mean Bill Gates is richer than most nations of the world--he could have easily out-of-pocket paid off Zambia's debt to the IMF or World Bank (a US corporation) (Billy Boy, by the bye, has been surpassed as the world's richest man by Mexico's Senor Telefono Slim--the man who is a monopoly in monopolized Mexico that, by the bye, the US owns or controls--Slick Willie Clinton set that up with his NAFTA (Sunbelt thinking) open-border policy with primarily Mexico--we already owned Canada--from a corporation point of view--and with it a bailing out of their economy--or perhaps we've all forgotten that. Isn't it weird that that open-border policy with Mexico was a sham--only the rich and trucks and choo-choo trains and shit like that get a free crossing--wow how F-ing hypocritical are we? Hypocrisies. That's our problem. We speak with forked tongues--hey, I'm talking Americans, folks, blacks, browns, yellows, reds, greens, whites, speckled--we all speak with forked tongues.

God I hate wasting my time bitching and growling and going maniacal over this kind of shit but it's a phenomenon that I being a child coming out of World War II never thought possible, though in college I was taught to beware of reality--what seems like a grand plan may in fact be a grand deceit--and then I read all about it studying sociology and reading Marx, yes, he was a sociologist, and reading Durkheim, and Simmel, and C. Wright Mills, and Charles Horton Cooley (of the "Looking Glass Theory"), and the wonderful Lester Frank Ward (society is like a strawberry plant), and I realized the problem and it is still the problem, the workingclass (the prolitariat) versus the ownerclass (the kings, queens, lords, earls, dukes, counts, countesses, bankers, brokers, counting houses, exchequers, accountants (a British phenomenon), ambassadors, generals, colonels, presidents, premiers, sultans, potentates, captains of industry, blah, and blah, and blah, and more blah)--the fight is over CONTROL of the work forces earnings--control of the COMMONWEALTH--where the word comes from--the common, that's all of us, and we as the common own the wealth of the land we live on--capital is not a main category in the natural law of economics--capital is what is put on a piece of land that gives it production and contributing value--the better the land, the more wealth it will produce--when private equity groups (like the Crusaders)(or the Roman Catholic Church) took over the land and made laws in favor of the owners of land that's when this all boiled into a lusty bouncing baby male--in terms of voting, whatever--think about it, original DEMOCRACY was a male landowner thing and had nothing to do with the workingclass, which included the artists, too, baby--musicians in the old days had to find employment with a rich bastard in order to survive and become world renown--remember, only the rich can really enjoy the fine arts of the world--they can afford to own the best of it--they can even afford to own the people's antiquities.

So these private equity firms are redesigning our cities--all of them, I was just reading about problems of evictions and eminent domain schemes and the leveling of the older buildings--affordable apartments and hotels and shit--in downtown Miami and going up with the skyscraping luxury hi-rises and the more-and-more-and-bigger-and-more-out-of-this-world hotels--why they're even driving out the retired New York Citians who flock to Florida the minute they retire--Florida is now getting too expensive for them.

There is a big suit going on in NYC right now against a private equity firm that backed a landlord to the tune of multiple buildings (hundreds of them it seems) resulting in his getting development rights from our billionaire mayor and our dumbass city council to tear down the affordable housing and replace it with hi-rise luxury apartments for the rich--it resulted in the possible evictions of 22,000 people--the tenants fought back and then the landlord started getting mean--cutting off services--abandoning them to the elements--fuck human lives, these bastards are the greediest bastards on earth, and like my landlord most of these bastards are foreigners or if US citizens, double citizens, too--like Brits and Irish and Israelis can be double citizens--Rupert Murdoch is a triple citizen, being an Aussie by birth--thereby an Aussie, Brit, and now American citizen. see what having money does for you?--you get so super rich you're like thinking of yourself as a god, like Donald Trump--like naive little Billy Boy Gates and Warren "Junk Bond and Crooked Daddy" Buffett and, now, like Senor Macho Telefono Slim--

But these people now control all of our money. Your pension funds are now owned by management and not your unions--well, under the Taft-Hartly Act, even union pension funds are controlled by the company--your stock holdings, your 401Ks, your savings accounts (did you ever try and take your money out of a bank immediately?)--they're not controlled by We the People, they're controlled by the Corporations that now own us lock, stock, and barrel. So if you have a couple of sou hidden away in that pair of grandpappy's old high-button shoes, take it out, air it out, and rush down to Charlie Schwab (a baby pigeon)--or hell email your order in over the Internet (pay for it with PayPal)--and buy some Exxon-Mobil, some Halliburton of Dubai, maybe look into some Carlyle Group stock--I don't think the Royal Family of Saudi Arabia's gonna let that one go broke--they own 51% of the world's gold (Pappy Bush when he was president tried to give Carlyle the right to strip-mine a mountain just outside of Yellowstone National Park and Cody, Wyoming (Unka Dick's second-home state), for its gold, the drain off of which (the sluice) would have contaminated the pristine Yellowstone River that makes Yellowstone Park the natural area of beauty it is).

See, a wolf never forgets because of his/her heightened senses--human senses are dulled by drinking and smoking and taking prescription drugs and getting vaccinated and eating processed foods (as opposed to a fresh killed baby elk--eaten belly first while its still warm and juicy)--we prove we're not animals by cooking our food, by the bye--that's civilization, you see, what Freud called "the evolution of cultures." We cook our food because in our evolutionary continuance we discovered fire and its preservative methods--you cook the meat (smoke it) and it will last longer than that fresh kill all us homo sapiens were eating before fire--see how simple and archetypical these things we consider supernatural are?

thegrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler