Homer_Rice

I was on my way to the geedunk for some pogey bait when I saw your comment. There are no mother-grabbing Generals in my fucking Navy. Your fucking Liberty is cancelled!

An article from a respected journo: Are You Ready for Some (Private Equity) Football!: The greediest owners in pro sports are now welcoming in the greed kings of high finance

Lol. Some of you guys are like reeds in a hurricane. Two days ago the Bengals were going to the Super Bowl. Today all they deserve are matches and gasoline. Patience is a virtue. Give this year's team a chance to find its groove. Two months from now it'll be: "We're going to the Super Bowl." Lol.

Oh, I don't know. Seems to me that there is plenty of ream to go around. And around. And around. Look, ya'll, this team will get better.

"All the King's Horses and all the King's Men..."

The Eagles should have felt right at home. Camden is just a bridge away!

Probably some kind of privacy situation. Do a WHOIS lookup and see if there are commonalities between the domains. I sold off a domain some years ago and it was a common (for that niche) name. I wanted to make sure that it did not go to a certain organization and was told by the broker that acting as an intermediary was partly designed to prevent this sort of "privacy" violation. I imagine this is true, but the intermediary also wants to arbitrage the deals, too.

Just me, but if he does that, then I'd finish the year with him per contract obligation, then trade him because he failed his teammates for x# of weeks until he came in. But I don't think he stays out very long.

Dr. Oerter was a very interesting person. I felt privileged that he shared some stuff with me and a few other veterans there at Miami. He was a little wary of us, being Vietnam and (V-era) types. I think the ethic was different in his mind between the two wars, but still he opened up a little. As for being buried in Oxford, I suspect that it is simply a matter of where he felt most comfortable in his professional (and personal?) life. I know that other history professors looked up to him a great deal. I've only been back to Miami twice since I left in the early 80s. It is a pretty place. I used to spend a fair amount of time over at Heuston Woods, sometimes camping, sometimes getting wasted and pretending we were there for camping!

Not exactly, but we could learn a lot from studying that period in history, if we wanted. And add in horizontal integration a la Rockefeller and oil. That tendency towards monopoly is also rearing its ugly head now, too. What we are experiencing now is a different kind of transition of our economy. While it does have similar consolidation of wealth like the Gilded Age, it is different because of changes in leadership in both the corporate and political classes. Here's a brief look into that: It's unbelievable how many dynamic companies broke their streaks of engineer-CEOs for the first time in the 2000s

That's one example of how this stuff works. Buy weight in the company. Use that as leverage to force the corporation to "do business" in certain ways. These ways often include stuff like selling off real estate (to another company owned by the PE firm) and then forcing the corporation to pay rent. Or force the company to use some vendors and not others. Lots of stuff like this happens in the wild, wonderful world of private equity. An anecdote. It's a good, if small and crude, example of the sorts of hijinks one encounters in the ethically-challenged business world. Right out of college I was a genuine activist for a couple of years. To support myself, I took a job as a buyer for a large, semi-upscale hotel in Center City, Philly. Good deal for me--start in the wee hours, end early in the afternoon. Lots of time left over for rabble rousing! My standard practice when it came to food was to put up our needs to a selected set of bidders (meat, produce, seafood, dry goods etc...) It took some vetting to get on the list of three or four companies I would work with in each category. There were three busy restaurants and a pretty hefty and well-booked banquet operation. So, while this was small apples, it was a nice chunk of change for the niche we occupied. Vendors would change from time to time and once I needed a new vendor to add to the list. One of the new trial vendors had a rep that fronted for both meat and produce companies. So, in the interest of efficiency, I decided to give him a try. At first, his bids were competitive enough and he got a small slice of the pie. After a while, though, he started to try to nudge me in certain directions. Saying things like, "What would it take for me to get all your produce business?" and "I'm kidding, but what if you forget to weigh the meat when it gets here?" Now, I already knew that this guy was mob-connected, lots of stuff in Philly was then (and may well be now, 40 years later.) Of course, what eventually happened is that I stopped doing business with the guy and those firms altogether. I think the lesson is pretty clear: don't engage with "ethically-challenged" companies. It is only asking for trouble.

Come now, BJ. Watching rapacious parasites get what they deserve ought to be free. After all, the US is chock full of communists and socialists and that's what they would want. Hehe. I'm talking about two things really. The first is the long history of the behavior of PE firms. A leopard cannot change its spots. The second is more broad and has to do with the financialization of the economy. Also a long term trend. How many millions of families have been fucked by this, now condoned, behavior over the past fifty years? You are right about one thing. It takes two to tango. The de-industrialization of America can be considered as one great asset stripping operation. And the shortsightedness and greed that brought that about is not to be only laid at the feet of PE firms. Corporate boards all over this land have made the looting possible. First they came for your "Bread" and we didn't do anything about it. Now they are coming for the "Circuses," too.

It's the modus operandi of a lot of these firms. Check out the history of Leveraged Buy Outs (LBOs), tons of example of how companies are bought, stripped of assets, loaded down by huge amounts of debt, and then, once these biggest bloodsuckers since Dracula have extracted all they can from their deliberate bust ups, they then dump the husk of what used to be a viable company. In fact, this is precisely what happened to Toys R Us. When KKR and Bain bought them out back at the beginning of the century, they loaded the company down with so much debt that T-R-Us could not remain competitive due to their debt service obligations. Prevented them from investing in the company itself. Now private equity has their fingers in a lot of pies and not all of their investments are "rip and run" projects. BUT, the role these companies played in turning our economy from a productive, let's build shit, foundation into a FIRE, let's be intermediate looters, economy is substantial. If Charlie Manson showed up at your door, would you invite him in for a beer?

If you are going to quote an article, please use quotation marks. Keeps the plagiarism down. I presume you mean Florio. And yes, he is wrong. Wouldn't be the first time. Doubt it'll be the last. From my perspective, I am just as proud of this vote cast by Blackburn as I am of the times the Bengals went to the Super Bowl. She gets it. I bet she could give us an earful on the difficulties introducing private equity funds into the finances of the NFL. I'm loving the nod to the old school here. Of course, I'm still the same guy who stirred up a lot of shit back in 1990, when I characterized Michael Milken's behavior at his sentencing as "Blubbering." Fun Days then. Sadly we are so far up the neoliberal river without a paddle that most people can't even put two and two together anymore. Just my two bits. A little more: NFL wants a cut of private equity investment profits

Not gonna get very far until you start asking the question, "Why?" Good book to get: