Fresh audio product: Trump’s strategic vision, turning the executive branch into a PE firm
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): December 11, 2025 Anatol Lieven analyzes the Trump national security strategy • Susannah Glickman on the transformation of the US government into a private equity firm (NYRB interview here)
fresh audio product: NATO summit, private equity
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): July 3, 2025 Lily Lynch, author of this report, on the NATO summit • Megan Greenwell, author of Bad Company, on the depredations of private equity
Fresh audio product: financiers on university boards; the politics of climate
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): April 10, 2025 Charlie Eaton and Alina Gibadulina on the increasing prominence of hedge fund and private equity titans on elite university boards (paper here) • Malcolm Harris, author of What’s Left, on a trio of political approaches to the climate crisis
Fresh audio product: the bankers’ club and how to bust it, the problem with immediacy
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): February 15, 2024 Gerald Epstein, author of Busting the Bankers’ Club, on the finance racket and how to transform it • Anna Kornbluh, author of Immediacy, on our sped-up, unmediated cultural eternal present
The private equity racket
This is the edited version of a talk I gave at New York City political education event on private equity, December 2, 2023. My fellow panelists were Kim Phillips-Fein and Holden Taylor. Video is here. You’ve always got to start somewhere, so I think I’ll start as the 19th century was turning into the 20th. As the scale and technical complexity of production increased, the previously existing world of businesses that were run either as sole proprietorships or small partnerships were inadequate to the task. They gave way to what would become… Read More
Fresh audio product
Just added to my radio archive (click on date for link): March 3, 2022 Anatol Lieven on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine • Alyssa Giachino and Derek Seidman, among the authors of this report, on private equity and fossil fuels
Bain actually loves Dems
All good Democrats are busily hating on Bain Capital right now. What they’re forgetting is how many Bain-affiliated political contributions have gone to Democrats. Plug the words “Bain Capital” into an OpenSecrets.org search and you learn that while Bain people have lovingly contributed to their former CEO’s presidential campaign, almost 3/4 of their contributions to other candidates, 72% to be precise, have gone to Democrats. That’s a higher percentage to Dems than the AFL-CIO! And among the top recipients are Dem headliners like Al Franken, Claire McCaskill, John Kerry, Mark Udall, Nancy Pelosi, and Sherrod… Read More
Leveraged speculators will save us!
And not just any band of leveraged speculators: handpicked members of the private equity elite operating with cheap government credit, and insured against losses! Others have criticized the Geithner bank rescue plan’s economic aspects in detail; no need to repeat all that here. I’ll just say that it strikes me as a very bad idea to set the thing up so that the government takes the lion’s share of any losses and the private investors, the lion’s share of any gains (if any). And it strikes me as fantastic that the dominant… Read More
LBO News from Doug Henwood 