#zombie debts

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Wall Street Journal goes to bat for the vultures who want to steal your house

Tonight (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.

Tomorrow (June 6), I’m on a Rightscon panel about interoperability.

The tacit social contract between the Wall Street Journal and its readers is this: the editorial page is for ideology, and the news section is for reality. Money talks and bullshit walks — and reality’s well-known anticapitalist bias means that hewing too closely to ideology will make you broke, and thus unable to push your ideology.

That’s why the editorial page will rail against “printing money” while the news section will confine itself to asking which kinds of federal spending competes with the private sector (creating a bidding war that drives up prices) and which kinds are not. If you want frothing takes about how covid relief checks will create “debt for our grandchildren,” seek it on the editorial page. For sober recognition that giving small amounts of money to working people will simply go to reducing consumer and student debt, look to the news.

But WSJ reporters haven’t had their corpus colossi severed: the brain-lobe that understands economic reality crosstalks with the lobe that worship the idea of a class hierarchy with capital on top and workers tugging their forelacks. When that happens, the coverage gets weird.

Take this weekend’s massive feature on “zombie mortgages,” long-written-off second mortgages that have been bought by pennies for vultures who are now trying to call them in:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/zombie-mortgages-could-force-some-homeowners-into-foreclosure-e615ab2a

These second mortgages — often in the form of home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) — date back to the subprime bubble of the early 2000s. As housing prices spiked to obscene levels and banks figured out how to issue risky mortgages and sell them off to suckers, everyday people were encouraged — and often tricked — into borrowing heavily against their houses, on complicated terms that could see their payments skyrocket down the road.

Once the bubble popped in 2008, the value of these houses crashed, and the mortgages fell “underwater” — meaning that market value of the homes was less than the amount outstanding on the mortgage. This triggered the foreclosure crisis, where banks that had received billions in public money forced their borrowers out of their homes. This was official policy: Obama’s Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner boasted that forcing Americans out of their homes would “foam the runways” for the banks and give them a soft landing;

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/06/personnel-are-policy/#janice-eberly

With so many homes underwater on their first mortgages, the holders of those second mortgages wrote them off. They had bought high-risk, high reward debt, the kind whose claims come after the other creditors have been paid off. As prices collapsed, it became clear that there wouldn’t be anything left over after those higher-priority loans were paid off.

The lenders (or the bag-holders the lenders sold the loans to) gave up. They stopped sending borrowers notices, stopped trying to collect. That’s the way markets work, after all — win some, lose some.

But then something funny happened: private equity firms, flush with cash from an increasingly wealthy caste of one percenters, went on a buying spree, snapping up every home they could lay hands on, becoming America’s foremost slumlords, presiding over an inventory of badly maintained homes whose tenants are drowned in junk fees before being evicted:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/08/wall-street-landlords/#the-new-slumlords

This drove a new real estate bubble, as PE companies engaged in bidding wars, confident that they could recoup high one-time payments by charging working people half their incomes in rent on homes they rented by the room. The “recovery” of real estate property brought those second mortgages back from the dead, creating the “zombie mortgages” the WSJ writes about.

These zombie mortgages were then sold at pennies on the dollar to vulture capitalists — finance firms who make a bet that they can convince the debtors to cough up on these old debts. This “distressed debt investing” is a scam that will be familiar to anyone who spends any time watching “finance influencers” — like forex trading and real estate flipping, it’s a favorite get-rich-quick scheme peddled to desperate people seeking “passive income.”

Like all get-rich-quick schemes, distressed debt investing is too good to be true. These ancient debts are generally past the statute of limitations and have been zeroed out by law. Even “good” debts generally lack any kind of paper-trail, having been traded from one aspiring arm-breaker to another so many times that the receipts are long gone.

Ultimately, distressed debt “investing” is a form of fraud, in which the “investor” has to master a social engineering patter in which they convince the putative debtor to pay debts they don’t actually owe, either by shading the truth or lying outright, generally salted with threats of civil and criminal penalties for a failure to pay.

That certainly goes for zombie mortgages. Writing about the WSJ’s coverage on Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith reminds readers not to “pay these extortionists a dime” without consulting a lawyer or a nonprofit debt counsellor, because any payment “vitiates” (revives) an otherwise dead loan:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/06/wall-street-journal-aids-vulture-investors-threatening-second-mortgage-borrowers-with-foreclosure-on-nearly-always-legally-unenforceable-debt.html

But the WSJ’s 35-paragraph story somehow finds little room to advise readers on how to handle these shakedowns. Instead, it lionizes the arm-breakers who are chasing these debts as “investors…[who] make mortgage lending work.” The Journal even repeats — without commentary — the that these so-called investors’ “goal is to positively impact homeowners’ lives by helping them resolve past debt.”

This is where the Journal’s ideology bleeds off the editorial page into the news section. There is no credible theory that says that mortgage markets are improved by safeguarding the rights of vulture capitalists who buy old, forgotten second mortgages off reckless lenders who wrote them off a decade ago.

Doubtless there’s some version of the Hayek Mind-Virus that says that upholding the claims of lenders — even after those claims have been forgotten, revived and sold off — will give “capital allocators” the “confidence” they need to make loans in the future, which will improve the ability of everyday people to afford to buy houses, incentivizing developers to build houses, etc, etc.

But this is an ideological fairy-tale. As Michael Hudson describes in his brilliant histories of jubilee — debt cancellation — through history, societies that unfailingly prioritize the claims of lenders over borrowers eventually collapse:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/08/jubilant/#construire-des-passerelles

Foundationally, debts are amassed by producers who need to borrow capital to make the things that we all need. A farmer needs to borrow for seed and equipment and labor in order to sow and reap the harvest. If the harvest comes in, the farmer pays their debts. But not every harvest comes in — blight, storms, war or sickness — will eventually cause a failure and a default.

In those bad years, farmers don’t pay their debts, and then they add to them, borrowing for the next year. Even if that year’s harvest is good, some debt remains. Gradually, over time, farmers catch enough bad beats that they end up hopelessly mired in debt — debt that is passed on to their kids, just as the right to collect the debts are passed on to the lenders’ kids.

Left on its own, this splits society into hereditary creditors who get to dictate the conduct of hereditary debtors. Run things this way long enough and every farmer finds themselves obliged to grow ornamental flowers and dainties for their creditors’ dinner tables, while everyone else goes hungry — and society collapses.

The answer is jubilee: periodically zeroing out creditors’ claims by wiping all debts away. Jubilees were declared when a new king took the throne, or at set intervals, or whenever things got too lopsided. The point of capital allocation is efficiency and thus shared prosperity, not enriching capital allocators. That enrichment is merely an incentive, not the goal.

For generations, American policy has been to make housing asset appreciation the primary means by which families amass and pass on wealth; this is in contrast to, say, labor rights, which produce wealth by rewarding work with more pay and benefits. The American vision is that workers don’t need rights as workers, they need rights as owners — of homes, which will always increase in value.

There’s an obvious flaw in this logic: houses are necessities, as well as assets. You need a place to live in order to raise a family, do a job, found a business, get an education, recover from sickness or live out your retirement. Making houses monotonically more expensive benefits the people who get in early, but everyone else ends up crushed when their human necessity is treated as an asset:

https://gen.medium.com/the-rents-too-damned-high-520f958d5ec5

Worse: without a strong labor sector to provide countervailing force for capital, US politics has become increasingly friendly to rent-seekers of all kinds, who have increased the cost of health-care, education, and long-term care to eye-watering heights, forcing workers to remortgage, or sell off, the homes that were meant to be the source of their family’s long-term prosperity:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom-bfad6f3b35a9

Today, reality’s leftist bias is getting harder and harder to ignore. The idea that people who buy debt at pennies on the dollar should be cheered on as they drain the bank-accounts — or seize the homes — of people who do productive work is pure ideology, the kind of thing you’d expect to see on the WSJ’s editorial page, but which sticks out like a sore thumb in the news pages.

Thankfully, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau is on the case. Director Rohit Chopra has warned the arm-breakers chasing payments on zombie mortgages that it’s illegal for them to “threaten judicial actions, such as foreclosures, for debts that are past a state’s statute of limitations.”

But there’s still plenty of room for more action. As Smith notes, the 2012 National Mortgage Settlement — a “get out of jail for almost free” card for the big banks — enticed lots of banks to discharge those second mortgages. Per Smith: “if any servicer sold a second mortgage to a vulture lender that it had charged off and used for credit in the National Mortgage Settlement, it defrauded the Feds and applicable state.”

Maybe some hungry state attorney general could go after the banks pulling these fast ones and hit them for millions in fines — and then use the money to build public housing.

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in 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/2023/06/04/vulture-capitalism/#distressed-assets

[Image ID: A Georgian eviction scene in which a bobby oversees three thugs who are using a battering ram to knock down a rural cottage wall. The image has been crudely colorized. A vulture looks on from the right, wearing a top-hat. The battering ram bears the WSJ logo.]

[starrysharks]

zombie wanting to eat the flesh of their loved ones as a way of showing affection ‼️‼️

[strawberrybyers]

realizing i’m so funny and talking a lot and making a million plans right now is not because i am healing for a new year new me era but because i am entering a state of ✨hypomania✨

[angeltannis]

obsessed with Sasha deciding to dig up Gaige’s rotten moldy dad’s corpse to try to revive his decomposed remains with her Anahatium shard. Girl this is how you get The Walking Dead

[theprofessionalpromptmaker]

Person A is someone who gambled away their fortune and went into deep debt, and when they tried to kill themself to escape the debt, they were revived by a necromancer paid by the person they owed. Now Person A to work to pay off their debts and is only allowed to die when they repay their loan. But the necromancer is the one in control of them and keeping them in line, enforcing the orders the loan shark gives Person A. Due to this, Person A and the necromancer, Person B, work fairly closely together, as Person B takes care of Person A’s corpse maintenance. And over time, Person A learns that Person B is the child of a debter, and after their parent died at the hands of the loan shark, Person B was found trying to revive their parent’s corpse. The loan shark decided to have Person B formally trained and work off their parent’s debt by reviving other debters for them.

[fluffypotatey]

hey anon, honestly i feel your rant but like, i am not a good headspace to really give concise thoughts to it

[icharchivist]

Is Sakyo like a Lu Woh type who's such an annoying uppity twink that you just want to dig your teeth into like a chew toy and then shake your head a bunch?

THAT DESCRIPTIONS PLEASE.

a3 is such a wholesome series but after what YOU GUYS did to Lu Woh in particular i feel fearful bringing this on Sakyo 😭

and i think it's not an *unfair* comparaison tho.... Like they're both more on the reserved side, they try to take things seriously even if no one around them do, they can resort to threat of violence to motivate people while actually they care too much to really carry through with it, they're both surrounded by groups who tend to want them to loosen it up, they both tend to lecture people over what should be done, reminding them of their duty and everything....

so they do have a lot in common. I would say on the difference is that Sakyo is much more likely to actually get angry (Lu Woh, despite threatening to be, tends to be pretty lowkey), and Sakyo also doesn't hesitate to be soft when the time is right (Lu Woh, so far, has kept the Tsundere energy through everything). Sakyo is also more passionate in general i'd say, he's more in contact with his own feelings and shortcomings than Lu Woh.

So they are pretty similar i'd say, not fully obviously, especially due to the fantasy vs down-to-earth distinctions of their arcs, but they do have major draws in common here and there.

now whether it means you want to dig your teeth into him and bite him like a chew toy........ i do know people who would do that to him.

just don't hesitate i guess?

[sanchoyo]

i start that new job tomorrow 😶 ...

[frittern]

EXTENDING OFF OF THIS.

1. There was no guarantee the surgery would work. This is the first time that they have ever had the chance to even try it, Joel has already mentioned that people have tried knock off nonsense cures in the past to no avail. He has already seen over and over again just how desperate people are for something that many times meant nothing, and the fireflies are Exactly the type of people to decide "yeah, actually, we'll kill one kid to just SEE if MAYBE we can do this, we'll use her body just to kind of experiment around. Not like we haven't already risked and killed Many Many People for our causes before this point, what's one more kid to the body pile". It's a pipe dream built off of desperate desperate hope.

2. Not to mention that Ellie's body is a LIMITED RESOURCE, to be able to produce a "vaccine" or "cure" they would need to reproduce it. A lot of it. Ellie's body at best could be used to understand a structure or compound that could fight off spores and then MAYBE, MAYBE give them an idea of what to search for or how to build a vaccine. They would have no way to get More of the DNA and blood in her body, especially with her dead, so if this vaccine relied on her body directly then it would at best be able to be put into maybe 20, 50 people. That's it. It wouldn't cure those already infected, and it would likely only partially help until the spores found a new way to mutate. Distributing and getting people to take the vaccine would also be a Fucking nightmare.

3. Because these people are so desperate for this attempt to do Anything, they are not going to wait another second to think this through or attempt another way or try to see if they can figure out something. They are not listening to Joel. They will kill him if he steps out of line. He cannot talk his way into them giving her back.

So like.

Arguably the only things Joel did wrong here was killing the scientist who was the "only one capable of making a vaccine" which , by the way is Totally Weird and very suspicious. They should have had notes and should have been training people if they thought they could figure out a cure. This should have been a big thing. And exactly HOW or WHY would Joel have been able to stop when that guy was one of the Main People in the way of getting to Ellie. As much as it would be nice to try and spare that guy, we do not have time to be questioning who might be what when they are hovering over her with scalpels and attempting to convince us to let her KILL her.

And of course, he should have told her. But in the end I think that they figure things out through the flash backs of the second game. It was a classic mistake of trying to protect someone from yourself, and the things you've done. It was distressing and upsetting and Yeah, This Is A Lot Of Dead People and Fucking Lord did it have consequences for him, but he cares about people. He cares about *Ellie* too much to have ever been able to make another choice.

This game has a lot about choices, about the fatal flaw of humanity. Even if you love the world, even if you love people, you will always love those you bond with more. No matter how much you care for humanity and want to save them, if it's a billion people vs. the one person you love the most, you will save that person every. Time. But even in the context of this lesson, even in this bittersweet ultimatum the game sets us up for, I think Joel was completely right in what he did and putting someone you care about this deeply, who saved your life and is basically apart of your family, at risk of dying in a horrific and intrusive way with only the BARE MINIMUM IDEALISTIC HOPE that MAYBE, MAYBE, a few people might have the same immunity she had when there are so many Other things to worry about killing you in this apocalypse. It's not fucking worth it. It never would have been worth it. So damn it, I'm right there with him, we're carrying this little girl in our arms out of that hospital of massacred people who refused to think for a damn second about potential consequences, and it's Into The Sunset with us.

sorry but I am officially a joel miller apologist. the fireflies knock him out & as soon as he regains consciousness marlene breaks the news to him that ‘yah sorry you’re never going to see your daughter again bc the surgery is lethal. but here’s her knife as a keep sake <3′ i’m sorry marlene but u thought that was going to go over well? you thought the insanely dangerous and firearm proficient man was who obviously bonded to ellie was going to go calmly? she should have sent ten men to escort him out. thirty. she should have just shot him in the head while he was unconscious. but of course she underestimated how much he cared. what he would do for ellie. bc she knew mean gruff self serving survivalist joel not father joel. she didn’t even let joel and ellie say goodbye to each other. was planning on killing ellie without even telling her for an experimental procedure they had no proof would work. didn’t even give joel the option to see her one last time. “would u kill 1 person to save 100?” they didn’t even allow a fourteen year old the agency to answer that question. team joel 

[hq92]

I had a dream that I was a survivor in a zombie apocalypse scenario. Me and a group of survivors were holed up in a house, someone compromised our location, the hoarde surrounded us and we had to get out safely yadda yadda.

While we were on the streets again a courier found me and asked "Are you so and so?" And I replied "Yes, that’s me."

He handed me a letter addressed to myself and I got teary eyed. Was it a note from my parents? My sibling and his kids? My husband or a long lost friend?

I gingerly and tearfully tore open the envelope, my pulse pounding with excitement:

"Dear So and So,

It's been 10 years since your last payment on your student loans. The appropriate 9% interest has been calculated for that amount of time and your new balance is listed below. Please make arrangements for prompt payments at your earliest convenience."

[birdstooth]

Hair stuff

Omg my olaplex 2 came!!! It cost so much but whatever. #no regrets #only debt

Still don’t get why u need a cosmetology license to purchase it directly tho bc 1.) it’s not more toxic than any of the other olaplex products and 2.) it’s not illegal for cosmetologists to sell it to a third party (like me) so… what’s the deal?

Anyway, I’m not sponsored or anything but this stuff seriously works. I am a true 1 on the hair colouring scale and I’ve been bleaching it to around a 9/10 level for the past few years

It’s incredibly damaging and I’m not kidding when I say I’ve had my hair literally disintegrate like cotton candy in water after over bleaching.

I’ve only used the olaplex no 3 in the past bc it’s the most concentrated solution available to consumers, and it made a huge difference.

Tbh if your hair is lighter tho idk if u need it… I do at least 4 bleaching sessions with 30 vol developer (if you’re tempted to use 40… don’t do it brother), with a couple weeks in between each. That gets my hair light enough to pick up pastel colour dyes, but if I want to go silver/grey, I need 5-6 sessions 😬

[exorbitant-interest]

If ‘Zombie Debt’ is a Netflix original series, I just might watch it.

[mfi-miami]

Attention Florida Homeowners: SLS Is Cranking Up Foreclosures!

Attention Florida Homeowners: SLS Is Cranking Up Foreclosures!

Attention Florida Homeowners: Specialized Loan Servicing Is Cranking Up Florida Foreclosures For The Holidays! Are You Prepared?  Specialized Loan Servicing is cranking up Florida foreclosures. This is bad news for Florida homeowners because Lakeview Loan is hellbent on seizing your home!  Therefore, MFI-Miami has teamed up with several Florida law firms to create a Florida foreclosure defense…

[mostlysignssomeportents]

When private equity destroys your hospital

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW in PHOENIX (Changing Hands, Feb 29) then Tucson (Mar 9-10), San Francisco (Mar 13), and more!

As someone who writes a lot of fiction about corporate crime, I naturally end up spending a lot of time being angry about corporate crime. It's pretty goddamned enraging. But the fiction writer in me is especially upset at how cartoonishly evil the perps are – routinely doing things that I couldn't ever get away with putting in a novel.

Beyond a doubt, the most cartoonishly evil characters are the private equity looters. And the most cartoonishly evil private equity looters are the ones who get involved in health care.

(Buckle up.)

Writing for The American Prospect, Maureen Tcacik details a national scandal: the collapse of PE-backed hospital chain Steward Health, a company that bought and looted hospitals up and down the country, starving them of everything from heart valves to prescription paper, ripping off suppliers, doctors and nurses, and callously exposing patients to deadly risk:

https://prospect.org/health/2024-02-27-scenes-from-bat-cave-steward-health-florida/

Steward occupies a very special place in the private equity looting cycle. Private equity companies arrange themselves on a continuum of indiscriminate depravity. At the start of the continuum are PE funds that buy productive and useful firms (everything from hospitals to car-washes) using "leveraged buyouts." That means that they borrow money to buy the company and use the company itself as collateral: it's like you getting a bank-loan to buy your neighbor's mortgage out from under them, and using your neighbor's house as collateral for that loan.

Once the buyout is done, the PE fund pays itself a "special dividend" (stealing money the business needs to survive) and then starts charging the business a "management fee" for the PE fund's expertise. To pay for all this, the PE bosses start to hack away at the company. Quality declines. So do wages. Prices go up. The company changes suppliers, opting for cheaper alternatives, often stiffing the old company. There are mass layoffs. The remaining employees end up doing three peoples' jobs, for lower wages, with fewer materials of lower quality.

Eventually, that top-feeding PE company finds a more desperate, more ham-fisted PE company to unload the business onto. That middle-feeding company also does a leveraged buyout, pays itself another special dividend, cuts wages, staffing and quality even further. They switch to even worse suppliers and stiff the last batch. Prices go up even higher.

Then – you guessed it – the middle-feeding PE company finds an even more awful PE bottom-feeder to unload the company onto. That bottom feeder does it all again, without even pretending to leave the business in condition to do its job. The company is a shambling zombie at this point, often producing literal garbage in place of the products that made its reputation. Employees' paychecks bounce, or don't show up at all. The company stops bothering to pay the lawyers that have been fending off its creditors. Those lawyers sue the company, too.

That's the kind of PE company Steward Health was, and, as the name suggests, Steward Health is in the business of stripping away the very last residue of value from community hospitals. As you might imagine, this gets pretty fucking ugly.

Steward owns 32 hospitals up and down the country, though its holdings are dwindling as the company walks away from its debt-burdened holdings, after years of neglect that have rendered them unfit for use as health facilities – or for any other purpose. Tcacik's piece offers a snapshot of one such hospital: Florida's Rockledge Regional Medical Center, just eight miles from Cape Canaveral.

Rockledge is a disaster. The fifth floor was, at one point, home to 5,000 bats.

Five.

Thousand.

Bats.

(Rockledge stiffed the exterminators.)

The bats were just the beginning. One of the internal sewage pipes ruptured. Whole sections of the hospital were literally full of shit, oozing out of the walls and ceiling, slopping over medical equipment.

That's an urgent situation for any hospital, but for Rockledge, it's catastrophic, because Rockledge is a hospital without any hospital supplies. Steward has stiffed the companies that supply "heart valves, urology lasers, Impella catheters, cardiac catheterization balloons, slings for lifting heavier patients, blood and urine test reagents, and most recently, prescription paper." Key medical equipment has been repossessed. So have the Pepsi machines. The hospital cafeteria had its supply of cold cuts repossessed:

https://www.reddit.com/r/massachusetts/comments/1agc1j4/comment/kolicqo/

It's not just Steward's nonpayments that reek of impending doom. Its payments also bear the hallmarks of a scam artist on the brink of blowing off the con. The company recently paid off a vendor with five separate checks for $1m, each drawn on "a random hospital in Utah" (Steward recently walked away from its Utah hospitals; its partners there are suing it for stealing $18m on their way out the door).

This company – which owns 32 hospitals! – has resorted to gambits like sending photos of fake checks to doctors it hasn't paid in months as "proof" that the money was coming (the checks arrived 22 days later).

Steward owes so much money to its employees – $1.66m to just one doctors' group. But the medical staff keep doing their jobs, and are reluctant to speak on the record, thanks to Steward's reputation for vicious retaliation. Those health workers keep showing up to take care of patients, even as the hospital crumbles around them. One clinician told Tcacik: "I watched a bed collapse underneath a [patient] who had just undergone hip surgery."

Rockledge has nine elevators, but only five of them work – the other four have been broken for a year. The hospital's fourth floor has been converted to "a graveyard of broken beds." The sinks are clogged, or filled with foul gunk. There's black mold. Nurses have noted on the maintenance tags that the repair service refuses to attend the hospital until their overdue bills are paid. The fifteen-person on-site maintenance team was cut to just two workers.

Steward is just the latest looting owner of Rockledge. After the Great Financial Crisis, private equity consultants helped sell it to Health Management Associates. The hospital's CEO took home a $10m bonus for that sale and exited; Health Management Associates then quickly became embroiled in a Medicare fraud and kickback scandal. Soon after, Rockledge was passed on to Community Health Systems, who then sold it on to Rockledge.

Steward, meanwhile, was at that time owned by an even bigger private equity giant, Cerberus, which then sold Steward off. That deal was performatively complex and hid all kinds of mischief. Prior to Cerberus's sell-off of Steward, they sold off Steward's real-estate. The buyer was Medical Properties Trust, who gave Cerberus $1.25b for the real-estate: three hospitals in Florida and three more in Ohio. Steward then contracted to operate these hospitals on MPT's behalf, and pay MPT rent for the real-estate.

This complex arrangement was key to siphoning value out of the hospital and to keeping angry creditors at bay – if you can't figure out who owes you money, it's a lot harder to collect on the debt. The scheme was masterminded by Steward founder/CEO Ralph de la Torre. De la Torre is notorious for taking a massive dividend out of the company while it owed $1.4b to its creditors. He bought a $40m yacht with the money.

De la Torre was once feted as a business genius who would "disrupt" healthcare. But as Steward's private jet hops around "Corfu, Santorini, St. Maarten and Antigua" as its hospitals literally crumble, he's becoming less popular. In Massachusetts, politicians have railed against Steward and de la Torre (Governor Healey wants the company to leave the state "as soon as possible").

Florida, by contrast, is much more friendly to Steward. The state Health and Human Services Committee chair Randy Fine is an ardent admirer of hospital privatization and is currently campaigning to sell off the last community hospital in Brevard County. The state inspectors are likewise remarkably tolerant of Steward's little peccadillos. The quasi-governmental agency that inspects hospitals has awarded this shit-and-bat-filled, elevator-free, understaffed rotting hulk "A" grades for quality.

These inspectors jointly represent a mismatched assortment of private and public agencies, dominated by a nonprofit called Leapfrog, the brainchild of Harvard public-health prof Lucian Leape, who founded it in 2000. Leapfrog likes to tout its "transparent" assessment criteria, and Steward are experts at hitting those criteria, spending the exact minimum to tick every box that Leapfrog inspectors use as proxies for overall quality and safety.

This is a pretty great example of Goodhart's Law: "every measurement eventually becomes a target, whereupon it ceases to be a good measurement":

https://xkcd.com/2899/

But despite Steward's increasingly furious creditors and its decaying facilities, the company remains bullish on its ability to continue operations. Medical Properties Trust – the real estate investment trust that is nominally a separate company from Steward – recently hosted a conference call to reassure Wall Street investors that it would be a going concern. When a Bank of America analyst asked MPT's CFO how this could possibly be, given the facility's dire condition and Steward's degraded state, the CFO blithely assured him that the company would get bailouts: "We own hospitals no one wants to see closed."

That's the thing about PE and health-care. The looters who buy out every health-care facility in a region understand that this makes them too big to fail: no matter how dangerous the companies they drain become, local governments will continue to prop them up. Look at dialysis, a market that's been cornered by private equity rollups. Today, if you need this lifesaving therapy, there's a good chance that every accessible facility is owned by a private equity fund that has fired all its qualified staff and ceased sterilizing its needles. Otherwise healthy people who visit these clinics sometimes die due to operator error. But they chug along, because no dialysis clinics is worse that "dialysis clinics where unqualified sadists sometimes kill you with dirty needles":

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-dirty-business-of-clean-blood

The bad news is that private equity has thoroughly colonized the entire medical system. They took hospitals, fired the doctors, then took over the doctors' groups that provided outsource staff to the hospital:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/04/a-mind-forever-voyaging/#prop-bets

It's illegal for private equity companies to own doctors' practices (doctors have to own these), but they obfuscated the crime with a paper-thin pretext that they got away with despite its obvious bullshittery:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

The financier who decides whether you live or die depends on an algorithm that literally sets a tolerable level of preventable deaths for the patients trapped in the practice:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/05/any-metric-becomes-a-target/#hca

Private equity also took over emergency rooms and boobytrapped them with "surprise billing" – junk fees that ran to thousands of dollars that you had to pay even if the hospital was in network with your insurer. They made billions from this, and spent a many millions from that booty keeping the scam alive with scare ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity

The whole health stack is colonized by private equity-backed monopolies. Even your hospital bed!

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/05/hillrom/#baxter-international

Then there's residential care. Private equity cornered many regional markets on nursing homes and turned them into slaughterhouses, places where you go to die, not live:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds

The palliative care sector is also captured by private equity. PE bosses hire vast teams of fast-talking salespeople who con vulnerable older people into entering an end-of-life system before they are ready to die. Thanks to loose regulation, the nation is filled with fake hospices that can rake in millions from Medicare while denying all care to their patients (hospice patients don't get life-extending medication or procedures, by definition):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

If you survive this long enough, Medicare eventually tells the hospice that you're clearly not dying and you get kicked off their rolls. Now you have to go through the lengthy bureaucratic nightmare of convincing the system – which was previously informed that you were at death's door – that you are actually viable and need to start getting care again (good luck with that).

If that kills you, guess what? Private equity has rolled up funeral homes up and down the country, and they will scam your survivors just as hard as the medical system that killed you did:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/09/high-cost-of-dying/#memento-mori

The PE sector spent more than a trillion dollars over the past decade buying up healthcare companies, and it has trillions more in "dry powder" allocated for further medical acquisitions. Why not? As the CFO of Medical Properties Trust told that Bank of America analyst last week, when you "own hospitals no one wants to see closed." you literally can't fail, no matter how many people you murder.

The PE sector is a reminder that the crimes people commit for money far outstrip the crimes they commit for ideology. Even the most ideological killers are horrified by the murders their profit-motivated colleagues commit.

Last year, Tkacic wrote about the history of IG Farben, the German company that built Monowitz, a private slave-labor camp up the road from Auschwitz to make the materiel it was gouging Hitler's Wehrmacht on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

Farben bought the cheapest possible slaves from Auschwitz, preferentially sourcing women and children. These slaves were worked to death at a rate that put Auschwitz's wholesale murder in the shade. Farben's slaves died an average of just three months after starting work at Monowitz. The situation was so abominable, so unconscionable, that the SS officers who provided outsource guard-labor to Monowitz actually wrote to Berlin to complain about the cruelty.

The Nuremberg trials are famous for the Nazi officers who insisted that they were "just following order" but were nonetheless executed for their crimes. 24 Farben executives were also tried at Nuremberg, where they offered a very different defense: "We had a fiduciary duty to our shareholders to maximize our profits." 19 of the 24 were acquitted on that basis.

PE is committed to an ideology that is far worse than any form of racial animus or other bias. As a sector, it is committed to profit above all other values. As a result, its brutality knows no bounds, no decency, no compassion. Even the worst crimes we commit for hate are nothing compared to the crimes we commit for greed.

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/2024/02/28/5000-bats/retaliation#charnel-house

[snivyartjpeg]

Yuma Month Day 26 - Role Swap

god i was excited for this one. it first started off as a joke, but the more i thought about it, the more interesting this swap became. so here's my massive lore dump of changes that'd happen in the story beneath the cut (spoiler warning):

i think, fundamentally, yuma and yakou are very similar characters. they're both very protective and kindhearted, with a strong sense of justice and a penchant for attracting terrible luck. because of this, some things would remain the same, such as the NDA's dynamics with their doormat chief as well amnesia!yakou's massive unpaid intern energy. i think yakou would be pretty similar to how he behaved in the light novel- a bit more optimistic and naive, like yuma. but there are two key differences between them that'd make this a different story, especially in ch 4: yuma has a forte, and yakou is very selfish. so here's some changes:

yakou's wife is his shinigami now, as you can see, while shinigami is yuma's dead wife. i think mrs furio would act cooler than shinigami. she'd still be playful, but she takes her job more seriously. also she hands yakou the solution keys normally without throwing up. they still have to do the dance and mouth sword thing tho. and the other stuff. that's just death god protocol

shinigami (or in this case the unnamed Mrs. Kokohead but i will still be calling her shinigami for convenience sake) was a scientist at amaterasu who studied forensics and thanatology instead of regenerative medicine. this also means that the pill she gives zombie yuma is not going to bring him back, but instead grant the zombie homunculi a peaceful, painless, but permanent death

speaking of zombie yuma, he's the homunculus now! yakou is 100% human and also doesnt have a forte. he's still number one, but instead of having a forte he's just that good at solving mysteries

yes this means makoto looks like yakou now. sorry makotoheads. i think he'd have really long, shaggy hair dyed to be like. idk. black or something. also he's more clean shaven bc stubble with a mask on is a sensory nightmare

yuma still cant cook. he subsists entirely on takeout, meat buns, black coffee, and beer. he's still in a lot of debt and under a lot of stress and his personality is essentially "what if canon number one just gave up"

he doesn't smoke though. he tried once and got into the worst coughing fit

imma say it right now. kurumi is not a love interest. yakou likely disguises himself as a faculty member instead (also i think one of the teachers gets a crush on fem yakou bc i just know she'd be hot)

ANYWAY what about chapter 4? im SO glad you asked! because here's where things get spicy!

so, lets start with the dead wife. shinigami catches onto huesca's inhumane research and she's just as adamant about bringing the truth to light as she always is. she blows the whistle, so he blows her up. yuma investigates, but they dont let him look any further, yada yada, yuma stews in his misery for five years

yomi sends in the evidence to motivate yuma to kill huesca, and makoto lets it happen because a dead huesca would be convenient. he even introduces the hitman, fully expecting yuma to make use of him

yuma doesnt. in fact, he wants to kill huesca with his own hands. and now that these detectives are here, he can do it and even return alive. the thing is, he doesn't want to put them in danger, so he chooses to do almost everything alone (sound familiar?)

his plan is simple:

ask desuhiko for a peacekeeper uniform. desuhiko trusts him enough to take "i want to investigate kanai ward's ultimate secret by infiltrating their ranks" as an answer. he does, however, let yakou know about this as an offhand comment before the mystery ever begins

hold fubuki's hand. it doesnt really matter how. she'll gladly allow it because she's fubuki. he stores her time powers and heads out the sub. yakou also learns this as an offhand comment played off as a joke (maybe fubuki affectionately comments about how she never expected the chief's hands to be so soft... idk. there has to be some way for yakou to have this as a future clue)

use his peacekeeper status to sneak into amaterasu HQ and demand a functioning ama-pal from that one creepy researcher

use ama-pal + fubuki's borrowed powers to bypass huesca's security. sneak the bot past the hard-of-hearing doctor and press the button to shut off security

this would probably alert huesca, but since the doctor never received a warning, yuma has enough time to rush in and stab him before he realizes what's going on

leave HQ while still in uniform, dispose of the disguise once he's safe, and return to the NDA like nothing happened. success!

soooo.... yakou, on that same day, decides to investigate amaterasu HQ with makoto

all the while, vivia has his suspicions about yuma's actions and keeps an eye on him in spectral mode. he... basically witnessed the whole thing, so he gets up off his ass and decides to follow yakou to the lab because he has a Very Bad Feeling about this

just like canon, he senses the death god and deduces that our protag has been killing off murderers, and so he wants to protect his chief as well as his peace and quiet (his dynamic with yuma would be the same as his dynamic with yakou, since it's entirely believable for yuma to treat vivia with the same kindness yakou did)

yakou tries to speak to huesca, but surprise! security is disabled and he's dead in the lab! no one else at amaterasu liked huesca enough to check on him, so yakou and makoto are the first ones at the scene of the crime. yakou, of course, decides to start investigating this murder

vivia somehow sneaks into the lab (dont ask me how) and confronts yakou, threatening him with his boxcutter and adamantly imploring him to stop pursuing this particular mystery in the same way he did yuma in canon. unfortunately, this attracts attention, and now they're in trouble (maybe even yomi's there to fetch his files). at this point, yakou has enough solution keys, so he panics and goes right into the labyrinth (and maybe others can enter for another reason that isnt coalescence idk)

so... they go in the labyrinth... vivia tries to stop him every step of the way, until the answer is right in front of them

yakou kills yuma with his own hands. there's no stab wounds or toxic gas to leave any doubt. yakou begins to question what good his justice really does. it doesnt even save them from their predicament, just like the other deaths. instead, makoto ex machina comes in to save them, and hands yakou a small black box

when they return to the agency, everyone is heartbroken over their chief, who seemingly died out of nowhere. fubuki tried rewinding time, but to no avail. halara tried everything to wake him up, knowing it's futile. desuhiko stood aside, feeling completely helpless. and yakou and vivia return looking like they just came back from hell

they barely get the chance for a funeral before the knockout gas trap activates... you know the rest

AAAAND SCENE! so that's my extremely long winded lore dump about this au. i thought about it Way Too Much but god it's so interesting to me. i love these characters and swapping them was immensely fun