bleak

I can’t help but recall the story of Monowitz, the for-profit concentration camp the massive German chemicals conglomerate IG Farben built in 1942 four and a half miles from Auschwitz, after its plans to staff a rubber plant with slaves marched in from the camps each morning proved too costly and inefficient to deliver a speedy return on investment. So Farben bought 25,000 slave laborers, many of them children who were cheaper, to build a new camp next to the rubber plant, with even tighter living quarters and more inhumane treatment than the rest of Auschwitz.

And while the operation was a colossal failure in its stated goal of producing synthetic rubber, it generated robust dividends for Farben’s subsidiary Degesch, from which the SS began to purchase a special odorless version of the insecticide Zyklon B for the purposes of accelerating and optimizing its murder of those too weak to work.

“I wouldn’t let myself sleep. I felt selfish going to bed,” a former PetSmart associate told Vice. “But at my job, animals passed away so often, there was nothing you could do.”

PetSmart could not afford to treat or euthanize or even cremate its pets, even though sales jumped more than 60 percent and gross margins soared to unprecedented heights during the pandemic, because its owners had legally stolen $30 billion from the balance sheet, buying the company with a minuscule down payment, siphoning off cash and assets into its own pockets, and forcing the retailer to submit to a punishing payback plan that sucks every last penny the stores generate into usurious interest payments.

For some reason, we allow the ownership class to call this form of legalized embezzlement “private equity.”

KKR wanted to extract its own payday from a chain of group homes for developmentally disabled adults that had already been sucked dry by a Canadian private equity firm, so it slashed pay to $8 an hour and told workers that it would have them arrested for patient abandonment if they attempted to leave “early” from open-ended “shifts” that lasted as long as 36 hours.

the company broke “from the conventional economics of slavery in which slaves are traditionally treated as capital equipment to be maintained and serviced for optimum use and depreciated over a normal lifespan. Instead, I.G. reduced slave labor to a consumable raw material, a human ore from which the mineral of life was systematically extracted.”

Once upon a time, and I know Massar is old enough to remember this, everyone called them “corporate raiders.”

The term originally surfaced in the 1950s to describe a comparatively benign class of predator 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.

Drexel was a pioneer in trading what is now called “distressed” debt, the illiquid but high-yield bonds of corporations that had fallen on hard times. Milken’s innovation involved creating enough demand for those bonds to sustain a distressed-debt assembly line, linking the raiders Black called “the Robber Barons of the future” with steady access to junk bonds that Milken in turn sold to corrupt money managers. Black further optimized the supply chain by “inventing” the “highly confident letter” that Drexel would furnish to favored raiders, assuring the boards of companies they sought to acquire that the brokerage was “highly confident” it would be able to swiftly finance the buyout with junk bonds, secured by the company’s assets.

Through these innovations, corporate raiders used junk bonds in the 1980s to acquire more than 2,000 companies, approximately one-fifth of which would file for bankruptcy within ten years.

We believe it is fiscal insanity to let the country go on with this phenomenon because the whole country loses. Behind the smokescreen of doing good for shareholders and punishing stupid, entrenched management and using the magic cloak of the words “free market” a small group is systematically extracting the equity from corporations and replacing it with debt, and incidentally accumulating major wealth.

Black refused to cooperate, instead demanding a $16 million cash bonus and hastening the bank’s chaotic 1989 collapse, whereupon he proceeded to his second act as a billionaire re-raiding dozens of companies he’d junked at Drexel.

Plunderers devotes a sickening six pages to Black’s reign of terror at the luggage maker 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, which was ultimately delisted in 2003. By that point, in one of the most monumental gaslights of all time, the corporate raiders had rebranded their business “private equity,” after the very first thing they looted from every sad company they conquered.

Black seemed to wield absolute control over the insurance commissioner—now California congressman John Garamendi—as he would countless politicians from former Connecticut governor John Rowland to former president Donald Trump, even as he inexplicably wired $188 million to convicted pedophile sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and profitably bankrupted countless companies along the way.

Regulators proved incapable of enforcing consumer protections or fraud statutes that might threaten PE profit margins. Perhaps most maddeningly, PE firms are routinely immunized from the possibility of private-sector consequences for their profiteering, as 38 state legislatures did most recently in 2020 when they passed blanket liability shields on nursing homes and hospitals for the duration of the COVID-19 emergency.

via their continued empty promises to eliminate the “carried interest loophole,” through which private equity executives avoid income tax by misclassifying their income as capital gains.

Blackstone founder Steve Schwarzman, who declared in response to Barack Obama’s empty promise in 2010 to impose income taxes on billionaires: “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”

I sometimes wonder if this is actually a war, with our loophole-enablers in elected office mere collaborationists, and the only reasonable response to the plunderers’ annexation of our every institution being some kind of armed revolution.

the executives’ defense attorneys reasoned that no company man of any race or creed would have acted differently from their clients in the face of the “Bolshevist danger.”

As Borkin would later explain, the Farben executives “were among the industrial elite of Germany, not Hitler’s black- and brown-shirted hooligans. They represented a combination of scientific genius and commercial acumen unique in a private industrial enterprise.” The reality that they also represented the most staggering and unprecedented evil the human race had ever known was somehow … not a thing.

Following his four-year sentence, the old Farben CEO would be named to the board of Deutsche Bank.

Many will wonder why these firms, if they are so concerned with their images as benevolent world-shapers (in Mayne’s words) and stewards of the environment, would even take on a project as obscene as The Line. The answer, of course, is money and fame. Indeed, the participation of the likes of Morphosis and Adjaye Associates makes a lot more sense if one dispels the notion of the architect as an artist or artisan, devoted to crafting lovely little things at a critical remove from society. Thom Mayne, David Adjaye, and all the others are not individual great men and women of the arts. They are at their core bosses: capitalists running firms employing the thousands of often well-meaning people lured into the field by architecture schools and the promise that they, too, could one day have their name on a building, only to instead be subjugated to ten hour days of drudgery and the other myriad indignities of wage labor. And so it goes.