Usual Disclaimer: Typical epic length McCamy post, with only a scattering of Zombie pics to lighten the mood. If you get bored easily, just read the intro and the last section. Also, I have nothing against zombies. They are cool and make great characters in video games.
Intro. Catchy title, I know. I am dead serious here. Every person has a style. Every business has a style. The Carlyle Group’s style is
Zombie . They want your assets, even if you are a little kid with a lemonade stand, and they will stop at nothing to snatch up your business, make it look fabulous on paper (even if that means substituting rat poison for sugar) before selling it to some sucker who will be stuck with a bunch of dead customers and millions of dollars in lawsuits. That's because they make money the totally insane way, the
Zombie Way .
I. We Connect the Dots Because the Corporate Media Won’t: How Daddy Bush is Killing Your Granddaddy With Help From Jr. The Washington Post reported recently that George W. Bush made a secret deal to protect nursing homes which abuse their residents (no relation to Resident Evil).
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/23/AR2009022302752.htmlBush decreed that a whole bunch of people could not testify in civil suits against nursing homes unless he personally (via his HHS Secretary) gave them the thumbs up. The list included state inspectors who noted violation of state health codes and anyone who got any money from Medicare or Medicaid (rules out health care providers, too). With no expert testimony available, it is a little hard to file a case involving medical neglect.
The corporate media forgot to add that he did this to help out his Daddy’s company,
the Carlyle Group which started exploring new ways to make money by depriving the disabled and elderly of decent quality care in 2007. This is their usual business model. Get into a new business and use their political connections to screw ordinary people so that they can post an undeserved profit.
In 2007, noting the aging U.S. population, Carlyle Group bought
HCR Manor Care http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCR_Manor_CareAlthough the Washington Post could have done a little in depth reporting, I had to read nursing blogs to find mention of this New York Times piece that was done in 2007 about companies like Carlyle Group which are buying up nursing homes, cutting staff and other services to way below the acceptable level needed to provide care for the residents, allowing our grandparents to get sick and die like animals. The Carlyle Group and the other corporate vultures can get away with its, because their complex corporate structure keeps them from paying out a dime in court for their medical malpractice and negligence.
“Private equity is buying up this industry and then hiding the assets,” said Toby S. Edelman, a nursing home expert with the Center for Medicare Advocacy, a nonprofit group that counsels people on Medicare. “And now residents are dying, and there is little the courts or regulators can do.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/23/business/23nursing.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1These private equity funds need all the lawsuit protection they can get. Here is what the NYTs found when writing its explosive four page story (please read it)
As such investors have acquired nursing homes, they have often reduced costs, increased profits and quickly resold facilities for significant gains.
But by many regulatory benchmarks, residents at those nursing homes are worse off, on average, than they were under previous owners, according to an analysis by The New York Times of data collected by government agencies from 2000 to 2006.
The Times analysis shows that, as at Habana, managers at many other nursing homes acquired by large private investors have cut expenses and staff, sometimes below minimum legal requirements.
Regulators say residents at these homes have suffered. At facilities owned by private investment firms, residents on average have fared more poorly than occupants of other homes in common problems like depression, loss of mobility and loss of ability to dress and bathe themselves, according to data collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
W. added an extra layer of protection for his Daddy’s business. The WaPo forgot to mention that. Guess they were trying to be fair and accurate. Funny how “fair and accurate” only seems to apply when the corporate media is writing about corporations that shuffle around billions of dollars and their political puppets.
On a lighter note, if Carlyle Group is true to form, it should be about ready to unload its fleet of snake pits masquerading as too-financially-irresistible-to-pass-up nursing homes on some feckless buyer. At that point, it will reap a windfall, while the federal hammer of justice will fall on the head of the new buyer, who will be forced to restore all of the eliminated services and rehire the fired workers and maybe even pay the outstanding judgments. And the Carlyle Group will waltz away, with its reputation intact. Because if you are a Bush in America, you are never held accountable for anything, not even murdering Grandma for cold hard cash.
II. a. Forgive This Section for Being Too Long, But The Carlyle Group Gets Away With Eating Our Brains, Because They Employ a Lot of Paperwork, Middlemen and Other Countries to Hide Their Trail The Carlyle Group could not manage their own mortgage securities, but now they expect U.S. taxpayers to GIVE them bailout money so that they can buy other people’s mortgages and clear their debt? Or maybe they want to be allowed to cherry pick all the good properties we have acquired and steal these from us for a song, leaving the American people with the dregs. I don’t think so.
Some people think that Americans have no memory. We wake up each day and push a
re-set button that erases everything that we saw or heard the day before except sports statistics and the intimate details of the sex lives of blondes.
While we might have a
Tomorrow is another day attitude , I think that most of us can remember last spring, when Bear Sterns was being made to go under so that the feds could rescue JP Morgan without making it look like they were rescuing JP Morgan .
http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/2008/05/15/the-secret-bailout-of-j-p-morgan-how-insider-trading-looted-bear-stearns-and-the-american-taxpayer/ If you have not read this article
what are you waiting for? Corporate criminals have already stolen your house, your retirement fund, your health. Are you waiting for them to take your children? Find out about how the Rothschild Family in England and the Morgan Family in the US have grown rich by stabbing free market capitalism in the back. These guys are the reason fascism was invented.
At the same time, Eliot Spitzer was being persecuted by the DOJ for a crime he did not commit (using state money to pay for sex) to shut him up about Bush complicity in the predatory lending scandal that was adding to the mortgage crisis.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/13/AR2008021302783.html The Carlyle Group took advantage of the flood of news to announce their own financial problems in March, 2008. As usual, the corporate media handled the American President’s Daddy’s company with kid gloves.
http://www.reuters.com/article/bankingFinancial/idUSN1361636620080314?sp=true U.S. private equity firm Carlyle Group should emerge relatively unscathed by the cratering of affiliate Carlyle Capital Corp CARC.AS (CCC), which invested in mortgage-backed securities and defaulted on about $16.6 billion of debt, analysts said on Thursday.
CCC, a fund listed in Amsterdam, said late on Wednesday that it expected its lenders to seize its remaining residential mortgage-backed securities assets after failing to reach a deal to refinance its debt.
Snip
"They don't lose much on a fund like this. It's like when you drop an egg in your kitchen. You just clean it up and throw it away. It's bad if you're the egg, but your kitchen is going to be fine," said Roy Smith, a professor at New York University's Stern School of Business.
Snip
Gould said Carlyle's long-cultivated image as astute investors would probably remain largely unaffected, since many banks, brokerages, hedge funds and others have been forced to take big write-downs over declining asset values amid credit travails in recent months.
You hear that? It was just an egg.
A $16.6 billion egg. . No one got hurt except the egg. Btw, exactly
who is the egg? Someone has to suck up that $16.6 billion dollar loss. The reporters never get around to telling us who pays for corporate incompetence.
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/carlyle-capital-winding-down-says/story.aspx?guid={ADEA2576-6E0A-4260-8CC5-FAD22FEE7A86}
Shares in Carlyle Capital Corp. (CCC.AE) dropped by more than half Monday after the mortgage-bond fund said it will wind up its operations and indicated there won't be any money left for shareholders.
The story goes on to say that executives owned 15% of the fund, so who owned the other 85%. What about the banks? Did they get back all the money they were owed?
From Bloomberg, we find out
why CCC failed. It was because they practiced business the exact same way that their parent company the Carlyle Group does business.
They took the maximum amount of risk to make the maximum amount of profit in the shortest amount of time (just like with the nursing home ventures I describe in part 1)---and they got stung. Do not believe anyone who says that CCC was an aberration or not typical of the Carlyle Group. CCC was business as usual for Daddy Bush’s employer.
http://www.marketminder.com/a/fisher-investments-media-hype-myths-us-economy/434664c2-51ea-45f2-bacd-3333a305fd62.aspx Firms who choose to leverage themselves this way intentionally take on additional risk for the chance of outsized return—and they know the inherent risks should their bets flop. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if Carlyle Capital and a few other similar firms fail—it’s merely the market’s way of weeding out unsustainable levels of risk. Firms can and do fizzle out all the time—in good times and bad—and it isn’t a sign of broader problems. Incidentally, Carlyle Capital Corp. is just one investment division run by the Carlyle Group, and though it’s on the brink of flopping, it probably won’t affect the Carlyle Group much (a firm managing 55 funds in 21 countries).
https://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Carlyle-may-help-CCC-investors-CQGVK?OpenDocumentWe are told
here that Carlyle Group was going to try to make things up to those who had been burned by CCC’s collapse and that these were mostly banks. However, that $150 million line of credit the article mentions is what is commonly referred to as “a drop in a bucket”.
https://www.businessspectator.com.au/bs.nsf/Article/Carlyle-may-help-CCC-investors-CQGVK?OpenDocumentAll this insufferable ass kissing by the press makes you want to vomit, doesn't it? What kind of favors does Carlyle Group hand out for treatment like that? Do you think that banks really agreed that Carlyle was too precious to hate? Were they willing to forgive and forget their share of that $16 billion dollar
oopsie! egg, when they were the egg, and they were in deep financial crisis themselves? If you read a little further in this journal, you will find out that Carlyle Groups' predatory way of doing business requires one thing above all else---it must have an unsuspecting populous roaming freely on the streets, absolutely ignorant of the zombie menace among it. If the banks it counts upon to put up the money for its acquisitions and the people it counts upon to buy its weapons that do not work and its companies that are rotten at the core know that they are doing business with a bunch of zombies in business suits---
---well, lets just say that zombies do best when they have the element of surprise. Arm their would be victims with enough knowledge---or a flame thrower---and the zombies' business model is not so successful.
II. b. The Carlyle Group is a Vulture Fund (But They Would Prefer That You Not Call Them That) Given what we know about the Carlyle Group, it should come as no surprise that they cheered on the White House backed free tax payer money giveaway to the banks---and AIG.
http://www.reuters.com/article/innovationNews/idUSTRE48M63H20080923?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0 PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Carlyle Group CYL.UL co-founder David Rubenstein said the private equity firm may be interested in buying some assets that could be acquired by the U.S. government as part of the $700 billion financial crisis bailout effort.
Speaking on CNBC, Rubenstein said Carlyle may be interested in acquiring some mortgage-backed securities and other assets, but he did not cite specific companies.
"Private equity can help by buying these assets," Rubenstein said. "Private equity can be among the most significant buyers of assets."
To which I can only reply….
What the fuck! First, the Carlyle Group is not a bank. Second, as far as we know, they are solvent and not in need of a financial bailout. Third, CCC went belly up and all their creditors had to make do with nothing but an
I’m so sorry. Ain’t it good that the President’s Daddy works for us . Fourth, we are getting these properties for a fraction of their values. Carlyle thinks they can just waltz in a pick out the best and state a price and say
Gimme those! ---
The bailout money that Carlyle Group employee Bush Sr.’s son came on television and demanded that we give to the banks or else life as we know it would cease to exist was supposed to be used by our government to buy up mortgages that were no longer worth as much as they were supposed to be worth. We, the American people who were paying all those billions of dollars were promised that
we would own those mortgages and the properties that they represented, so that when this damned Bush recession ended, we could sell them and get our billions of dollars back.
Where in the deal did it say that we would spend billions of dollars to buy mortgages
and then hand them over to the world’s newest, hungriest vulture fund ? That’s right. The Carlyle Group wants to get into the business of making a profit off the recession/depression. That is why it is called a
vulture fund .
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_36/b4098000738050.htm "Banks and investment banks are having to sell things they wouldn't have sold in previous cycles," says Julian Nichols, head of European distressed products at Deutsche Bank (DB).
For U.S. financiers, that makes for good hunting. Jeffrey Lefleur, executive director of New York real estate investment company W.P. Carey (WPC), says that half of his company's business now comes from financing European companies. Apollo Management, Carlyle Group, and Blackstone Group (BX) are expected to invest much more in distressed European assets. All firms declined comment on their strategies.
According to one source, Blackstone is associated with Carlyle—and AIG and Henry Kissinger. Maybe our economy is floundering because too many political leaders think they know how to manage money?
http://www.nowpublic.com/world/feds-aig-bailout-henry-kissinger-carlyle-group-get-150billionIf Blackstone and Carlyle are working together, then all our stuff that we are being forced to sell because Bush-Cheney engineered a recession/depression will not be sold on an open competitive market to the highest bidder in order to help the U.S. taxpayers recover their money. Huge chunks of valuable real estate will be snatched up for a song by the two heads of a single zombie monster which is part of a dynasty that hates America because we exposed its granddaddies for the traitorous Nazis they were.
Speaking of traitorous Nazi scum, did I mention that the Mellon Family provided a lot of the seed money for the Carlyle Group when it was formed?
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Carlyle_Group The infamous, pro-Nazi Mellon family of Pittsburgh, owners of
Aluminum Company of America, held back essential aluminum
production at the onset of the war -- nearly strangling U.S.
bomber and fighter production.
http://www.theconspiracy.us/cati2/0012.htmlFunny, how Mellon’s Carlyle Group turned to the Bushes, and how the Nazi supporting Bushes have supported the Nazi supporting Morgans and Chases. Could these be corporate fascist zombies?
More from the last Reuters article above.
On Monday, the U.S. Federal Reserve issued new guidelines for its treatment of minority bank investments, but said it would continue to treat 25 percent as the threshold triggering Fed regulation.
Still, Carlyle may look at financial investments even under the current restrictions, Rubenstein said. In addition to private equity money, Rubenstein said sovereign wealth funds and international buyers should be encouraged to invest in the United States at this time.
Rubenstein was also very glad last fall that AIG was being bailed out.
I am sure he was. AIG does not just insure you and me. It insures zombies, too. What? You didn’t know zombies need insurance?
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/world/2009-02/28/content_7522828.htm Problems at AIG did not come from its traditional insurance operations, but instead from its financial services units, and primarily its business insuring mortgage-backed securities and other risky debt against default. The government maintains it needed to bail AIG out last September, saying the company's failure would have further disrupt markets and threaten the already fragile economy.
Someone tell me, in a time when all mortgage backed securities were going into default, why did we sink money into a middle man whose job was paying out money to companies whose mortgage backed securities went into default? The sensible thing for AIG to do would have been to split off the bankrupt portion of its company, close it, let the feds take over that part and continue on with their lucrative life insurance business—the part that matters to you and me. Rubenstein would have to be an idiot not to have known that AIG’s mortgage security division would still be on the verge of bankruptcy even after the first bailout. So why was he cheering on the bandaid? Was he one of those insured through AIG? Did CCC’s debt get erased through the first AIG bailout? Did AIG get $85 billion to pay CCC’s $16 billion thanks to Bush family connections? Does anyone in the federal government ever actually sit down and take a look at the books of these companies? Or do names like
Mellon and
Bush Sr. scare them too much after what the two men did to Bill Clinton?
III. On the Theory That I Can Not Possibly Be The Only Person Who Has Seen the Zombies in the Room, I Turned to Google and Found This Book Written in 2003 It is called
Carlyle Group: Anatomy of a Scam by Uri Dowbenko. The author discusses Carlyle Group history, including their ties to the Bin Laden family. I like this summary of how they make money:
“The Carlyle Group is a quintessential Bushonian operation,” says Al. “In other words, they don’t use a dime of the firm’s own capital, nor a dime of the firms partners capital. Including Frank Carlucci, etc. They use exclusively borrowed money and/or limited partnerships that they form to stick stock into. It is a 100% OPM company .”
Snip
So how do they get enough liquid capital to buy assets? Is it through the funding by the limited partners? And how did they acquire United Defense? Carlyle Group, after all, is the definition of the prototypical “bottom feeder,” (buying bankrupt companies for pennies on the dollar) albeit on an unprecedented global scale.
Snip
“If you look at the banks that the Carlyle Group does business with, they are the same banks that all the large Bushonian frauds ($50 million and above) have been committed through. These include Credit Lyonnais, The Bank of Greece, The Jarlska Bank of Denmark, Credit Suisse, Daiwa, Banque Paribas, etc. It’s the same 12 banks again and again that these frauds have been perpetrated through, Banque Paribas Panama, Banque Paribas EAB.”
http://www.conspiracydigest.com/carlyle_group.html IV.My. Just….my! Here were have a company made up of zombies that roam the world taking other people’s important, life sustaining stuff---you know, their brains---and snatching it to use as food. Without a care in the world for the havoc they leave in their wake. At best, they convert their victims to their cause.
Everyman for himself! At worst, their victims die.
And the son of one of their Most Important Members, ex-President George W. Bush just spent the last eight years driving down the cost of most of the real estate, businesses and other assets in this country. Then, he handed out hundreds of billions of dollars, some of which almost certainly will make its way into the hands (through a bookkeeping maneuver or a blackmail scheme or bribery) of the folks at Carlyle (or one of their associate firms, I don’t think that they want to be linked with the term
vulture fund so Blackstone is getting stuck with the label). Carlyle seems to have a knack for persuading banks to pretend that Carlyle is flush with money that they do not really have. Carlyle will use this Monopoly money to buy up all of our Important Stuff and it will
eat our brains declare them yummy, sell them for a hefty profit, become the rulers of the world----
---and the sons of bitches still will not be satisfied, because they are a bunch of freakin’ zombies.
V. So Simple Even a Zombie Could Follow This Carlyle Group Sees. Carlyle Group Wants. Carlyle Group Seizes. Carlyle Group Devours. Carlyle Group Regurgitates the Mess on Our Doorstep. Repeat.
And the answer to the question I posed in II a.
Who is the egg? . I do not have a solid answer, but I have a suspicion that the U.S. taxpayer is the egg which paid for the $16.6 billion mistake when we bailed out AIG. I would be ever so pleased if someone in the new Obama administration would look into it.
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