Mitchell Chatfield’s Reviews > These Are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America > Status Update
Mitchell Chatfield
is starting
A remarkably midwit structure regarding a coal plant: ‘still, is the potential to save 150 jobs worth the plants potential to pollute the planet?’
This book tends to treat the audience like 9 year olds from a few decades ago. Even the book itself assumes that question is implied throughout the preceding sections. It’s belittling and infuriating to spell it out
— May 25, 2024 04:23PM
This book tends to treat the audience like 9 year olds from a few decades ago. Even the book itself assumes that question is implied throughout the preceding sections. It’s belittling and infuriating to spell it out
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Mitchell’s Previous Updates
Mitchell Chatfield
is starting
A common motif is ‘how terrible! The workers and the customers were shafted because of private equity’ as if somehow the status quo doesn’t involve both groups - but workers especially - being hung out to dry at every moment. The critique may be correct, but its implications are so naive
— May 24, 2024 09:14PM
Mitchell Chatfield
is starting
Balance between workers and owners in the 1970’s USA? Really? Maybe it’s too critical for a pop audience text, but ‘balance’ doesn’t describe the literal hundreds of years of bloody and deadly struggle (cf Foner)
— May 19, 2024 12:48AM
Mitchell Chatfield
is starting
Just listened to a spurious claim that robber barons were not as bad for society as PE firms are; and that robber barons didn’t rely on worker exploitation. You don’t need to be a Marxist to see that’s plainly false. Cornering manoeuvres, swindling, and the thick teat of the state were their backbone - not some glamorised early-Rio-Tinto resource extraction
— May 18, 2024 06:11PM
Mitchell Chatfield
is starting
Currently not very far through, but the premise seems to be fundamentally liberal - the American economy would be fixed for workers if only the business owners who make jobs were doing more. I’m really not sure that the McManagement style is the solution: it plays to regressive fantasies that the golden age is somewhere back behind us
— May 18, 2024 06:04PM
