Word came recently that both the Philadelphia Quakers and the Unitarian General Assembly have decided to divest from fossil fuels. It followed by a few weeks the news that the Roman Catholic University of Dayton and Union Theological Seminary, the home of many a great thinker, had done likewise.
Read more...ISIS has mastered digital strategy. But whose strategy? And what for?
Read more...On Monday, the Sacramento Bee published an editorial that took up many of the issues that we’ve raised in recent months about private equity firms’ fee abuses and the extraordinary shroud of secrecy that the industry has thrown over most of its activities.
Read more...It’s not clear what to make of an attorney general who opens an investigation and then accepts lame excuses for maintaining secrecy from its target, in this case, the American Red Cross. We’re flagging this example because it exemplifies an effort by organizations to use “trade secrets” as a pretext for hiding more and more of their dealings with governments. This is absurd, since the premise of Federal and state Freedom of Information Act laws is that government records should be open to the public, and that includes records of entities doing business with government agencies. In other words, if you want to have government bodies as your customers, one of the costs of doing business is having your formal interactions with them subject to public review.
Read more...I was naive enough to think that the New York Times’ vendetta against former SIGTARP prosecutor Neil Barofsky was limited to bank propagandist Andrew Ross Sorkin and Administration mouthpiece Jackie Calmes, who penned a particularly ham-handed hit piece on Barofsky’s book Bailout.
It turns out the depth of loyalty of reporters at the New York Times is much deeper than I imagined. Ben Protess and Jessica Silver-Greenberg work hard to snigger and finger-wag at Barofsky for being about to land a plum assignment that will again make him a big bank nemesis: that of serving as monitor to miscreant Credit Suisse.
Read more...Van Buren continues his examination of what he calls the “post-Constitutional era”. He focuses on the steady erosion of freedom of speech, particularly in the media, including limits on the ability of journalists to protect sources to more self-censorship and increased antipathy towards reporting that involves the use of confidential material.
Read more...Deflation proves that austerity policies are failing, but the media is doing a remarkable job of keeping readers confused and ignorant.
Read more...A revealing image, and more investigation of KKR’s all-too-clever wordsmithing strongly indicate its claim that KKR Capstone is not an affiliate does not stand up to scrutiny. This is a serious charge because if the critics are right, KKR is embezzling.
Read more...It’s encouraging to see Dan Primack, a seasoned private equity reporter who has been careful about taking up negative stories about his industry, take the latest wave of private equity fee-skimming reports seriously.
Read more...In an important, well-reaserched article, Gretchen Morgenson flags several types of private equity fee abuses. Did the incoming New York Times editor, Dean Baquet, bury her story by running it Memorial Day weekend?
Read more...Truth be told, I had really wanted to ignore Andrew Ross Sorkin’s artfully packaged Timothy Geithner puff piece in the Sunday New York Times magazine. But it makes for a useful study in a not-well-recognized propaganda technique, three card monte.
Read more...Net neutrality is on its way to being executed by the likes of Comcast and Verizon. That will mean the death of the Internet as we know it.
Read more...It is hard to grasp how successful the private equity industry has been in brainwashing investors to keep information secret.
Read more...Every day brings multiple new scandals. At least they used to be scandals. Now they’re simply news items strained of ethical content by business journalists who see no evil, hear no evil, and speak not about evil.
Read more...Since readers have taken interest in the details of our ongoing litigation with the giant California public pension fund, CalPERS, I thought I’d tie off a thread from earlier in the month. By way of background, last September, we filed a Public Records Act request (California’s version of FOIA) for private equity return data that […]
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