Book Review: Veteran journalist explores impact of private equity industry on US society
Megan Greenwell was the editor in chief of Deadspin when it was acquired in 2019 by a Boston-based private equity firm. After three months of watching her new bosses make what seemed to her to be boneheaded decisions, she quit. Two months later, the staff followed her out the door. Within five years, the once popular online sports magazine known for its irreverent reporting had been sold to an obscure Maltese website.
Stunned by what she witnessed, the veteran journalist was determined to get to the bottom of a little understood, lightly regulated industry that owns hospitals, day care centers, supermarket chains, newspapers, commercial and residential real estate, and much more. The big names are Blackstone, the Carlyle Group, Apollo Global Management, KKR and Cerberus Capital Management. But what, she wondered, do they actually do?
The result of her inquiry is 'Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,' a deeply reported, briskly paced and highly disturbing account of how the private equity industry has 'reshaped the American economy to serve its own interests, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes, and their sense of security.'
Instead of focusing on the macroeconomic level, she tells the story through four remarkable people whose lives were upended after private equity acquisitions. Liz was a Toys R Us floor supervisor when the storied retailer was acquired by Mitt Romney's company, Bain Capital, and other investors and eventually went under, laying off 33,000 employees without severance pay.
Roger practiced medicine in rural Wyoming when private equity acquired his hospital and gutted services. Natalia was working for local Gannett newspapers at a time when the chain eliminated more than half its staff after years of private equity ownership. And Loren, an affordable housing organizer, escaped public housing only to end up in a mold- and rodent-infested apartment complex in northern Virginia owned by a private equity firm on the other side of the continent.
Greenwell has written an essential guide to an industry that operates largely in the shadows, donates generously to Democrats and Republicans in Congress to keep it that way, and has contributed substantially to the hollowing out of the American dream. Despite her immersion in this predatory world, she remains surprisingly optimistic. 'Every year,' she writes, 'a few more people like Liz, Roger, Natalia and Loren start fighting back.'
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