#junk book
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Beat the quilting desires (for now) by sewing a little junk book.
Assembling the signatures. The yellow paper makes up the bulk of the book; it's the last dozen or so tea-stained pages of a yellow notepad. The rest is some green tissue paper I found and immediately saved, a drawing I did on the back of some job training stuff, cut up trader Joe's paper bag, and a stanped parchment paper bag from a store that I kept largely intact, so it can still hold things.
Ive sewn a lot of chapbooks in my time but just single signature ones as far as I recall. So the signature sewing went fine and the part where I sewed the signatures together went not as well. But it's a junk book, who cares. And I learned valueable lessons like 'even stitches actually matter now just on a structural level' and 'why would you do this with a fan pointed at you'.
Its 46 pages long. The cover is a sparkling canned water box I cut up with bits from the only newspaper I am subscribed to (thru my union), which is a union newspaper. The cover decoration is what I thought was the most interesting article that neatly fit--Amazon union joins Teamster.
I did everything in a very backwards order and put myself in a position where I needed to glue like 20 sticky notes to this thing, and then realized I actually don't have to, and didn't. It would look nicer if I had, but I'm glad I didn't. That's the exact opposite point of this kind of book.
Funnily enough the only thing I didn't add, out of these random scraps I found/saved but hadn't packed yet (I have tons of bits of interesting paper, all of it packed right now) was the one piece that made me do this book anyway; a baffler subscription sticky note that has a stamp of a shoe on a banana peel. I thought it wasn't bad. No idea where it went tho; may well have been one of the sticky notes I folded up and used to spread the glue. Oh well.
It wasn't intended to be labor themed, but at least it's relevant. Idk what I'll write in it, if anything. Good detour altho I didn't really have time for it. I like it though.
#junk book#theres probably another name for these#i havent made one in a long time and i guess i forgot everything id learned#really proud of the binding even tho it looks bad. its way more secure than if id glued it#i did mean to also glue it. just forgot#art
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Junkbook Shop
In light of my immanent move to South Korea, I am opening an (unofficial) shop for my craft! My hobby is called junkbooking, and it's similar to scrapbooking except each page is based off of a color or a concept. I have pages based on color, as well as some based on different Stray Kids songs or the boys themselves!
If you don't see something you like but would like something like this, feel free to message me and we can work on a commission. When I move to Korea, I won't have my materials so commissions are open until August 18th, 2024. I only have stickers for Stray Kids, so I will be unable to accept K-pop commissions for other groups.
The quantity of each page is exactly one, as each one is unique! To peruse the shop This Link will take you to Google photos where you can see all of the pages up for grabs and the prices attached! Every craft is under $8!
To place an order please fill out this form!
Thank you and happy browsing!
#junkbook#junk book#crafting#stray kids#stray kids craft#south korea#seoul#art commisions#art comms open#sticker#sticker art#kpop art#art shop#sticker shop#yonsei university#yonsei#lizzy talks
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I'm reading "Junk" by Melving Burgess and it's honestly fucking up my mental health because the spirituality from Rob and Lily... I've seen it. When I was severely addicted to weed, all my social interactions were around smoking basically and I've met so many Lilies and Robs and Gemmas. I was kind of a Gemma too, at the time. And I got so heavily engulfed in these fake spirituality bullshit that serves the one and only purpose of enabling your addictions and behaviours. I never got addicted to "harder" drugs than weed and alcohol but the reasoning and way of thinking was the exact fucking same, the "free spirited and loving home" I had who progressively became more and more rotten because of addiction was the same, the "soul sisters" shit... That last thing prevented me from leaving my abusive girlfriend for years because we were "meant to be together".
I love the book so far, for damn, that hits so hard.
#genderqueer#trans#lgbtqiaplus#lgbtqia#book#queer#transgender#books and reading#books#booklr#junk#melvin burgess#junk book#tw drug#tw drugs#drug abuse#spirituality
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New junk book
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This is not a dream my friend, and it will never end. This one is the nightmare that goes on
#myart#illustration#gravity falls#stanford pines#fanart#the book of bill#does this count as book of bill spoilers-#if it’s vague enough hopefully it’ll be fineeee#this is WILDLY different from my usual postings BUT!! IN MY DEFENSE!!#…book of bill#and now I’ve dived head first back into Gravity Falls-#will probably post a few sketches an such about GF later#just to keep myself sane while I finish my snm junks#also good luck with those lil codes#don’t worry they’re super easy I ain’t smart enough for anything complicated
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Since it is world book day, I thought I would share once again one of my most heavily annotated, scrapbooked, lived in books- Good Omens.
I usually scrapbook inside my books, but this one is the only one that has things in almost every single page. These are just the pages with double spreads.
To the book that saved me and to Terry Pratchett and @neil-gaiman , thank you 🥂.
I did add some image descriptions. So you get some clues about all the things I put in each spread.
(Because someone asked in the tags: “how can you read it? Reread it??”
Well simple answer: this edition,like many others, happen to have black pages with just the days of the week printed on them, which I left visible, and plenty of empty spaces where I glue/draw everything else, so nothing is covered at all. Plus having so much stuff inside has actually made it easier to open. )
#good omens#crowley#aziraphale#ineffable husbands#neil gaiman#terry pratchett#good omens fun facts#good omens annotations#scrapbooking#junk journal#world book day
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I have to do traditional art for my illustration class this semester, so I got a new sketchbook and this is the first page :)
#doctorsiren#gravity falls#the book of bill#billford#bill cipher#stanford pines#traditional art#my art#I have to reacclimate myself to traditional art since I’ve been doing mainly digital for like 4 years now#at least almost all of my markers and junk still work huzzah!!!#this page is to deter anyone from looking futher!! /silly#also yeah I’m very obsessed with A Human’s Touch being Bill about Ford 😭
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As a long time httyd fan who has been heavily involved in the fandom since the first movie and who has spent years working in the animation industry, I’d like to share my thoughts on the new httyd movie. Keep in mind, this is just my personal opinion and it's completely fine if you disagree with me. I just want to say a little something about all this that really bothers me.
The core reason that Dreamworks and Universal made this film is that it’s a quick and easy cash grab for them. Thats it. They don’t care about telling a good story or making a “better” version of the original movie for fans or even having an accurate portrayal of the characters/story. It’s purely about money. They know that fans of the original film will go see this movie, whether it’s good or bad. And those guaranteed ticket sales are all that matter to the studios. And with Universal, it has the added bonus of being a cheap promotional and merchandising opportunity for the new HTTYD land in Orlando that opens around the same time that the film is premiering in theaters.
And to help the studios make even more money out of this, they are using non-unionized VFX companies around the world to make this film, so that they can get cheaper labor and push the artists to do more that would be against American union standards. The same thing has probably happened with the costuming and fabrication for the filming, hence why the costumes look un-weathered and the sets look cheap. They don’t want to pay for the extra time and effort that it would take to make the practical bits of the production look good.
On top of all this, Dreamworks has already announced that they’re shutting down all their in-house animation projects in favor of using AI and outsourcing projects to cheaper international non-union studios.
With all this in mind, I just can’t support this film and I will not be seeing it in theaters. And I hope that others will do the same.
The only way to stop all these horrible “live action” remakes (which are actually just realistically animated remakes) is to not buy tickets to see them. Money is all that matters to these studios, and if they don’t make any money off of it, then they will stop and try something different. Maybe they'll even go back to focusing on original stories!
That’s the power that we hold as audiences. Our wallets help drive the decisions that the executives make. So support unique storytelling and gorgeous cinematography in movies. Support indie films. Support animators as they're fighting for fair pay and better contracts. But don't support a mediocre shot-for-shot remake riding on the coattails of an already successful film.
And I just want to wrap all this up by saying I have absolutely no hate towards anyone that has worked on the new film. Toothless looks incredible and I know the artists and creatives involved in this project did the best they could with what they were given.
But I also know that those same artists have so many more brilliant ideas that they would’ve loved to be given the creative freedom to do. I just wish hollywood would be willing to take a chance and let them do it.
#they could've made a film following the plot of the httyd books or even a different pov of what happened in Berk from a vikings view#those would've been much better options if they really wanted to utilize this IP in a live action or realistic animation format#but they chose the cheap option of literally copying an already successful film and throwing actors in there to say its new and different#this whole thing bugs me so much#i hope you guys will excuse this rant but I hate what hollywood has become and I hate that creatives are forced to make this junk for them#all while fearing for their jobs because of rampant layoffs#please help put an end to hollywood abusing creatives in the way that they are and don't watch this movie#httyd#how to train your dragon#hiccup#toothless#movie#live action#dragon#astrid#stormfly#cosplay#art#artists on tumblr
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scrappin'
#junk journal#scrapbooking#journalling#collage#my art#i found this discarded thumbelina book..and like on every page she looks empty inside. makes u think.#journal tag
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The Enchanted Horse (1992) written by Magdalen Nabb, illustrated by Julek Heller
For @horsefigureoftheday
#this book was so fucking creepy#i think forth grade me would have eaten that shit up#i skimmed the story while looking for the illustrations#and yes i understand its a metaphor for growing up#and it has “values” and “empathy” and such#but the blind man who runs the junk shop has deff killed someone#i say this with love and affection#i do love an impromptu book selection on my part#real tunnel vision after finding it on the#internet archive#and cleaning it up with#photopea#anyways#the enchanted horse#magdalen nabb#Julek Heller#1992#horses#horse art#horse#equids#illustration#1990s#nineties#90s#juvenile fiction#christmas#rural gothic#rural america#rural decay
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Some more journal pages! I call these study pages in my index. They’re my jam. My journal is a super small sumikkogurashi journal from daiso so it doesn’t take up much space. These pages are like my little anatomy reference/study pages that I can use to do studies in class/when I don’t have my phone. They’re super helpful and I genuinely use them all the time. I put some flower stickers on them but they’re really not meant to be to aesthetic, they’re more for practice use.
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here are all the notebooks/journals/sketchbook/scrapbook I’ve been using since 2023 ☺️ my favorites are Moleskine, Leuchtturm 1917 and Lamy, honorable mention would be Midori (everything in the pictures was either gifted by my fiancé or bought with my own money)🌿 reblog is ok, don’t repost/use
#my photos#my journal#journal#notebook#scrapbook#sketchbook#bullet journal#journaling#diary#bujo#studyblr#study blog#commonplace book#commonplace journal#junk journal#studyspo#study inspo#light academia#light academia aesthetic#book journal#journal community#moleskine#leuchtturm1917#writing#reading journal
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finally finished my asos reread. i forgot how diabolical the last chapters are like what do you mean we get deeply introspective jon admitting to his desires for winterfell and lordship and children and comparing ghost to a weirwood and ‘he belonged to the old gods, this one’ and then denying all his desires bc winterfell belongs to the old gods too and he chooses to deny his claim bc his love for the starks supersedes everything and then thinks of val up in her tower ‘i am not the man to steal you out of there’ and then immediately he’s raised up to lord commander and then next chapter we get sansa as a bastard abruptly waking up to snowfall and being drawn to the yard that was meant to be a godswood but no weirwood can take root and ‘the eyrie was no home’ and ‘a godswood without gods, as empty as me’ and ‘she stepped out all the same’ and then the snow is like lovers kisses and like innocence and dreams and she literally rebuilds winterfell out of snow but her momentary peace is shattered by ‘dawn stealing into her garden like a thief’ and men who only want her for her beauty and claim and then she’s almost thrown out of a tower. like oh my goddddd
#the web is so intricate it cannot be verbalised it must be experienced#if jonsa isn’t real then why does it feel like ur reading the books with the code cracked. like everything makes so much sense#rereads#junk
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The long, bloody lineage of private equity's looting
Tomorrow (June 3) at 1:30PM, I’m in Edinburgh for the Cymera Festival on a panel with Nina Allen and Ian McDonald.
Monday (June 5) at 7:15PM, I’m in London at the British Library with my novel Red Team Blues, hosted by Baroness Martha Lane Fox.
Fans of the Sopranos will remember the “bust out” as a mob tactic in which a business is taken over, loaded up with debt, and driven into the ground, wrecking the lives of the business’s workers, customers and suppliers. When the mafia does this, we call it a bust out; when Wall Street does it, we call it “private equity.”
It used to be that we rarely heard about private equity, but then, as national chains and iconic companies started to vanish, this mysterious financial arrangement popped up with increasing frequency. When a finance bro’s presentation on why Olive Garden needed to be re-orged when viral, there was a lot off snickering about the decline of a tacky business whose value prop was unlimited carbs. But the bro was working for Starboard Value, a hedge fund that specialized in buhying out and killing off companies, pocketing billions while destroying profitable businesses.
https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/
Starboard Value’s game was straightforward: buy a business, load it with debt, sell off its physical plant — the buildings it did business out of — pay itself, and then have the business lease back the buildings, bleeding out money until it collapsed. They pulled it with Red Lobster,and the point of the viral Olive Garden dis track was to soften up the company for its own bust out.
The bust out tactic wasn’t limited to mocking middlebrow family restaurants. For years, the crooks who ran these ops did a brisk trade in blaming the internet. Why did Sears tank? Everyone knows that the 19th century business was an antique, incapable of mounting a challenge in the age of e-commerce. That was a great smokescreen for an old-fashioned bust out that saw corporate looters make off with hundreds of millions, leaving behind empty storefronts and emptier pension accounts for the workers who built the wealth the looters stole:
https://prospect.org/economy/vulture-capitalism-killed-sears/
Same goes for Toys R Us: it wasn’t Amazon that killed the iconic toy retailer — it was the PE bosses who extracted $200m from the chain, then walked away, hands in pockets and whistling, while the businesses collapsed and the workers got zero severance:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/06/01/how-can-they-walk-away-with-millions-and-leave-workers-with-zero-toys-r-us-workers-say-they-deserve-severance/
It’s a good racket — for the racketeers. Private equity has grown from a finance sideshow to Wall Street’s apex predator, and it’s devouring the real economy through a string of audactious bust outs, each more consequential and depraved than the last.
As PE shows that it can turn profitable businesses gigantic windfalls, sticking the rest of us with the job of sorting out the smoking craters they leave behind, more and more investors are piling in. Today, the PE sector loves a rollup, which is when they buy several related businesses and merge them into one firm. The nominal business-case for a rollup is that the new, bigger firm is more “efficient.” In reality, a rollup’s strength is in eliminating competition. When all the pet groomers, or funeral homes, or urgent care clinics for ten miles share the same owner, they can raise prices, lower wages, and fuck over suppliers.
They can also borrow. A quirk of the credit markets is that a standalone small business is valued at about 3–5x its annual revenues. But if that business is part of a large firm, it is valued at 10–20x annual turnover. That means that when a private equity company rolls up a comedy club, ad agency or water bottler (all businesses presently experiencing PE rollup), with $1m in annual revenues, it shows up on the PE company’s balance sheet as an asset worth $10–20m. That’s $10–20m worth of collateral the PE fund can stake for loans that let it buy and roll up more small businesses.
2.9 million Boomer-owned businesses, employing 32m people, are expected to sell in the next couple years as their owners retire. Most of these businesses will sell to PE firms, who can afford to pay more for them as a prelude to a bust out than anyone intending to operate them as a productive business could ever pay:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken
PE’s most ghastly impact is felt in the health care sector. Whole towns’ worth of emergency rooms, family practices, labs and other health firms have been scooped up by PE, which has spent more than $1t since 2012 on health acquisitions:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect
Once a health care company is owned by PE, it is significantly more likely to commit medicare fraud. It also cuts wages and staffing for doctors and nurses. PE-owned facilities do more unnecessary and often dangerous procedures. Appointments get shorter. The companies get embroiled in kickback scandals. PE-backed dentists hack away at children’s mouths, filling them full of root-canals.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect
The Healthcare Private Equity Association boasts that its members are poised to spend more than $3t to create “the future of healthcare.”
https://hcpea.org/#!event-list
As bad as PE is for healthcare, it’s worse for long-term care. PE-owned nursing homes are charnel houses, and there’s a particularly nasty PE scam where elderly patients are tricked into signing up for palliative care, which is never delivered (and isn’t needed, because the patients aren’t dying!). These fake “hospices” get huge payouts from medicare — and the patient is made permanently ineligible for future medicare, because they are recorded being in their final decline:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS
Every part of the health care sector is being busted out by PE. Another ugly PE trick, the “club deal,” is devouring the medical supply business. Club deals were huge in the 2000s, destroying rent-controlled housing, energy companies, Mervyn’s department stores, Harrah’s, and Old Country Joe. Now it’s doing the same to medical supplies:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals
Private equity is behind the mass rollup of single-family homes across America. Wall Street landlords are the worst landlords in America, who load up your rent with junk fees, leave your home in a state of dangerous disrepair, and evict you at the drop of a hat:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights
As these houses decay through neglect, private equity makes a bundle from tenants and even more borrowing against the houses. In a few short years, much of America’s desperately undersupplied housing stock will be beyond repair. It’s a bust out.
You know all those exploding trains filled with dangerous chemicals that poison entire towns? Private equity bust outs:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/04/up-your-nose/#rail-barons
Where did PE come from? How can these people look themselves in the mirror? Why do we let them get away with it? How do we stop them?
Today in The American Prospect, Maureen Tkacik reviews two new books that try to answer all four of these questions, but really only manage to answer the first three:
https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/
The first of these books is These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs — and Wrecks — America by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/These-Are-the-Plunderers/Gretchen-Morgenson/9781982191283
The second is Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, by Brendan Ballou:
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brendan-ballou/plunder/9781541702103/
Both books describe the bust out from the inside. For example, PetSmart — looted for $30 billion by RaymondSvider and his PE fund BC Partners — is a slaughterhouse for animals. The company systematically neglects animals — failing to pay workers to come in and feed them, say, or refusing to provide backup power to run during power outages, letting animals freeze or roast to death. Though PetSmart has its own vet clinics, the company doesn’t want to pay its vets to nurse the animals it damages, so it denies them care. But the company is also too cheap to euthanize those animals, so it lets them starve to death. PetSmart is also too cheap to cremate the animals, so its traumatized staff are ordered to smuggle the dead, rotting animals into random dumpsters.
All this happened while PetSmart’s sales increased by 60%, matched by growth in the company’s gross margins. All that money went to the bust out.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/09/27/the-30-billion-kitty-meet-the-investor-who-made-a-fortune-on-pet-food/
Tkacik says these books show that we’re finally getting wise to PE. Back in the Clinton years, the PE critique painted the perps as sharp operators who reduced quality and jacked up prices. Today, books like these paint these “investors” as the monsters they are — crooks whose bust ups are crimes, not clever finance hacks.
Take the Carlyle Group, which pioneered nursing home rollups. As Carlyle slashed wages, its workers suffered — but its elderly patients suffered more. Thousands of Carlyle “customers” died of “dehydration, gangrenous bedsores, and preventable falls” in the pre-covid years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/opioid-overdoses-bedsores-and-broken-bones-what-happened-when-a-private-equity-firm-sought-profits-in-caring-for-societys-most-vulnerable/2018/11/25/09089a4a-ed14-11e8-baac-2a674e91502b_story.html
KKR, another PE monster, bought a second-hand chain of homes for mentally disabled adults from another PE company, then squeezed it for the last drops of blood left in the corpse. KKR cut wages to $8/hour and increased shifts to 36 hours, then threatened to have workers who went home early arrested and charged with “patient abandonment.” Many of these homes were often left with no staff at all, with patients left to starve and stew in their own waste.
PE loves to pick on people who can’t fight back: kids, sick people, disabled people, old people. No surprise, then, that PE loves prisons — the ultimate captive audience. HIG Capital is a $55b fund that owns TKC Holdings, who got the contract to feed the prisoners at 400 institutions. They got the contract after the prisons fired Aramark, owned by PE giant Warburg Pincus, whose food was so inedible that it provoked riots. TKC got a million bucks extra to take over the food at Michigan’s Kinross Correctional Facility, then, incredibly, made the food worse. A chef who refused to serve 100 bags of rotten potatoes (“the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in my life”) was fired:
https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/local/michigan/prison-food-worker-i-was-fired-for-refusing-to-serve-rotten-potatoes/69-467297770
TKC doesn’t just operate prison kitchens — it operates prison commissaries, where it gouges prisoners on junk food to replace the inedible slop it serves in the cafeteria. The prisoners buy this food with money they make working in the prison workshops, for $0.10–0.25/hour. Those workshops are also run by TKC.
Tkacic traces private equity back to the “corporate raiders” of the 1950s and 1960s, who “stealthily borrowed money to buy up enough shares in a small or midsized company to control its biggest bloc of votes, then force a stock swap and install himself as CEO.”
The most famous of these raiders was Eli Black, who took over United Fruit with this gambit — a company that had a long association with the CIA, who had obligingly toppled democratically elected governments and installed dictators friendly to United’s interests (this is where the term “banana republic” comes from).
Eli Black’s son is Leon Black, a notorious PE predator. Leon Black got his start working for the junk-bonds kingpin Michael Milken, optimizing Milken’s operation, which was the most terrifying bust out machine of its day, buying, debt-loading and wrecking a string of beloved American businesses. Milken bought 2,000 companies and put 200 of them through bankruptcy, leaving the survivors in a brittle, weakened state.
It got so bad that the Business Roundtable complained about the practice to Congress, calling Milken, Black, et al, “a small group is systematically extracting the equity from corporations and replacing it with debt, and incidentally accumulating major wealth.”
Black stabbed Milken in the back and tanked his business, then set out on his own. Among the businesses he destroyed was Samsonite, “a bankrupt-but-healthy company he subjected to 12 humiliating years of repeated fee extractions, debt-funded dividend payments, brutal plant closings, and hideous schemes to induce employees to buy its worthless stock.”
The money to buy Samsonite — and many other businesses — came through a shadowy deal between Black and John Garamendi, then a California insurance commissioner, now a California congressman. Garamendi helped Black buy a $6b portfolio of junk bonds from an insurance company in a wildly shady deal. Garamendi wrote down the bonds by $3.9b, stealing money “from innocent people who needed the money to pay for loved ones’ funerals, irreparable injuries, etc.”
Black ended up getting all kinds of favors from powerful politicians — including former Connecticut governor John Rowland and Donald Trump. He also wired $188m to Jeffrey Epstein for reasons that remain opaque.
Black’s shady deals are a marked contrast with the exalted political circles he travels in. Despite private equity’s obviously shady conduct, it is the preferred partner for cities and states, who buy everything from ambulance services to infrastructure from PE-owned companies, with disastrous results. Federal agencies turn a blind eye to their ripoffs, or even abet them. 38 state houses passed legislation immunizing nursing homes from liability during the start of the covid crisis.
PE barons are shameless about presenting themselves as upstanding cits, unfairly maligned. When Obama made an empty promise to tax billionaires in 2010, Blackstone founder SteveS chwarzman declared, “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
Since we’re on the subject of Hitler, this is a good spot to bring up Monowitz, a private-sector satellite of Auschwitz operated by IG Farben as a slave labor camp to make rubber and other materiel it supplied at a substantial markup to the wermacht. I’d never heard of Monowitz, but Tkacik’s description of the camp is chilling, even in comparison to Auschwitz itself.
Farben used slave laborers from Auschwitz to work at its rubber plant, but was frustrated by the logistics of moving those slaves down the 4.5m stretch of road to the facility. So the company bought 25,000 slaves — preferring children, who were cheaper — and installed them in a co-located death-camp called Monowitz:
https://www.commentary.org/articles/r-tannenbaum/the-devils-chemists-by-josiah-e-dubois-jr/
Monowitz was — incredibly — worse than Auschwitz. It was so bad, the SS guards who worked at it complained to Berlin about the conditions. The SS demanded more hospitals for the workers who dropped from beatings and overwork — Farben refused, citing the cost. The factory never produced a steady supply of rubber, but thanks to its gouging and the brutal treatment of its slaves, the camp was still profitable and returned large dividends to Farben’s investors.
Apologists for slavery sometimes claim that slavers are at least incentivized to maintain the health of their captive workforce. This was definitely not true of Farben. Monowitz slaves died on average after three months in the camp. And Farben’s subsidiary, Degesch, made the special Zyklon B formulation used in Auschwitz’s gas chambers.
Tkacik’s point is that the Nazis killed for ideology and were unimaginably cruel. Farben killed for money — and they were even worse. The banality of evil gets even more banal when it’s done in service to maximizing shareholder value.
As Farben historian Joseph Borkin wrote, the company “reduced slave labor to a consumable raw material, a human ore from which the mineral of life was systematically extracted”:
https://www.scribd.com/document/517797736/The-Crime-and-Punishment-of-I-G-Farben
Farben’s connection to the Nazis was a the subject of Germany’s Master Plan: The Story of Industrial Offensive, a 1943 bestseller by Borkin, who was also an antitrust lawyer. It described how Farben had manipulated global commodities markets in order to create shortages that “guaranteed Hitler’s early victories.”
Master Plan became a rallying point in the movement to shatter corporate power. But large US firms like Dow Chemical and Standard Oil waged war on the book, demanding that it be retracted. Borkin was forced into resignation and obscurity in 1945.
Meanwhile, in Nuremberg, 24 Farben executives were tried for their war crimes, and they cited their obligations to their shareholders in their defense. All but five were acquitted on this basis.
Seen in that light, the plunderers of today’s PE firms are part of a long and dishonorable tradition, one that puts profit ahead of every other priority or consideration. It’s a defense that wowed the judges at Nuremberg, so should we be surprised that it still plays in 2023?
Tkacik is frustrated that neither of these books have much to offer by way of solutions, but she understands why that would be. After all, if we can’t even close the carried interest tax loophole, how can we hope to do anything meaningful?
“Carried interest” comes up in every election cycle. Most of us assume it has something to do with “interest payments,” but that’s not true. The carried interest loophole relates to the “interest” that 16th-century sea captains had in their cargo. It’s a 600-year-old tax loophole that private equity bosses use to pay little or no tax on their billions. The fact that it’s still on the books tells you everything you need to know about whether our political class wants to do anything about PE’s plundering.
Notwithstanding Tkacik’s (entirely justified) skepticism of the weaksauce remedies proposed in these books, there is some hope of meaningful action. Private equity’s rollups are only possible because they skate under the $101m threshold for merger scrutiny. However, there is good — but unenforced — law that allows antitrust enforcers to block these mergers. This is the “incipiency standard” — Sec 7 of the Clayton Act — the idea that a relatively small merger might not be big enough to trigger enforcement action on its own, but regulators can still act to block it if it creates an incipient monopoly.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken
The US has a new crop of aggressive — fearless — top antitrust enforcers and they’ve been systematically reviving these old laws to go after monopolies.
That’s long overdue. Markets are machines for eroding our moral values: “In comparison to non-market decisions, moral standards are significantly lower if people participate in markets.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20130607154129/https://www.uni-bonn.de/Press-releases/markets-erode-moral-values
The crimes that monsters commit in the name of ideology pale in comparison to the crimes the wealthy commit for money.
Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Edinburgh, London, and Berlin!
If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farbenizers
[Image ID: An overgrown graveyard, rendered in silver nitrate monochrome. A green-tinted businessman with a moneybag in place of a head looms up from behind a gravestone. The right side of the image is spattered in blood.]
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Printer ink is expensive so we’re trying to hand write now.
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Yesterdays spread in my daily pocket 🪴
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