About 20%.
"UC investments in entities with ties to weapons makers, #Israel, #Blackrock, #Blackstone and 24 other companies targeted by divestment proponents amount to about $32 billion of #UC's $175 billion...
"Stephen Schwarzman’s income from Blackstone Group fell below $1bn in 2023, a decline of more than 30 per cent from the previous year, as a slowdown in dealmaking made it harder for the world’s largest private equity group to sell investments for a profit"
Beautiful and captivating decorations around this magnificent statue of Lord Shiva as the cosmic dancer, Natraj, which embodies both beauty and devotion.
Wealthy #plutocrat#landlord who enriches himself on the labour of others criticises workers (during a cost of living crisis & housing affordability crisis) for wanting to save money.
Why is this news? Why hasn't the journalist asked some obvious questions to provide a little context for this bear-defecates-in-woods story?
how much does #Blackstone gain from leeching off the labour of their myriad tenants?
how much unpaid overtime and other forms of wage theft is facilitated by working from an office?
are workers more likely to fail to complete their contractual work while working from home, or is this "they don't work as hard" merely a euphemism for the extraction of unpaid extra work?
how much has the pandemic further shifted power away from workers and towards plutocrats?
what do the tenants from whom Blackstone extracts its billions think of working from home?
to what extent is Blackstone a significant contributor to the very housing/cost of living crises that are making the financial situation of workers ever more precarious?
If end-stage capitalism has a motto, it's this: "Stop hitting yourself." The great failure of "voting with your wallet" is that you're casting ballots in a one party system (The Capitalism Party), and the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes.
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Aramark used funds from a custodian's union to bid against that union's members for contracts, in an attempt to break the union and force the workers to take a paycut to $11/hour:
Made some shrimp fried (cauliflower) rice for dinner tonight on the flattop! The Husband doesn’t even care that it’s not real rice! He damn near took his plate and hid like a squirrel 😂😂😂.
It's been 21 years since #BillWillingham launched #Fables, his 110-issue, wide-ranging, delightful and brilliantly crafted author-owned comic series that imagines that the folkloric figures of the world's fairytales are real people, who live in a secret society whose internal struggles and intersections with the mundane world are the source of endless drama.
(The Hachette story has a happy ending; I took the book back from them and sold it to #Blackstone, who brought out a new expanded edition to accompany a DRM-free audiobook and ebook):
A Scotsman and business writer named Bertie Charles Forbes founded Forbes magazine in 1917 and was famous for epigrams on the business of life. [..] Forbes died in 1954, long before the current batch of plunderers had begun amassing their fortunes and depleting the treasure of others. But he knew their kind when he said: “The man who has won millions at the cost of his conscience is a failure.”
Last Nov, publishing got excellent news: the planned merger of #PenguinRandomHouse (the largest publisher in the history of human civilization) with its immediate competitor #SimonAndSchuster would not be permitted, thanks to the #FTC's deftly argued case against the deal:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Heard of the "surprise billing epidemic"? That's where you go to a hospital that's covered by your insurer, only to discover - after the fact - that the #EmergencyRoom is operated by a separate, PE-backed company that charges you thousands for junk fees. KKR and #Blackstone invented this scam, then funneled millions into fighting the #NoSurprisesAct, which more-or-less killed it:
KKR sinks its fangs in every part of the economy, thanks to the vast fortunes it amassed from its investors, ripped off from its customers, and fraudulently obtained from the public purse. After the pandemic, KKR scooped up hundreds of companies at firesale prices:
Asset Management Firms Are Gaining Power Over Housing, Hospitals, Water and More
Brett Christophers explains how asset managers like #BlackRock and #Blackstone have come to “own the world.”
As many as 31,000 homes have been taken off the long-term housing market and converted to short-term rentals in Canada, according to Wachsmuth’s 2020 study.
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