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nando161mando · 4 months
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slyandthefamilybook · 4 months
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A NON-EXHAUSTIVE BUT NEVERTHELESS EXHAUSTING LIST OF NEO-NAZI AND WHITE SUPREMACIST DOGWHISTLES
since some of y'all apparently need a refresher course. as always, use your judement when deciding if it's a dogwhistle or just innocent usage of a number or symbol
NUMBERS
100% - 100 percent white
109 or 110 - A reference to the 109 countries that have expelled, in whole or in part, their Jewish populations. 110 refers to the hope that more countries will do so, usually specifically the United States. Often posted on its own as a reply, or phrased as a question (e.g. "If you were kicked out of 109 bars it's probably our fault")
1290 - A reference to the Edict of Expulsion of 1290, which expelled the Jewish population of England
13/50 or 13/52 or 13/90 - The supposed statistic that Black Americans make up 13% of the population yet commit 50% or 52% of violent crime, or 90% of interracial violence. Often posted on its own as a reply
14 - The Fourteen Words, a Neo-Nazi slogan
14/23 - A number representing the Southern Brotherhood, an Alabama prison gang
1488 - A combination of the Fourteen Words and Heil Hitler
C18 - Combat 18, a British neo-Nazi group
18 - The letters A (1) and H (8), standing for Adolf Hitler
21-2-12 - The Letters U (21), B (2), and 12 (L), standing for Union, Brotherhood, and Loyalty, the slogan of the Unforgiven, a Florida prison gang
23 - Often thrown up as a hand sign, with two fingers raised on one hand and three fingers raised on the other. Represents the letter W (23), standing for white
271,000 - A reference to the supposed fact that the Red Cross claimed only 271,000 people had been murdered in concentration camps. In reality, that number reported by the Red Cross only came from reports from 13 concentration camps (there were 23 main camps, plus a large number of smaller "satellite" camps)
88 - H (8) H (8), standing for Heil Hitler
9% - A number representing the percentage of the world's population that is white
SYMBOLS
((( ))) - Triple parentheses, or echo. Used by neo-Nazis to call out someone as Jewish
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Iron Cross - A German military decoration
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Sonnenrad (Sun Wheel)
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Reichsadler (Imperial Eagle) - A blocky, art-deco eagle facing to the side. Variants exist, some facing right, some facing left. The Parteiadler (Party Eagle) has a slightly different design. The Reichsadler is usually clutching a wreath with a swastika, although this is sometimes left out to maintain plausible deniability
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Totenkopf (Death's Head) - A symbol used by the SS
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Wolfsangel (Wolf's Hook) - Used as the insignia of various Wermacht (Nazi Military) divisions
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Wolfsangel (horizontal)
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Odal Rune - From the Proto-Germanic "Othala" meaning heritage
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Algiz Rune - A symbol used by German nationalists
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Celtic Cross
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"Broken Sun" Cross
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Arrow Cross - A Hungarian nationalist party that was active from 1935-1945. The symbol has been re-appropriated by modern neo-Nazis
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Valknot
EMOJI
🤑 Greedy Face Emoji - Used to refer to "greedy Jews"
💰 Money Bag Emoji - Used to refer to "greedy Jews"
🥸 Disguised Emoji - Used to refer to Jews because of the enlarged nose
🤥 Lying Emoji - Used to refer to Jews because of the enlarged nose
👃 Nose Emoji - Used to refer to Jews
🙋‍♂️ Raising Hand Emoji - Used for its resemblance to the Sieg Heil salute
✋ Raised Hand Emoji - Used for its resemblance to the Sieg Heil salute
o/ or 0/ - Used for its resemblance to the Sieg Heil salute
🐸 Frog Emoji - A reference to Pepe the Frog, a webcomic charcter co-opted by the alt-right
👌 Okay Symbol Emoji - A hand symbol co-opted by the alt-right. Sometimes said to resemble the letters WP, or White Power
🚪 Door Emoji - Refers to the fact that some of the gas chambers (such as the ones at Auschwitz) had wooden doors, and therefore could not have been airtight enough to contain the Zyklon B gas used to murder prisoners. In reality, many of the wooden doors were either replaced with airtight metal ones, or were made airtight with strips of felt that then deteriorated or were removed
🚿 Showerhead Emoji - Refers to the showerheads used to dispense Zyklon B gas in the gas chambers
⛽ Gas Pump Emoji - Refers to gas chambers
⚡⚡ Double Lightning Emojis - Used for their resemblance to the Siegrune (victory rune) badge worn by members of the SS (Schutzstaffel)
💀 Skull Emoji - Used for its resemblance to the Totenkopf (Death's Head) used by the SS
☠️ Skull and Crossbones Emoji - Used for its resemblance to the Totenkopf (Death's Head) used by the SS
WORDS/PHRASES
6MWE - Six Million Wasn't Enough. A call for further genocide against Jews
AKIA - A Klansman I Am
Annudah Shoah - A mockery of both the Shoah (Holocaust) and the fear of further genocide
Auschwitz had a swimming pool/rec center/maternity ward/etc. - An attempt to diminish the horror of concentration camps by making them seem more like labor camps with amenities
Blood and Honor - A neo-Nazi slogan
Blood and Soil - A neo-Nazi slogan
Blood Libel - Not a phrase used by the far right, but something they often believe in or claim. Blood libel is an antisemitic conspiracy theory stretching back hundreds of years. The original claim was that Jews used the blood of Christian babies to bake matzah (a ritual food eaten on Passover). It has since evolved into images of Jews drinking blood, kidnapping and killing non-Jewish babies, and conspiracy theories about harvesting adrenochrome
Bowlcut - A reference to white supremacist mass-murderer Dylan Roof
Cohencidence - A portmanteau of Cohen (a common Jewish last name) and coincidence. Used to refer to Jewish control (e.g. "All these companies are owned by Jews! What a Cohencidence!")
COORS - "Comerades of Our Racial Struggle"
Cultural Marxism - A conspiracy theory that Jews are intentionally weakening "Western values" in order to make countries like the United States more susceptible to communism. This was called Cultural Bolshevism in Nazi Germany
Da Shoah or Muh Shoah or Muh Holocaust - A mockery of the Holocaust
Day of the Rope - A day referenced in neo-Nazi book The Turner Diaries when all race traitors will be hanged
Degenerate - An insult based on the false theory that bad morals will cause human beings to regress along the path of evolution (to de-evolve). Used to describe groups, individuals, or ideologies
Early Life - A reference to the "Early Life" section of Wikipedia biographies, which will reveal that a person is Jewish or has Jewish ancestry
Every Single Time - Every time something bad happens, the perpetrator is Jewish
Featherwood - A term derived from racist prison subculture. A featherwood is a woman associated with a racist gang
FGRN - For God, Race, and Nation. A Ku Klux Klan slogan
The Fourteen Words - A neo-Nazi slogan. "We must secure the existance of our people and a future for white children"
The Frankfurt School - A school of sociology founded at Goethe University Frankfurt in 1923. Usually blamed as the originator of "Cultural Marxism"
Fren - Internet slang. A diminutive of "friend", used to diminish Naziism and make it seems more harmless. Often used in usernames to describe one's self (e.g. sad_fren_88)
Globalist - A person who desires connection between countries in terms of politics, trade, and travel. Used to scaremonger about Jews destroying countries by removing their borders
Gorillion - A mockery of the number 6 million, being the amount of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust
Goy - Hebrew for "nation", used by Jews to refer to non-Jews/gentiles. Used disparagingly by neo-Nazis to suggest Jews view non-Jews as beneath them
Goyslop - Unhealthy food that Jews force non-Jews to eat to keep them weak
Groid - A shortening of "Negroid", an archaic terms used to describe Black people
Groyper - A follower of avowed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. A reference to the "Groyper" meme, a variant of Pepe the Frog
GSHW - Germany Should Have Won (i.e. won World War II)
GTKRWN - Gas the Kikes; Race War Now
HDKH - Hitler Didn't Kill Himself. A neo-Nazi theory that Hitler escaped Germany and fled to Argentina
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John 8:44 - "You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father's desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and does not stand in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks out of his own character, for he is a liar and the father of lies." Part of Jesus' rebuke of his Jewish followers
Joo or Jooz - An intentional misspelling of "Jews" in an attempt to bypass censors or automatic content filters
Kate Hikes - A spoonerism of "hate kikes"
Kek - 4chan variation of "lol"
Kekistan - A fictional country imagined by white nationalists with a flag that resembles the Nazi battle flag
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Khazar - A reference to the conversion of a group of Khazars (a Turkic people) to Judaism. Antisemites speculate that the entirity of Ashkenazi Jews are descended from these Khazar converts, and therefore have no historical, cultural, or genetic tie to the Levant. This has been proven false on multiple occasions
Kike - A racial slur against Jews
Lizard People or Reptilians - A conspiracy theory by far-right figure David Icke, claiming that world leaders are really reptilian aliens. Most people who believe this theory believe that the lizard people in question are the Jews
Magic Soil - A protest against the idea that people of one nationality can become people of another nationality simply by living in a country (i.e. "France doesn't have magic soil that turns Africans into Frenchmen")
Nicker - An intentional misspelling of the N word in an attempt to bypass censors or automatic content filters
Ns - Black people (as in the plural of the letter N)
NSDAP - Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. The Nazi party, but using an acronym that is unfamiliar to most people
NS - National Socialist
Noticer - Someone who "notices" that Jews control the world
The Noticing - A mass movement of people "noticing" that Jews control the world
New World Order - A far-right conspiracy theory about Jews taking control over the world and implementing a single world government. Also used in conjunction with phrases like "world banks"
OFOF - One Front, One Family. Slogan of the neo-Nazi group Volksfront
ORION - Our Race Is Our Nation
Oy Vey - A Yiddish exclamation meaning "oh woe". Used by neo-Nazis to mock Jews
Pattern Recognizer - Someone who has recognized the "pattern" of Jews always being in control
Peckerwood - A term derived from racist prison subculture. A peckerwood is a man associated with a racist gang
Power Level - A memeification of far-right beliefs. The more fascist your beliefs, the higher your "power level"
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion - A 20th century Russian hoax claiming to be the minutes of meetings between Jewish leaders discussing how they will take control of the world
Pure Blood - Someone who is a pure member of the white race
Rabbi Smolett - A claim that Jews fabricate antisemitic hate crimes (a reference to actor Jussie Smolett who was accused of doing the same)
ROA - Race Over All
The Goyim Know - A phrase used by white supremacists acting like Jews who have discovered white supremacist activity, and are afraid that they've been found out. Often "The Goyim Know, Shut It Down", which adds the idea that Jews will prohibit any conversation that gets too close to the truth
The Red Cross - A reference to the supposed fact that the Red Cross claimed only 271,000 people had been murdered in concentration camps. In reality, that number reported by the Red Cross only came from reports from 13 concentration camps (there were 23 main camps, plus a large number of smaller "satellite" camps)
Tiny Hats or Tiny Hatted People - A reference to the Kippah or Yarmulke often worn by Jewish men
Reject Modernity, Embrace Tradition - A fascist slogan warning against social progress and calling for a return to a prelapsarian (usually ethnocentric) paradise
Rubbing Hands - A reference to an antisemitic charicature called "The Happy Merchant"
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"To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you're not allowed to criticize" - A quote often misattributed to Voltaire, which neo-Nazis use to decry claims of antisemitism as efforts to silence them. In fact, it's a quote from a neo-Nazi pedophile
Shabbos Goy - A non-Jewish neighbor of a Jew who can be asked to perform acts Jews are forbidden from doing on the Sabbath (e.g. turning of a light or turning on the heat). Used by neo-Nazis to claim someone is a slave to Jews
Sheeeiiit - An over-the-top representation of how "shit" is said with a Blaccent. Often used in memes declaring Black people to be less intelligent
Shekels - Jewish currency (from the Hebrew word for weight, similar to how British currency is called the pound. In reality, the plural of shekel is shkalim). The name has been adopted by the State of Israel for the NIS (New Israeli Shekel). "Shekels" is used by neo-Nazis to mock Jews as being greedy
Synagogue of Satan - An antisemitic term for Jews, stemming from the Chrsitian Bible
They or Them - When used to describe a nebulous group of undefined adversaries, these words almost always refer to Jews
They Cry Out in Pain As They Strike You - An antisemitic proverb claiming that Jews will make false cries of antisemitism while at the same time perpetrating atrocities
Troon - A slur against trans people, particularly trans women
Volk - German for "folk", or "kind". Used by neo-Nazis to refer to white people
We Wuz Kangz - A racist phrase ment to mock Black nationalists
White Genocide - The myth that a group of people (usually Jews) are conspiring to eliminate the white race through various means including immigration, intermarriage, and homosexuality
WP - White Power
WN - White Nationalist or White Nationalism
Wooden Doors - Refers to the fact that some of the gas chambers (such as the ones at Auschwitz) had wooden doors, and therefore could not have been airtight enough to contain the Zyklon B gas used to murder prisoners. In reality, many of the wooden doors were either replaced with airtight metal ones, or were made airtight with strips of felt that then deteriorated or were removed
Zio - An abbreviation of "Zionist". Used derogatorialy by neo-Nazis
WPRWS - 'Weimar Problems Require Weimar Solutions" (sometimes shortened to just "Weimar Problems" or "Weimar Solutions"). Prior to the rise of the Nazi Party, the democratic Weimar Republic was in financial crisis (the eponymous "Weimar Problem"). This was often blamed on the Jews. The "Weimar Solution" is Naziism
ZOG - Zionist Occupied Government, reflecting the belief that the United States government is controlled by Jews
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saywhat-politics · 7 months
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newyorkthegoldenage · 4 months
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A Santa Claus on wheels appears in front of a department store on December 6, 1938. Santa holds signs urging the boycott of German-made toys.
Photo: Associated Press
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It is standard Nazi rhetoric that social justice movements are funded by secretive Jewish Cabals in order to destroy White Western society.
J. K. Rowling and TERF rhetoric regularly claim that the Trans Rights movement is funded by a secretive cabal to destroy the [white European] definition of Women.
In Victoria, Australia on March 18, 2023 TERFs and Nazis stood side by side calling for the extermination of the same minority group.
The dots are in front of you...
Connect them.
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quitblamingnarcissism · 7 months
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It's also one of the many reasons why "narcissistic abuse" is bullshit.
Like any group of tyrants in history, the Nazis had a lot of the patterns that frequently get labeled as "narcissistic". But they were not mentally ill. Maybe some happened to be mentally ill, but as a whole they were not. They were ordinary people who became evil because society allowed it.
Slave traffickers and witch murderers were the same way. Not mentally ill. Just ordinary people who became evil because society allowed it.
Many people like to comfort themselves by relying on the "just world theory". They assume that people as a whole are kind. Whenever they see someone do something that's heinously evil, they assume that ordinary people would never do that and that only someone who's mentally ill could ever come close to it. But pick up a history book and you'll see that that's false.
And the same is true nowadays. Your abusive ex or abusive parent are not "narcissists". Sure, maybe there's a small chance that they just so happened to be, but that's not why they were abusive. They were abusive because society allowed it.
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batboyblog · 7 months
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sooooo Elon Musk's X let someone buy an ad with the literal 14 words...
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sissa-arrows · 1 month
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This is a German report during WW2. The people they call terrorists are the people who were resisting to the Nazis. The “terrorists camps” were groups of people resisting to the Nazis.
“The fight against terrorists and resistance groups was, in January 1944, specially successful. It was led by the troops subordinate to the MBF, by the units of the commander of the Sipo and the SD. Units under the command of the commander-in-chief of the Western Front also participated in these fights. In January 1944, 582 actions against 244 terrorist camps were carried out by the army, the FG and the SD. According to known evidence, so far, 173 terrorists have been killed during these operations. According to a statement by the Sipo-SD commander, 4,460 arrests were made in January 1944 [...]. In addition, 841 people were arrested by the French police. [...] Following the convictions handed down by war courts, 109 people were shot. In any case, we act bluntly against terrorists. Where necessary, collective sanctions are applied as immediate retaliation. These included are many immediate executions as well as large-scale arrests, followed by the transfer of persons arrested for compulsory work in the Reich. Houses and farms, from which shots were fired, have been systematically burned immediately for several weeks now.”
If it doesn’t remind you anything and doesn’t revolt you congrats you’re a fucking monster who would have most likely sided with the Nazis. The methods and language used by Israel is very similar to the methods and language used by the Nazis but you’re too busy drinking up all the propaganda and supporting white supremacy like your ancestors probably did to stand for what’s right.
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The long, bloody lineage of private equity's looting
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Tomorrow (June 3) at 1:30PM, I’m in Edinburgh for the Cymera Festival on a panel with Nina Allen and Ian McDonald.
Monday (June 5) at 7:15PM, I’m in London at the British Library with my novel Red Team Blues, hosted by Baroness Martha Lane Fox.
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Fans of the Sopranos will remember the “bust out” as a mob tactic in which a business is taken over, loaded up with debt, and driven into the ground, wrecking the lives of the business’s workers, customers and suppliers. When the mafia does this, we call it a bust out; when Wall Street does it, we call it “private equity.”
It used to be that we rarely heard about private equity, but then, as national chains and iconic companies started to vanish, this mysterious financial arrangement popped up with increasing frequency. When a finance bro’s presentation on why Olive Garden needed to be re-orged when viral, there was a lot off snickering about the decline of a tacky business whose value prop was unlimited carbs. But the bro was working for Starboard Value, a hedge fund that specialized in buhying out and killing off companies, pocketing billions while destroying profitable businesses.
https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/
Starboard Value’s game was straightforward: buy a business, load it with debt, sell off its physical plant — the buildings it did business out of — pay itself, and then have the business lease back the buildings, bleeding out money until it collapsed. They pulled it with Red Lobster,and the point of the viral Olive Garden dis track was to soften up the company for its own bust out.
The bust out tactic wasn’t limited to mocking middlebrow family restaurants. For years, the crooks who ran these ops did a brisk trade in blaming the internet. Why did Sears tank? Everyone knows that the 19th century business was an antique, incapable of mounting a challenge in the age of e-commerce. That was a great smokescreen for an old-fashioned bust out that saw corporate looters make off with hundreds of millions, leaving behind empty storefronts and emptier pension accounts for the workers who built the wealth the looters stole:
https://prospect.org/economy/vulture-capitalism-killed-sears/
Same goes for Toys R Us: it wasn’t Amazon that killed the iconic toy retailer — it was the PE bosses who extracted $200m from the chain, then walked away, hands in pockets and whistling, while the businesses collapsed and the workers got zero severance:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/06/01/how-can-they-walk-away-with-millions-and-leave-workers-with-zero-toys-r-us-workers-say-they-deserve-severance/
It’s a good racket — for the racketeers. Private equity has grown from a finance sideshow to Wall Street’s apex predator, and it’s devouring the real economy through a string of audactious bust outs, each more consequential and depraved than the last.
As PE shows that it can turn profitable businesses gigantic windfalls, sticking the rest of us with the job of sorting out the smoking craters they leave behind, more and more investors are piling in. Today, the PE sector loves a rollup, which is when they buy several related businesses and merge them into one firm. The nominal business-case for a rollup is that the new, bigger firm is more “efficient.” In reality, a rollup’s strength is in eliminating competition. When all the pet groomers, or funeral homes, or urgent care clinics for ten miles share the same owner, they can raise prices, lower wages, and fuck over suppliers.
They can also borrow. A quirk of the credit markets is that a standalone small business is valued at about 3–5x its annual revenues. But if that business is part of a large firm, it is valued at 10–20x annual turnover. That means that when a private equity company rolls up a comedy club, ad agency or water bottler (all businesses presently experiencing PE rollup), with $1m in annual revenues, it shows up on the PE company’s balance sheet as an asset worth $10–20m. That’s $10–20m worth of collateral the PE fund can stake for loans that let it buy and roll up more small businesses.
2.9 million Boomer-owned businesses, employing 32m people, are expected to sell in the next couple years as their owners retire. Most of these businesses will sell to PE firms, who can afford to pay more for them as a prelude to a bust out than anyone intending to operate them as a productive business could ever pay:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken
PE’s most ghastly impact is felt in the health care sector. Whole towns’ worth of emergency rooms, family practices, labs and other health firms have been scooped up by PE, which has spent more than $1t since 2012 on health acquisitions:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect
Once a health care company is owned by PE, it is significantly more likely to commit medicare fraud. It also cuts wages and staffing for doctors and nurses. PE-owned facilities do more unnecessary and often dangerous procedures. Appointments get shorter. The companies get embroiled in kickback scandals. PE-backed dentists hack away at children’s mouths, filling them full of root-canals.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/17/the-doctor-will-fleece-you-now/#pe-in-full-effect
The Healthcare Private Equity Association boasts that its members are poised to spend more than $3t to create “the future of healthcare.”
https://hcpea.org/#!event-list
As bad as PE is for healthcare, it’s worse for long-term care. PE-owned nursing homes are charnel houses, and there’s a particularly nasty PE scam where elderly patients are tricked into signing up for palliative care, which is never delivered (and isn’t needed, because the patients aren’t dying!). These fake “hospices” get huge payouts from medicare — and the patient is made permanently ineligible for future medicare, because they are recorded being in their final decline:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS
Every part of the health care sector is being busted out by PE. Another ugly PE trick, the “club deal,” is devouring the medical supply business. Club deals were huge in the 2000s, destroying rent-controlled housing, energy companies, Mervyn’s department stores, Harrah’s, and Old Country Joe. Now it’s doing the same to medical supplies:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals
Private equity is behind the mass rollup of single-family homes across America. Wall Street landlords are the worst landlords in America, who load up your rent with junk fees, leave your home in a state of dangerous disrepair, and evict you at the drop of a hat:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights
As these houses decay through neglect, private equity makes a bundle from tenants and even more borrowing against the houses. In a few short years, much of America’s desperately undersupplied housing stock will be beyond repair. It’s a bust out.
You know all those exploding trains filled with dangerous chemicals that poison entire towns? Private equity bust outs:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/04/up-your-nose/#rail-barons
Where did PE come from? How can these people look themselves in the mirror? Why do we let them get away with it? How do we stop them?
Today in The American Prospect, Maureen Tkacik reviews two new books that try to answer all four of these questions, but really only manage to answer the first three:
https://prospect.org/culture/books/2023-06-02-days-of-plunder-morgenson-rosner-ballou-review/
The first of these books is These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs — and Wrecks — America by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/These-Are-the-Plunderers/Gretchen-Morgenson/9781982191283
The second is Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America, by Brendan Ballou:
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/brendan-ballou/plunder/9781541702103/
Both books describe the bust out from the inside. For example, PetSmart — looted for $30 billion by RaymondSvider and his PE fund BC Partners — is a slaughterhouse for animals. The company systematically neglects animals — failing to pay workers to come in and feed them, say, or refusing to provide backup power to run during power outages, letting animals freeze or roast to death. Though PetSmart has its own vet clinics, the company doesn’t want to pay its vets to nurse the animals it damages, so it denies them care. But the company is also too cheap to euthanize those animals, so it lets them starve to death. PetSmart is also too cheap to cremate the animals, so its traumatized staff are ordered to smuggle the dead, rotting animals into random dumpsters.
All this happened while PetSmart’s sales increased by 60%, matched by growth in the company’s gross margins. All that money went to the bust out.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoinegara/2021/09/27/the-30-billion-kitty-meet-the-investor-who-made-a-fortune-on-pet-food/
Tkacik says these books show that we’re finally getting wise to PE. Back in the Clinton years, the PE critique painted the perps as sharp operators who reduced quality and jacked up prices. Today, books like these paint these “investors” as the monsters they are — crooks whose bust ups are crimes, not clever finance hacks.
Take the Carlyle Group, which pioneered nursing home rollups. As Carlyle slashed wages, its workers suffered — but its elderly patients suffered more. Thousands of Carlyle “customers” died of “dehydration, gangrenous bedsores, and preventable falls” in the pre-covid years.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/opioid-overdoses-bedsores-and-broken-bones-what-happened-when-a-private-equity-firm-sought-profits-in-caring-for-societys-most-vulnerable/2018/11/25/09089a4a-ed14-11e8-baac-2a674e91502b_story.html
KKR, another PE monster, bought a second-hand chain of homes for mentally disabled adults from another PE company, then squeezed it for the last drops of blood left in the corpse. KKR cut wages to $8/hour and increased shifts to 36 hours, then threatened to have workers who went home early arrested and charged with “patient abandonment.” Many of these homes were often left with no staff at all, with patients left to starve and stew in their own waste.
PE loves to pick on people who can’t fight back: kids, sick people, disabled people, old people. No surprise, then, that PE loves prisons — the ultimate captive audience. HIG Capital is a $55b fund that owns TKC Holdings, who got the contract to feed the prisoners at 400 institutions. They got the contract after the prisons fired Aramark, owned by PE giant Warburg Pincus, whose food was so inedible that it provoked riots. TKC got a million bucks extra to take over the food at Michigan’s Kinross Correctional Facility, then, incredibly, made the food worse. A chef who refused to serve 100 bags of rotten potatoes (“the most disgusting thing I’ve seen in my life”) was fired:
https://www.wzzm13.com/article/news/local/michigan/prison-food-worker-i-was-fired-for-refusing-to-serve-rotten-potatoes/69-467297770
TKC doesn’t just operate prison kitchens — it operates prison commissaries, where it gouges prisoners on junk food to replace the inedible slop it serves in the cafeteria. The prisoners buy this food with money they make working in the prison workshops, for $0.10–0.25/hour. Those workshops are also run by TKC.
Tkacic traces private equity back to the “corporate raiders” of the 1950s and 1960s, who “stealthily borrowed money to buy up enough shares in a small or midsized company to control its biggest bloc of votes, then force a stock swap and install himself as CEO.”
The most famous of these raiders was Eli Black, who took over United Fruit with this gambit — a company that had a long association with the CIA, who had obligingly toppled democratically elected governments and installed dictators friendly to United’s interests (this is where the term “banana republic” comes from).
Eli Black’s son is Leon Black, a notorious PE predator. Leon Black got his start working for the junk-bonds kingpin Michael Milken, optimizing Milken’s operation, which was the most terrifying bust out machine of its day, buying, debt-loading and wrecking a string of beloved American businesses. Milken bought 2,000 companies and put 200 of them through bankruptcy, leaving the survivors in a brittle, weakened state.
It got so bad that the Business Roundtable complained about the practice to Congress, calling Milken, Black, et al, “a small group is systematically extracting the equity from corporations and replacing it with debt, and incidentally accumulating major wealth.”
Black stabbed Milken in the back and tanked his business, then set out on his own. Among the businesses he destroyed was Samsonite, “a bankrupt-but-healthy company he subjected to 12 humiliating years of repeated fee extractions, debt-funded dividend payments, brutal plant closings, and hideous schemes to induce employees to buy its worthless stock.”
The money to buy Samsonite — and many other businesses — came through a shadowy deal between Black and John Garamendi, then a California insurance commissioner, now a California congressman. Garamendi helped Black buy a $6b portfolio of junk bonds from an insurance company in a wildly shady deal. Garamendi wrote down the bonds by $3.9b, stealing money “from innocent people who needed the money to pay for loved ones’ funerals, irreparable injuries, etc.”
Black ended up getting all kinds of favors from powerful politicians — including former Connecticut governor John Rowland and Donald Trump. He also wired $188m to Jeffrey Epstein for reasons that remain opaque.
Black’s shady deals are a marked contrast with the exalted political circles he travels in. Despite private equity’s obviously shady conduct, it is the preferred partner for cities and states, who buy everything from ambulance services to infrastructure from PE-owned companies, with disastrous results. Federal agencies turn a blind eye to their ripoffs, or even abet them. 38 state houses passed legislation immunizing nursing homes from liability during the start of the covid crisis.
PE barons are shameless about presenting themselves as upstanding cits, unfairly maligned. When Obama made an empty promise to tax billionaires in 2010, Blackstone founder SteveS chwarzman declared, “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
Since we’re on the subject of Hitler, this is a good spot to bring up Monowitz, a private-sector satellite of Auschwitz operated by IG Farben as a slave labor camp to make rubber and other materiel it supplied at a substantial markup to the wermacht. I’d never heard of Monowitz, but Tkacik’s description of the camp is chilling, even in comparison to Auschwitz itself.
Farben used slave laborers from Auschwitz to work at its rubber plant, but was frustrated by the logistics of moving those slaves down the 4.5m stretch of road to the facility. So the company bought 25,000 slaves — preferring children, who were cheaper — and installed them in a co-located death-camp called Monowitz:
https://www.commentary.org/articles/r-tannenbaum/the-devils-chemists-by-josiah-e-dubois-jr/
Monowitz was — incredibly — worse than Auschwitz. It was so bad, the SS guards who worked at it complained to Berlin about the conditions. The SS demanded more hospitals for the workers who dropped from beatings and overwork — Farben refused, citing the cost. The factory never produced a steady supply of rubber, but thanks to its gouging and the brutal treatment of its slaves, the camp was still profitable and returned large dividends to Farben’s investors.
Apologists for slavery sometimes claim that slavers are at least incentivized to maintain the health of their captive workforce. This was definitely not true of Farben. Monowitz slaves died on average after three months in the camp. And Farben’s subsidiary, Degesch, made the special Zyklon B formulation used in Auschwitz’s gas chambers.
Tkacik’s point is that the Nazis killed for ideology and were unimaginably cruel. Farben killed for money — and they were even worse. The banality of evil gets even more banal when it’s done in service to maximizing shareholder value.
As Farben historian Joseph Borkin wrote, the company “reduced slave labor to a consumable raw material, a human ore from which the mineral of life was systematically extracted”:
https://www.scribd.com/document/517797736/The-Crime-and-Punishment-of-I-G-Farben
Farben’s connection to the Nazis was a the subject of Germany’s Master Plan: The Story of Industrial Offensive, a 1943 bestseller by Borkin, who was also an antitrust lawyer. It described how Farben had manipulated global commodities markets in order to create shortages that “guaranteed Hitler’s early victories.”
Master Plan became a rallying point in the movement to shatter corporate power. But large US firms like Dow Chemical and Standard Oil waged war on the book, demanding that it be retracted. Borkin was forced into resignation and obscurity in 1945.
Meanwhile, in Nuremberg, 24 Farben executives were tried for their war crimes, and they cited their obligations to their shareholders in their defense. All but five were acquitted on this basis.
Seen in that light, the plunderers of today’s PE firms are part of a long and dishonorable tradition, one that puts profit ahead of every other priority or consideration. It’s a defense that wowed the judges at Nuremberg, so should we be surprised that it still plays in 2023?
Tkacik is frustrated that neither of these books have much to offer by way of solutions, but she understands why that would be. After all, if we can’t even close the carried interest tax loophole, how can we hope to do anything meaningful?
“Carried interest” comes up in every election cycle. Most of us assume it has something to do with “interest payments,” but that’s not true. The carried interest loophole relates to the “interest” that 16th-century sea captains had in their cargo. It’s a 600-year-old tax loophole that private equity bosses use to pay little or no tax on their billions. The fact that it’s still on the books tells you everything you need to know about whether our political class wants to do anything about PE’s plundering.
Notwithstanding Tkacik’s (entirely justified) skepticism of the weaksauce remedies proposed in these books, there is some hope of meaningful action. Private equity’s rollups are only possible because they skate under the $101m threshold for merger scrutiny. However, there is good — but unenforced — law that allows antitrust enforcers to block these mergers. This is the “incipiency standard” — Sec 7 of the Clayton Act — the idea that a relatively small merger might not be big enough to trigger enforcement action on its own, but regulators can still act to block it if it creates an incipient monopoly.
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken
The US has a new crop of aggressive — fearless — top antitrust enforcers and they’ve been systematically reviving these old laws to go after monopolies.
That’s long overdue. Markets are machines for eroding our moral values: “In comparison to non-market decisions, moral standards are significantly lower if people participate in markets.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20130607154129/https://www.uni-bonn.de/Press-releases/markets-erode-moral-values
The crimes that monsters commit in the name of ideology pale in comparison to the crimes the wealthy commit for money.
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Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Edinburgh, London, and Berlin!
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/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farbenizers
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[Image ID: An overgrown graveyard, rendered in silver nitrate monochrome. A green-tinted businessman  with a moneybag in place of a head looms up from behind a gravestone. The right side of the image is spattered in blood.]
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charlesoberonn · 4 months
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mysharona1987 · 1 month
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ktempestbradford · 4 months
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From The Atlantic: Substack Has a Nazi Problem
[that link is to an archived version, so no paywall]
Bottom Line: the CEOs/leaders of Substack aren't just being laissez-faire about the fascists and open white supremacists on the platform, they actively boost them by having them on the company podcast, featuring them, mentioning them, and boosting them. Because the newsletters bring in LOADS of money and they love money. Even newsletters that repeatedly violate the basic, useless guidelines of Substack, they do not get punished.
This isn't a huge surprise for anyone who has been following the major issues with Substack that have come up in the past few years. There was the whole scandal where the public discovered that Substack had been paying people secretly to be on the service while advertising that anyone can make it on their own here! Plus, they were paying bigots directly to put their newsletters on the srvice.
Good breakdowns of that from Annalee Newitz and Grace Lavery.
Then there was the disasterous interview one of the CEOs (Chris Best) did with Nilay Patel of The Verge when Substack's Twitter clone launched. Nilay -- who is, if you hadn't guessed, of Indian descent -- asked him pointed questions about content moderation and... well...
[Nilay] I just want to be clear, if somebody shows up on Substack and says “all brown people are animals and they shouldn’t be allowed in America,” you’re going to censor that. That’s just flatly against your terms of service. [Best] So, we do have a terms of service that have narrowly prescribed things that are not allowed. That one I’m pretty sure is just flatly against your terms of service. You would not allow that one. That’s why I picked it. So there are extreme cases, and I’m not going to get into the– Wait. Hold on. In America in 2023, that is not so extreme, right? “We should not allow as many brown people in the country.” Not so extreme. Do you allow that on Substack? Would you allow that on Substack Notes? I think the way that we think about this is we want to put the writers and the readers in charge– No, I really want you to answer that question. Is that allowed on Substack Notes? “We should not allow brown people in the country.” I’m not going to get into gotcha content moderation. This is not a gotcha... I’m a brown person. Do you think people on Substack should say I should get kicked out of the country? I’m not going to engage in content moderation, “Would you or won’t you this or that?” That one is black and white, and I just want to be clear: I’ve talked to a lot of social network CEOs, and they would have no hesitation telling me that that was against their moderation rules. Yeah. We’re not going to get into specific “would you or won’t you” content moderation questions. Why? I don’t think it’s a useful way to talk about this stuff.
Best wasn't willing to get into these "gotchas" around their new social network, which is a pretty clear indication that they won't get into it around content moderation on the original platform. (Their statement after the fact did nothing to make things better.)
It's also really clear from the Atlantic article that the Substack CEOs/Owners are, at best, more interested in making money than in keeping white supremacists and Nazis (literal ones) off their platform. At worst, the Substack CEOs/Owners are supremacist/Nazi sympathizers. Either way:
Substack Directly Supports the Alt-Right, Nazis, and White Supremacists
Openly, brazenly, and without remorse.
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antifainternational · 8 months
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https://antifa.se/2023/08/13/afa-reserach-customer-register-from-the-nordic-resistance-movements-webshop-greenpilled/
Curious about the identities and addresses of neo-nazis in your country? Thanks for lax security on a website run by the violent fascist group Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR), antifa in Sweden have been able to put together a list of real names and addresses of neo-nazis in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, India, Ireland, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, the UK, and the US!
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elhawrites · 2 months
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More people in the West need to see this. Not just to scroll through but to read and sit with the realization that if Ukraine falls, no country in Europe is safe. History repeats itself and if you are too careless to pay attention to it, you'll be forced to live through it.
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