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I went home in a taxi that cost one hundred dollars and walked the peopled gray beach behind El Sereno, feeling my aloneness. It did not feel bad. It felt like something hidden was slowly becoming visible. I thought of Joy, Cecilia, Candy, Jamie, Selina, Chris. They fell away from me like empty potato chip bags thrown from a car. Even Patrick. He was good, I thought, but now he’s finished. And I pictured throwing away an empty milk shake container. These thoughts and images scared me. I could not believe I was really like that. I thought of Veronica. Here there was a change. Veronica did not fall away or seem finished. She seemed to go on forever, all the way down into the ground. I asked myself why and was answered immediately. Her pain was so deep that she had become deep, whether she liked it or not. Maybe deeper than any human being can bear to be.
She was in shock, and because she was heavily medicated, she kept dropping her knitting needles and her silverware. I had to cut her airline food into pieces for her. I poured her half a cup of water and she trembled so that she spilled it on herself anyway. The stewards and stewardesses rolled their eyes behind her back. They didn’t know about her son. They weren’t able to see her grief. They saw a fat old lady who kept screwing up, and they thought it was funny. One of them caught my eye and smirked, like I would think it was funny, too; I gave him such a look that he blanched and turned away. But the others kept giggling. I wanted to march down the aisle and make them stop/ But I pictured myself, skinny and prissy, shaking my finger and acting the good girl. I wasn’t the good girl. The old woman couldn’t see them anyway and would have had to put up with my climbing over her so that I could be the good girl.
If I remain baffled by the way some people seem able to blithely chuck away something I find so difficult to retain, it is not because I do not understand the rules of capitalism so much as I marvel at the hidden workings of the human mind. With the life’s work I’ve chosen and settled comfortably into, the writing and editing that sits at the centre of my world, moneymaking is less an objective goal as it is a scarce by-product. It preciousness waxes in proportion to the difficulty of its extraction. But watching people gamble firsthand, their dedication to it, the hours they put in as they empty their wallets and take their chances, I can’t help feeling that they’re in it to lose.
I have seen men and women at the blackjack tables itching to leave, batting away the real-world commitments constantly tugging at their sleeves – removing their wristwatch and placing it in a pocket – and watched them ‘push’ whatever money they had left onto their box, piling it high, wanting to lose, despair gnawing at them as the cards were dealt, their defeat a blessed release when it finally came.
chimes w the neil gaiman quote that i love so much
Slot machine players in particular seem to crave what the cultural critic Michael Crawford terms ‘automaticity’ – or a state of pure passivity in which they are at one with the machine, reactive, responsive, but no more than that; the whole of their sensorium shrunk down to a tiny forcefield. Press the button, or don’t. In such a state their gambling qualifies as ‘play’ only in a twisted fashion, in relying on an absorption born not of focus or concentration but its opposite: an alienation so profound they can no longer connect to the world. Once unplugged they empty themselves of everything.
They don’t care about the money any more. They know it’s hopeless.
I believe that losing, in this sense, triggers a kind of emetic impulse, a desire to vomit up one’s fears about the uncontrollable nature of the world and to purge oneself of deeply lodged hurts. In losing there can be tremendous relief, even rebirth, in that only once you have lost everything can you walk away and start over, or start again, living out the mundane reality of your life until the tension once more becomes unbearable. Winning is far more problematic, because there is responsibility in the win – what to do with all that money! It’s the opposite of release.
You want to lose. Out of what writers Frederick and Steve Barthelme, accounting for their own haemorrhaging losses at the tables, call a ‘unique despair’.
The thought is so powerful that it winds me. The gut punch comes from the way that gambling at full throttle turns losing into a species of self-harm. I think of my father and his roulette compulsion, and I wonder if behind his dapper and gregarious front he might have secretly reached the end of himself, too: the point at which however much luck he believed he owned, he had given up on hope. [...]
I didn’t write poetry or perform anything publically about my deafness for years because I didn’t think there was poetry in it. Deafness was something I was trying to look away from, something that stained my humanity. It didn’t deserve language, it didn’t belong in the ‘Perfect Species’ or the story I was trying to tell about myself. I didn’t know it could be written or asserted on the stage, and if it did, wouldn’t it be a self-pitying ploy? A novelty? How would I centre something about myself that I was actively resisting?
i like this
As the chapters in this book explain, private equity firms also hasten the “financialization” of the American economy through the increased power of banks and other financial institutions over companies that make and sell useful products and tangible goods. Today, the finance industry gets a quarter of all corporate profits, up from a tenth in the “greed is good” 1980s. At the same time, it employs just 5 percent of the country’s workforce and largely fails to deliver a useful product for many Americans: a quarter of households, for instance, don’t have access to a bank account. By controlling the operation of companies in the rest of the economy, private equity hastens this trend toward financial control.
crazy
Most private equity firms are paid on the 2-and-20 model: a 2 percent annual fixed fee on all the money it invests and 20 percent of all profits above a certain threshold. The United States taxes money made from investments—so-called capital gains—at a lower level than money made through ordinary labor, whether at a factory or in an office. The distinction is ambiguous and unfair, but even more so, private equity firms have convinced the IRS that their 20 percent income should be taxed at the lower capital gains rate than at the higher ordinary income rate.109 This means that many private equity executives often pay a lower effective tax rate than the retail employees, secretaries, and factory workers they employ. But the industry as a whole has fought hard, and successfully, to defend this imbalance.
Private equity firms use so-called management fee waivers to give more of their income this preferential treatment. Here, private equity firms waive some or all of their 2 percent management fee (which is taxed at a higher rate) in exchange for a priority claim on the profits earned (which is taxed at a lower rate). Through a variety of tactics, however, the firms virtually guarantee that they will make this money back.110 Some of the biggest firms—KKR, Apollo, and TPG Capital—used these fee-waiver provisions.111 Many of these schemes might violate the spirit, if not the letter, of the law. The IRS investigated fee waivers during the Obama administration but very little came of it. An audit of Thoma Bravo for use of the tactic, for instance, took four years and resulted in no actual adjustments to the company’s tax returns. In 2015, the Obama administration proposed regulations to bar the most aggressive forms of fee waivers. But nothing came of that either: the regulations were never finalized. Ultimately, both of President Obama’s treasury secretaries—Tim Geithner and Jack Lew—left the government to work for private equity firms.
Consider the case of cheerleading competitions. Varsity Brands is the country’s leading organizer of these events. As alleged in a class action complaint, between 2015 and 2018, Varsity bought its three largest rivals, all of which are now owned by Varsity, which in turn is owned by Bain Capital.119 By controlling 90 percent of the cheerleading competition market, Varsity gained control over the sport’s governing body and now decides which events entitle winners to participate in the country’s premier competitions. Varsity also allegedly increased participation fees and made money by, for instance, forcing competitors to wear only Varsity-approved uniforms and equipment and stay only in Varsity-approved hotels. “Cheerleading uniform prices have gone through the roof,” one local gym owner complained to the Federal Trade Commission. “Competition costs are so high that many athletes have to quit the sport.”120 Varsity and Bain largely deny the allegations of the class action complaint, and the lawsuit remains ongoing.121
insane
How did Schwarzman afford to fete himself in this way, welcoming celebrities to his home and building literal temples to celebrate himself? In part, the answer lies in housing. Over the past fifteen years, private equity firms like Schwarzman’s have helped to lead what one commentator called “the biggest land grab since the Manifest Destiny.”8 In 2011, no landlord in America owned more than a thousand single-family home rental properties.9 By 2013, Schwarzman’s firm, Blackstone, bought more than that in a single day, at a cost of over $100 million. One of Blackstone’s companies, Invitation Homes, became the largest renter of single-family homes in America.10 More generally, in just two years, private equity firms and hedge funds bought about 350,000 bank-owned homes11 and, with the industry’s help, between 2006 and 2017, 5.4 million single-family homes transitioned from owner occupied to rentals.12 Now, nearly a third of all rentals in the United States are single-family homes.13 These statistics help to explain how Schwarzman was able to celebrate himself as he did. And they help to explain how the very nature of homeownership in America is changing, and how private equity has helped to lead the way.
In 2012, the FHFA launched a series of auctions of foreclosed homes, with the intention that the purchased houses be converted into rental properties.34 Investors developed new software that estimated the best purchases based on a neighborhood’s schools, crime, and nearness to transit, as well as possible maintenance costs. Such software allowed investors to participate in thousands of auctions and identify those properties likely to make the most money.
pano idea?