#Blackstone

[mindcraftblocks]

blackstone(redo)

#blackstone #minecraft #minecraft blocks as people #mcblockppl #the jacket is still gilded's #nether blocks

[rakkun]

NANA

Happy birthday Nana Osaki <3

#nana manga #nana #manga #nana anime #nana osaki #hachi #nana komatsu #komatsu nana #nana icons #ai yazawa #trapnest #blackstone

[bajis2]

🩶

#nana #anime moodboard #indie moodboard #nana and hachi #nana anime #nana komatsu #nobuo terashima #takumi ichinose #vivian westwood #trapnest #ai yazawa #shin nana #nana and ren #nana osaki #reira serizawa #anime icon #anime manga #anime / manga #black moodboard #blackstone #shin #deftones #gothcore #yazawa ai #vivienne westwood #tv girl #radiohead #cigarrete #2000s core #2000s fashion

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Union pensions are funding private equity attacks on workers

On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

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.

During the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese state would bill the families of executed dissidents for the ammunition used to execute their loved ones:

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-the-Chinese-government-makes-the-families-of-executed-people-pay-for-the-cost-of-bullets

In end-stage capitalism, the dollars we spend to feed ourselves are used to capture the food supply and corrupt our political process:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

And the dollars we save for retirement are flushed into the stock market casino, a game that is rigged against us, where we are always the suckers at the table:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Everywhere and always, we are financing our own destruction. It's quite a Mr Gotcha moment:

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Now, anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. We are living through a broad, multi-front counter-revolution to Reaganomics and neoliberal Democratic Party sellouts. The FTC and DOJ Antitrust Division are dragging Big Tech and Big Meat and Big Publishing into court. We're seeing bans on noncompete clauses, and high-profile government enforcers are publicly pledging never to work for corporate law-firms when they quit public service:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/09/nein-nein/#everything-is-miscellaneous

And of course, there's the reinvigoration of the labor movement! Hot Labor Summer is now Perpetual Labor September, with 75,000 Kaiser workers walking out alongside the UAW, SAG-AFTRA and 2,350 other groups of workers picketing, striking or protesting:

https://striketracker.ilr.cornell.edu/

But capitalism still gets a lick in. Union pension plans are some of the most important investors in private equity funds. Your union pension dollars are probably funding the union-busting, child-labor-employing, civilization-destroying Gordon Gecko LARPers who are also evicting you from the rental they bought and turned into a slum, and will then murder you in a hospice that they bought and turned into a slaughterhouse:

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

Writing for The American Prospect, Rachel Phua rounds up the past, present and future of union pension funds backing private equity monsters:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-10-04-workers-funding-misery-private-equity-pension-funds/

Private equity and hedge funds have destroyed 1.3 million US jobs:

https://united4respect.org/press-release/people-who-work-at-walmart-sears-amazon-formerly-toys-r-us-more-join-forces-together-as-united-for-respect-2-2-2-2-5-3/

They buy companies and then illegally staff them with children:

https://www.dol.gov/newsroom/releases/whd/whd20230217-1

They lobby against the minimum wage:

https://pestakeholder.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Insire-Brands-memo-on-15-wage.pdf

They illegally retaliate against workers seeking to unionize their jobsite:

https://www.hoteldive.com/news/dc-hotel-workers-enlist-us-representatives-to-fight-sofitel-union-busting/650396/

And they couldn't do it without union pension funds. Public service union pensions have invested $650 million with PE funds. In 2001, the share of public union pensions invested in PE was 3.5%; today, it's 13%:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1B0vv26VEFmwtfw5ur6dSDMY8NftvZKij/

Giant public union funds like CalPERS are planning massive increases in their contributions to PE:

https://www.calpers.ca.gov/page/newsroom/calpers-news/2023/calpers-preliminary-investment-return-fiscal-year-2022-23

This results in some ghastly and ironic situations. 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:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-20/pension-fund-gains-mean-worker-pain-as-aramark-cuts-pay

Blackstone's investors include the California State Teachers Retirement System (CalSTRS). The PE ghouls who sucked Toys R Us dry were funded by Texas teachers.

Then there's KKR, one of the most rapacious predators of the PE world. Half of the investors in KKR's Global Infrastructure Investors IV fund are public sector pension funds. Those workers' money were spent to buy up Refresco (Arizona Iced Tea, Tropicana juices, etc), a transaction that immediately precipitated a huge spike in on-the-job accidents as KKR cut safety and increased tempo:

https://www.osha.gov/ords/imis/establishment.inspection_detail?id=1675674.015

Petsmart is the poster-child for PE predation. The company uses TRAPs ("TrainingRepaymentAgreementProvision") clauses to recreate indentured servitude, forcing workers to pay thousands of dollars to quit their jobs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/04/its-a-trap/#a-little-on-the-nose

Why would a Petsmart employee want to quit? Petsmart's PE owner is BC Partners, and under BC's management, workers have been forced to work impossible hours while overseeing cruel animal abuse, including starving sick animals to death rather than euthanizing them, and then being made to sneak them into dumpsters on the way home from work so Petsmart doesn't have to pay for cremation. 24 of BC Partners' backers are public pension funds, including CalSTRS and the NYC Employees' Retirement System:

https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/

PE buyouts are immediately followed by layoffs. One in five PE acquisitions goes bankrupt. Unions should not be investing in PE. But the managers of these funds defend the practice, saying they "facilitate dialog" with the PE bosses on workers' behalf.

This isn't total nonsense. Once upon a time, public pension fund managers put pressure on investees to force them to divest from Apartheid South Africa and tobacco companies. Even today, public pensions have successfully applied leverage to get fund managers to drop Russian investments after the invasion of Ukraine. And public pensions pulled out of the private prison sector, tanking the valuation of some of the largest players.

But there's no evidence that this leverage is being applied to pensions' PE billions. It's not like PE is a great deal for these pensions. PE funds don't reliably outperform the market, especially after PE bosses' sky-high fees are clawed back:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3623820

Pension funds could match or beat their PE returns by sticking the money in a low-load Vanguard index tracker. What's more, PE is getting worse, pioneering new scams like inflating the value of companies after they buy and strip-mine them, even though there's no reason to think anyone would buy these hollow companies at the price that the PE companies assign to them for bookkeeping purposes:

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2bstqfcskz9o72ospzlds/opinion/why-does-private-equity-get-to-play-make-believe-with-prices

To inject a little verisimilitude into this obvious fantasy, PE companies sell their portfolio companies to themselves at inflated prices, in a patently fraudulent shell-game:

https://www.ft.com/content/646d00f4-af5d-4267-a436-54fb3bc1697b

What's more, PE funds aren't just bad bosses, they're also bad landlords. PE-backed funds have scooped up an appreciable fraction of America's housing stock, transforming good rentals into slums:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/27/extraordinary-popular-delusions/#wall-street-slumlords

PE is really pioneering a literal cradle-to-grave immiseration strategy. First, they gouge you on your kids' birth:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/27/crossing-a-line/#zero-fucks-given

Then, they slash your wages and steal from your paycheck:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3465723

Then, they evict you from your home:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/05/vulture-capitalism/#distressed-assets

And then they murder you as part of a scam they're running on Medicare:

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

As the labor movement flexes its muscle, it needs to break this connection. Workers should not be paying for the bullet that their bosses put through their skulls.

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/2023/10/05/mr-gotcha/#no-ethical-consumption-under-capitalism

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#pluralistic #labor #pensions #finance #private equity #toys r us #Rachel Phua #kkr #bain capital #calpers #aramark #Private Equity Stakeholder Project #RefrescoArizona Iced Tea #CalSTRS #Roark Capital #child labor #blackstone #PSSI

[ih8gdlx]

#ai yazawa #shoujo #nana #nana manga #nana anime #nana komatsu #nana osaki #nana and hachi #nana and ren #blackstone

[follow-up-news]

An industrial cleaning company accused by federal investigators of hiring dozens of children to clean slaughterhouses during the graveyard shift has resolved the allegations with the U.S. Department of Labor, according to a federal court filing filed Tuesday morning.

As part of the consent order, Packers Sanitation Services Inc., or PSSI, will review and enhance its existing policies and training materials and hire a third-party consultant to conduct “quarterly child labor compliance training” and monitor the company’s compliance for three years. The company will also provide a new child labor provision in its contracts with clients and will notify the Labor Department as to how many employees it terminated as a result of its compliance with child labor laws.

Allegations of child labor at a slaughterhouse in Grand Island, Nebraska, date back to 2016, according to a previously unreported local police report obtained by NBC News. The report stated that an officer was called to the local middle school because a 14-year-old girl had “injuries to her hands.” The document shows that the allegations were investigated as “child abuse.”

The resolution comes about a month after the Department of Labor accused the company of employing at least 31 children on graveyard shifts in slaughterhouses in three states, where they were tasked with cleaning the killing floors and various machines — including meat and bone cutting saws and a grinding machine — according to the complaint, which noted that several children began their shifts at the facilities at 11 p.m. and worked until 5, 6 or 7 a.m, with some working up to six or seven days a week. At least three chiildren suffered chemical burns as a result of working in the slaughterhouses, according to that complaint.

According to court documents, the Labor Department identified as of Monday another 19 minors who PSSI employed at two additional facilities since last month’s filing, bringing the total number of minors who have worked for the company to at least 50 at five plants in three states.

In their complaint filed last month, federal officials said initial evidence indicates the company may also employ more children under similar conditions at 400 other sites across the country.

The company is owned by the private equity firm Blackstone, which took it over in 2018.

#child labor #Packers Sanitation Services #blackstone

[rafamonzo]

From the series : “Interpreting the Silent Artefacts” / R.Tanaka

http://rafamonzo.tumblr.com   / http://tanaka-clan.tumblr

#photography #black&white #experimental photography #altered landscape #experimental landscape #interpreting the silent artefacts #blackstone

[artifacts-archive]

Bird Figure

Ohio, Native North American, 1500-1000 BC (late Archaic)

“Bird stones,” are simple animal forms, often of birds but sometimes of other animals, created from hard, visually pleasing stones. They were often carved from materials with variations in them, such as banded shale, sandstone, granite, or others. Bird stones have been found throughout the upper Midwest and all along the east coast of the United States, and into Ontario Province in Canada. Some were found in fields, apparently unconnected to broader towns and settlement, but others have been found associated with Native American altars or graves. The function of these objects is not clear, and there have been many theories. Most examples, like this one, were pierced on the bottom of the form, to allow for tying them to something else. Some scholars believe that they were worn suspended on necklaces or as amulets, or perhaps placed in important locations to indicate clan affiliation. However, the most common theory about their use is that they were counterweights for the atlatl, a spear or dart-thrower. The bird stone would have helped hunters or warriors to throw projectiles much further than they could without the weighted atlatl.

#artifact #Native American #Ohio #archaic #sculpture #blackstone

[jhokey]

Doodle - Blackstone Furnace

During the 1.16 update, Minecraft added soul fire, hotter than regular fire. Despite adding torches, campfires, lanterns, etc., furnaces were strangely left out. Combining blackstone, soul sand, or soil for a stronger furnace would have been great.

#art #mineimator #render #minecraft #aesthetic #furnace #blackstone #soulfire

[quiverpaw]

blackclaw x stonefur..

blackclaw is a DICK to mistyfoot but i don't think he has anything against stonefur. still probably toxic as hell

#blackstone #my art #crackship series

[ophilosoraptoro]

A Message to Maui... The Evidence May Shock You

#maui wildfires #maui #hawaii #real estate #cover up #deep state #nwo #economy #propaganda #climate propaganda #climate hoax #climate change #directed energy weapon #government propaganda #lahaina #maui strong #police state #Blackstone #wall street #the great reset #you'll own nothing and be happy #marxism #communism #japan #china #california #forest fires #paradise California #russia #space weapons

[rakkun]

NANA OSAKI

#nana manga #nana #manga #nana anime #nana osaki #hachi #nana komatsu #komatsu nana #nana icons #ai yazawa #trapnest #blackstone #funny

[bajis2]

But you’ll never die, Ren.

#anime moodboard #nana #nana and hachi #nana anime #nana komatsu #nana osaki #black moodboard #indie moodboard #messy moodboard #nana and ren #ren honjo #2000s core #manga screenshots #manga cap #blackstone #trapnest #reira serizawa #vivienne westwood #vivian westwood #2000s fashion #2000s style #yazawa ai #ai yazawa #manga panel #manga quotes #takumi ichinose #nobuo terashima #deftones #goth #goth aesthetic

[elemonopq]

Edit by @khassan_kairtegi

#mecca #kaaba #mekkahmadinah #makkah #the system #allah #allahuakbar #islam #islamism #worldaround #kiswah #umrah #hajj #tawaf #Blackstone

[ih8gdlx]

#ai yazawa #shoujo #nana #nana manga #nana osaki #shoujo manga #manga art #blackstone #manga panel

[libraryofva]

Recent Acquisition - Ephemera Collection

Only people who do things get criticized. "It's Our Business to Protect Your Business." Nash Insurance Agency, Edwin B. Nash, J.W. Nash, Phone 49, Blackstone, Virginia

#blotter #vintage #advertising #Blackstone #VA #Virginia #insurance