{"id":72,"date":"2022-09-06T19:03:38","date_gmt":"2022-09-06T19:03:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/eatthepoor.com\/?p=72"},"modified":"2023-09-05T21:27:09","modified_gmt":"2023-09-05T21:27:09","slug":"putting-the-i-in-capitalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/eatthepoor.com\/?p=72","title":{"rendered":"Putting the \u201cI\u201d in \u201cCapitalism\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This week a consortium of investors, businessmen, baseball executives and a magic giant officially completed their purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers<\/a> who, unlike the Los Angeles Angels, actually play in Los Angeles. But if these savvy business pros want to succeed in the dog-eat-dog world of American capitalism, where apparently the eating of dogs by dogs is a metaphor for behaving like assholes, they should heed the lessons of former owner Frank McCourt, author of the best-selling memoir and presciently-titled, \u201cAngeles Ashes\u201d:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BUY A BRAND-NAME COMPANY<\/strong>. It\u2019s easy! They\u2019re all around you, from names that are synonymous with wholesome goodness, like Kellogg\u2019s, to the opposite, like Trump. But here\u2019s the best part:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DON\u2019T USE YOUR OWN MONEY<\/strong>. This is key! In 2004, McCourt bought the Dodgers for $421 million, all of it borrowed<\/em><\/a>. CONGRATULATIONS! YOU NOW OWN A HEAVILY IN-DEBT BUSINESS!<\/em> So the first thing you need to do before those scheduled interest payments start bleeding you like a medieval surgeon is:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

PAY YOURSELF A HANDSOME SALARY<\/strong>.<\/em> McCourt took home $5 million annually for overseeing the \u201coverall business\u201d of the Dodgers, and paid his wife $2 million a year for acting as CEO when she wasn\u2019t sleeping with her driver, also on the Dodger payroll. (NOTE: Your actually marital infidelity may vary.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DON\u2019T NEGLECT THE CHILDREN<\/strong>. It\u2019s as American as shooting an apple pie with a rifle: summer jobs for your kids. They have to learn responsibility somehow and what better way than to pay them $600,000 a year? Despite the fact that one had a full-time job at Goldman Sachs and the other was still attending school at Stanford<\/a>. With so much cash flowing out of the company and into the family trust, now what else can you do but:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

RAISE PRICES<\/strong>, on everything from parking to souvenirs to \u201cDodger Dogs\u201d made of actual former Dodger players. Next, START CUTTING<\/strong> EXPENSES<\/strong>, like player salaries<\/a>, because when your team hasn\u2019t been to the World Series since 1988, why waste money on trying? Now you\u2019re ready to:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

LOOT THE COMPANY<\/strong>. As the rapacious owner of a heavily leveraged business, you have an obligation to pull as much money out of it as you can before the whole thing collapses like a racehorse on Luck<\/em>. In most cases, you will pay yourself back your initial investment as soon as possible with first-dollar revenue; now you are \u201ceven\u201d\u2014having made back your initial investment\u2026and YOU STILL OWN THE COMPANY.<\/em> But the McCourts, because they bought entirely on layaway, had no investment to recoup, so the estimated $140 million<\/a> they pulled out of the Dodgers with all the finesse of a drive-by colonoscopy was pure capitalist gravy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Now you\u2019re playing with \u201chouse\u201d money, so it won\u2019t matter if you continue to DECIMATE YOUR COMPANY<\/strong>, which now owes more than it\u2019s worth and can be broken up and sold for parts. In the case of the Dodgers, McCourt, having enriched himself while presiding over epic serial failure and driving one of the most famous names in baseball into bankruptcy, still stands to make hundreds of millions of dollars<\/a> on the sale of a team he bought using none of his own money. GOD BLESS AMERICA!<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

What Frank McCourt did to the Dodgers is no anomaly; it\u2019s what Sam Zell did to the Chicago Tribune<\/a>, private equity firm Wasserstein & Co. did to the 101-year-old Harry & David<\/a>, and Bain Capital<\/a> did to nearly one-quarter of the companies they invested in<\/a>: fire workers, loot pension plans, increase debt, and drive profitable companies into bankruptcy while taking billions for themselves. Then, like a planet eater on Star Trek, <\/em>move on to the next company to plunder and annihilate, or in the case of the guy who once ran Bain, the presidency, where his plan is more deregulation for better plundering, lower taxes for his friends and continuing to \u201cnot worry about the very poor.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The LIE of American capitalism is that it\u2019s about investment, or hard work, or great ideas,\u00a0or the sweat equity that goes into building a business from the ground up\u2026when the business model is really the same as a serial killer who preys on sex workers: pay for it, ruin it so it\u2019s unrecognizable, take all the money,\u00a0cut it up and dump it.<\/strong> But this time the victim got away! The McCourts are gone, the new owners seem almost lifelike, and the Dodgers are off to their best start since 1981, when they won the World Series. And if you can\u2019t root for underdogs, and prostitutes\u2026well, that\u2019s just un-American.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week a consortium of investors, businessmen, baseball executives and a magic giant officially completed their purchase of the Los Angeles Dodgers who, unlike the Los Angeles Angels, actually play in Los Angeles. But if these savvy business pros want to succeed in the dog-eat-dog world of American capitalism, where apparently the eating of dogs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/eatthepoor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/eatthepoor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/eatthepoor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eatthepoor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eatthepoor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/eatthepoor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91,"href":"http:\/\/eatthepoor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions\/91"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/eatthepoor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eatthepoor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/eatthepoor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}