When you live in a region for a while, you hear stories about the famous names there. They say this family watched its namesake business collapse a few decades ago, and the family left behind them unemployment, factory buildings that would soon become hollow shells, but they say the family made off with the wealth that they could live on for many, many years. They say that such-and-such a corporation did the same, extracting wealth from peacetime prosperity and wartime industrial urgency, leaving toxic waste pits next to the river but rewarding executives, owners, and stockholders as they too left shells of industrial buildings and unemployment that lasted for years. They say one of those first two stories involved stripping pension funds as well. They say that a more recent family sold its vital area business to new operators working on the hedge fund model which strips assets and slowly destroys the business, no matter how vital a service it supplies to the region and its economic and civic life. So these things happen over and over again, it seems, because there's nobody able to put a halt to it, nobody able to shine a light long and bright enough on it, nobody with the perseverance and the alliances and the skills to make an issue of the corruption that the structures of our economic life allow and encourage. Extract value, and let the pieces fall where they will --that's our society's motto.#
When you live in a region for a while, you hear stories about the famous names there. They say this family watched its namesake business collapse a few decades ago, and the family left behind them unemployment, factory buildings that would soon become hollow shells, but they say the family made off with the wealth that they could live on for many, many years. They say that such-and-such a corporation did the same, extracting wealth from peacetime prosperity and wartime industrial urgency, leaving toxic waste pits next to the river but rewarding executives, owners, and stockholders as they too left shells of industrial buildings and unemployment that lasted for years. They say one of those first two stories involved stripping pension funds as well. They say that a more recent family sold its vital area business to new operators working on the hedge fund model which strips assets and slowly destroys the business, no matter how vital a service it supplies to the region and its economic and civic life. So these things happen over and over again, it seems, because there's nobody able to put a halt to it, nobody able to shine a light long and bright enough on it, nobody with the perseverance and the alliances and the skills to make an issue of the corruption that the structures of our economic life allow and encourage. Extract value, and let the pieces fall where they will --that's our society's motto.#