Bengals are lone vote against PE ownership of NFL teams.

[I_C_Deadpeople]

1 minute ago, Jamie_B said:

 

Similar happened to Red Lobster

All you can eat shrimp killed Red Lobster lol (not that funny, it kind of did). Not really apples to apples comparing a restaurant chain to the NFL. 

 

Mike Brown would bankrupt red Lobster as well.

[Jamie_B]

1 minute ago, I_C_Deadpeople said:

All you can eat shrimp killed Red Lobster lol (not that funny, it kind of did). Not really apples to apples comparing a restaurant chain to the NFL. 

 

Mike Brown would bankrupt red Lobster as well.

 

Thats what got blamed. 

 

That's not what happened.

 

How private equity rolled Red Lobster (nbcnews.com)

[|SF2|]

39 minutes ago, Jungletiger said:

 

I doubt it will be that hard.

What are you babbling about??? You act like they can take 10% of the stadium and players and leave. They are buying equity. To pull out, they have to sell their equity. They don’t get to load sections 150 and 151 into a moving truck with goal posts and walk away. 

[|SF2|]

42 minutes ago, I_C_Deadpeople said:

All you can eat shrimp killed Red Lobster lol (not that funny, it kind of did). Not really apples to apples comparing a restaurant chain to the NFL. 

 

Mike Brown would bankrupt red Lobster as well.

Mike Brown is worth $4.1 billion dollars. His team has been in the AFC Championship 2 of the last 3 years. Team is the only one that consistently beats KC.  This is the same shit that made me leave MikeBrownSucks.Com. Same shit that makes me vomit when idiots discuss politics.  The inability to give someone credit if they do something good.

 

You seem like a guy who hopes we go 7-10 so you can tell me “I told you so.”

[UncleEarl]

1 hour ago, I_C_Deadpeople said:

All you can eat shrimp killed Red Lobster lol (not that funny, it kind of did). Not really apples to apples comparing a restaurant chain to the NFL. 

 

Mike Brown would bankrupt red Lobster as well.

Didn’t the firm that owned Red Lobster also own the company selling them the shrimp?

[Homer_Rice]

On 8/29/2024 at 9:42 AM, BlackJesus said:

So instead of sending these rapacious parasites to the guillotine live on pay-per-view like they deserve, we are going to let them ruin the only reason to wake up on Sunday. 😡 

 

They already destroyed childhood nostalgia with what they did to Toys-R-Us ... Now these vultures want to sacrifice the 'golden calf' that is the NFL. 

 

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.

 

 

7 hours ago, SF2 said:

You are talking about publicly traded companies for one and with only 10% ownership they couldn’t do any of this scary stuff you are predicting.    
 

Also, there are plenty of quality private equity firms out there funding startups with PRIVATE not public capital.  Yeah, there are some Richard Gere type firms out there but I would think most owners wouldn’t do business with them.  
 

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.

[Randle P McMurphy]

3 hours ago, SF2 said:

Mike Brown is worth $4.1 billion dollars. His team has been in the AFC Championship 2 of the last 3 years. Team is the only one that consistently beats KC.  This is the same shit that made me leave MikeBrownSucks.Com. Same shit that makes me vomit when idiots discuss politics.  The inability to give someone credit if they do something good.

 

You seem like a guy who hopes we go 7-10 so you can tell me “I told you so.”

 

Same reason I bailed on MikeBrownSucks.com  It got tiring as hell!  Any time politics come up, I usually just say the "right wing" and the

"left wing" are connected to the same bird dumbass!!  In other words, "Lets keep the peasants arguing amongst themselves while we fuck

everyone of them!  

[Homer_Rice]

2 hours ago, UncleEarl said:

Didn’t the firm that owned Red Lobster also own the company selling them the shrimp?

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.

[UncleEarl]

44 minutes ago, Homer_Rice said:

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.

The process may be different, but it’s the same old game of vertical integration ala Gould, Vanderbilt, etc.   

[T-Dub]

1 hour ago, Homer_Rice said:

"I'm kidding, but what if you forget to weigh the meat when it gets here?"

 

 

 

Always a joke until it isn't, & then the humor disappears in a hurry.  Next it's "what if you didn't check it at all" and "what's a little horse meat mixed in?"

 

Give them an inch...

[Homer_Rice]

On 8/30/2024 at 6:23 PM, UncleEarl said:

The process may be different, but it’s the same old game of vertical integration ala Gould, Vanderbilt, etc.   

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

[Homer_Rice]

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

[BronxBengal]

On 9/1/2024 at 6:43 PM, Homer_Rice said:

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

very good non-football link and conversation.  Very accurate link and very true.  I am an engineer close to retirement who has worked for a couple of Fortune 500 companies.  Reason I started with these companies was they were growing due to innovation and creating technology resulting in improvement in lifestyles for all employees  The companies were ran by individuals who had solid backgrounds in STEM majors like engineering, science or math.  The cultures were awesome because of personal and professional growth.  Reason I left was these innovative supporting executives retired or left and replaced by type of individuals with similar backgrounds described in the link.  Consequently the companies either got sold or lost major market share resulting lifestyle changes for employees while executives and hedge funds managers pocketed multi millions.  In the meantime, the employees were treated like walking dollar signs and you didn’t know if the person in the office next to you would be there the next day.  A very repressive environment . Yes, things are shifting and my views have change drastically over the past 35 years because of what I have experienced and seen.  I have traveled all over the world and this type of culture is infiltrating other countries that I never thought it would happen like Japan and Korea.  Their culture was to protect the employees but this is also changing.
 

 Quoting Peter Parker’s uncle in Spider-Man, “with great power comes great responsibility.”  Unfortunately, I do not believe the people in power feel obligated of having responsibility for others regardless if it is political or corporate America.  We all are pawns to some type of chess game being played out in the modern world.

 

 

[Jamie_B]

14 hours ago, Homer_Rice said:

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

 

For those of you who like to complain about how Mike Brown screws over the taxpayers with his "sweetheart deal" on the stadium. You really need to read this and how much worse things could get for all other cities with teams and then think about how Mike was the only one to vote no on it.