#looting

[yrglrgl]

Raccoon Rogue today

[fuck-u-maga]

[missiongd]

Hey 👋

We will be adding more corrupt names to the list in the coming days.

As everyone knows, my life and effort are not free or cheap.

The vast majority of people know that many individuals have the desire to harm others in some way; I mean, some people are simply disrespectful. Unfortunately, there is no specific official body to discipline them or stop them at a certain limit.

As everyone knows, we treat everyone with kindness and good manners, but it's all for nothing.

As everyone knows, justice is absent in all countries of the world. ⚖️

They all know I borrowed money from the bank and from people, and I paid them all my salary until I was starving. I mean, I was clear with them from the beginning.My reputation was damaged in front of people and several problems occurred because of that. It is only natural that whoever harms me will receive a similar punishment, or even double the punishment. ⛓️⚖️

I ask God to take revenge on everyone who wronged and deceived mme. 🤲🏼 👐

The biggest thief in Harry Baldwin + Michael Cruz According to Harry, it's in his address: Metro Bank's registered office address in the UK is One Southampton Row, London, WC1B 5HA, but for specific branch locations, you'll need to use their Store Locator on their website to find the closest store for your needs, as they have many physical branches across the uk

Maria Catalina Naranjo

Helen

Liam Patricia

----

The information mentioned is as I stated it. Anyway, this website also stole from me.

License number: approved: 8 Moore Wells

https://bits-capital.co

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Leveraged buyouts are not like mortgages

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

Here's an open secret: the confusing jargon of finance is not the product of some inherent complexity that requires a whole new vocabulary. Rather, finance-talk is all obfuscation, because if we called finance tactics by their plain-language names, it would be obvious that the sector exists to defraud the public and loot the real economy.

Take "leveraged buyout," a polite name for stealing a whole goddamned company:

Identify a company that owns valuable assets that are required for its continued operation, such as the real-estate occupied by its outlets, or even its lines of credit with suppliers;

Approach lenders (usually banks) and ask for money to buy the company, offering the company itself (which you don't own!) as collateral on the loan;

Offer some of those loaned funds to shareholders of the company and convince a key block of those shareholders (for example, executives with large stock grants, or speculators who've acquired large positions in the company, or people who've inherited shares from early investors but are disengaged from the operation of the firm) to demand that the company be sold to the looters;

Call a vote on selling the company at the promised price, counting on the fact that many investors will not participate in that vote (for example, the big index funds like Vanguard almost never vote on motions like this), which means that a minority of shareholders can force the sale;

Once you own the company, start to strip-mine its assets: sell its real-estate, start stiffing suppliers, fire masses of workers, all in the name of "repaying the debts" that you took on to buy the company.

This process has its own euphemistic jargon, for example, "rightsizing" for layoffs, or "introducing efficiencies" for stiffing suppliers or selling key assets and leasing them back. The looters – usually organized as private equity funds or hedge funds – will extract all the liquid capital – and give it to themselves as a "special dividend." Increasingly, there's also a "divi recap," which is a euphemism for borrowing even more money backed by the company's assets and then handing it to the private equity fund:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

If you're a Sopranos fan, this will all sound familiar, because when the (comparatively honest) mafia does this to a business, it's called a "bust-out":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

The mafia destroys businesses on a onesy-twosey, retail scale; but private equity and hedge funds do their plunder wholesale.

It's how they killed Red Lobster:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

And it's what they did to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/28/5000-bats/#charnel-house

It's what happened to nursing homes, Armark, private prisons, funeral homes, pet groomers, nursing homes, Toys R Us, The Olive Garden and Pet Smart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben

It's what happened to the housing co-ops of Cooper Village, Texas energy giant TXU, Old Country Buffet, Harrah's and Caesar's:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/14/billionaire-class-solidarity/#club-deals

And it's what's slated to happen to 2.9m Boomer-owned US businesses employing 32m people, whose owners are nearing retirement:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

Now, you can't demolish that much of the US productive economy without attracting some negative attention, so the looter spin-machine has perfected some talking points to hand-wave away the criticism that borrowing money using something you don't own as collateral in order to buy it and wreck it is obviously a dishonest (and potentially criminal) destructive practice.

The most common one is that borrowing money against an asset you don't own is just like getting a mortgage. This is such a badly flawed analogy that it is really a testament to the efficacy of the baffle-em-with-bullshit gambit to convince us all that we're too stupid to understand how finance works.

Sure: if I put an offer on your house, I will go to my credit union and ask the for a mortgage that uses your house as collateral. But the difference here is that you own your house, and the only way I can buy it – the only way I can actually get that mortgage – is if you agree to sell it to me.

Owner-occupied homes typically have uncomplicated ownership structures. Typically, they're owned by an individual or a couple. Sometimes they're the property of an estate that's divided up among multiple heirs, whose relationship is mediated by a will and a probate court. Title can be contested through a divorce, where disputes are settled by a divorce court. At the outer edge of complexity, you get things like polycules or lifelong roommates who've formed an LLC s they can own a house among several parties, but the LLC will have bylaws, and typically all those co-owners will be fully engaged in any sale process.

Leveraged buyouts don't target companies with simple ownership structures. They depend on firms whose equity is split among many parties, some of whom will be utterly disengaged from the firm's daily operations – say, the kids of an early employee who got a big stock grant but left before the company grew up. The looter needs to convince a few of these "owners" to force a vote on the acquisition, and then rely on the idea that many of the other shareholders will simply abstain from a vote. Asset managers are ubiquitous absentee owners who own large stakes in literally every major firm in the economy. The big funds – Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street – "buy the whole market" (a big share in every top-capitalized firm on a given stock exchange) and then seek to deliver returns equal to the overall performance of the market. If the market goes up by 5%, the index funds need to grow by 5%. If the market goes down by 5%, then so do those funds. The managers of those funds are trying to match the performance of the market, not improve on it (by voting on corporate governance decisions, say), or to beat it (by only buying stocks of companies they judge to be good bets):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/17/shareholder-socialism/#asset-manager-capitalism

Your family home is nothing like one of these companies. It doesn't have a bunch of minority shareholders who can force a vote, or a large block of disengaged "owners" who won't show up when that vote is called. There isn't a class of senior managers – Chief Kitchen Officer! – who have been granted large blocks of options that let them have a say in whether you will become homeless.

Now, there are homes that fit this description, and they're a fucking disaster. These are the "heirs property" homes, generally owned by the Black descendants of enslaved people who were given the proverbial 40 acres and a mule. Many prosperous majority Black settlements in the American South are composed of these kinds of lots.

Given the historical context – illiterate ex-slaves getting property as reparations or as reward for fighting with the Union Army – the titles for these lands are often muddy, with informal transfers from parents to kids sorted out with handshakes and not memorialized by hiring lawyers to update the deeds. This has created an irresistible opportunity for a certain kind of scammer, who will pull the deeds, hire genealogists to map the family trees of the original owners, and locate distant descendants with homeopathically small claims on the property. These descendants don't even know they own these claims, don't even know about these ancestors, and when they're offered a few thousand bucks for their claim, they naturally take it.

Now, armed with a claim on the property, the heirs property scammers force an auction of it, keeping the process under wraps until the last instant. If they're really lucky, they're the only bidder and they can buy the entire property for pennies on the dollar and then evict the family that has lived on it since Reconstruction. Sometimes, the family will get wind of the scam and show up to bid against the scammer, but the scammer has deep capital reserves and can easily win the auction, with the same result:

https://www.propublica.org/series/dispossessed

A similar outrage has been playing out for years in Hawai'i, where indigenous familial claims on ancestral lands have been diffused through descendants who don't even know they're co-owner of a place where their distant cousins have lived since pre-colonial times. These descendants are offered small sums to part with their stakes, which allows the speculator to force a sale and kick the indigenous Hawai'ians off their family lands so they can be turned into condos or hotels. Mark Zuckerberg used this "quiet title and partition" scam to dispossess hundreds of Hawai'ian families:

https://archive.is/g1YZ4

Heirs property and quiet title and partition are a much better analogy to a leveraged buyout than a mortgage is, because they're ways of stealing something valuable from people who depend on it and maintain it, and smashing it and selling it off.

Strip away all the jargon, and private equity is just another scam, albeit one with pretensions to respectability. Its practitioners are ripoff artists. You know the notorious "carried interest loophole" that politicians periodically discover and decry? "Carried interest" has nothing to do with the interest on a loan. The "carried interest" rule dates back to 16th century sea-captains, and it refers to the "interest" they had in the cargo they "carried":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

Private equity managers are like sea captains in exactly the same way that leveraged buyouts are like mortgages: not at all.

And it's not like private equity is good to its investors: scams like "continuation funds" allow PE looters to steal all the money they made from strip mining valuable companies, so they show no profits on paper when it comes time to pay their investors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups

Those investors are just as bamboozled as we are, which is why they keep giving more money to PE funds. Today, the "dry powder" (uninvested money) that PE holds has reached an all-time record high of $2.62 trillion – money from pension funds and rich people and sovereign wealth funds, stockpiled in anticipation of buying and destroying even more profitable, productive, useful businesses:

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2di1vzgjcmzovkcea8f0g/portfolio/private-equitys-dry-powder-mountain-reaches-record-height

The practices of PE are crooked as hell, and it's only the fact that they use euphemisms and deceptive analogies to home mortgages that keeps them from being shut down. The more we strip away the bullshit, the faster we'll be able to kill this cancer, and the more of the real economy we'll be able to preserve.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy

[thoughtportal]

[blueiscoool]

Italy Recovers Etruscan Artifacts Dug up by ‘Amateurish’ Tomb Raiders

Italian authorities have recovered precious 3rd century B.C. artifacts from an Etruscan necropolis looted by a couple of bungling tomb raiders in Umbria who stumbled across the haul on their land.

The Etruscans flourished in central Italy around 2,500 years ago but were gradually assimilated into the Roman empire. They left behind lavish tombs, pottery and statues but tantalizingly few written documents and patchy evidence of their daily lives.

The artifacts, including eight urns, two sarcophagi and beauty accessories such as bronze mirrors and a perfume bottle still redolent of its original scent, are worth at least 8 million euros ($8.5 million), Carabinieri art police said.

They were found in Citta della Pieve, about 150 kilometers (90 miles) north of Rome.

One sarcophagus contained the full skeleton of a woman in her 40s, while the urns were finely decorated with scenes from Greek mythology and female figures with still-visible red paint on their lips and gold coloring on their jewels.

Police seized the loot from two entrepreneurs who had unearthed Etruscan burial chambers while excavating land they owned, Perugia Chief Prosecutor Raffaele Cantone told a press conference on Tuesday.

They “had nothing to do with the world of (practiced) tomb raiders” and were “clumsy” and “amateurish” in the way they tried to access the black market for looted art, the prosecutor said.

The Carabinieri caught up with them after they posted pictures of their discovery on the internet in the hope of finding buyers, triggering investigations that included phone wiretaps, stakeouts and air surveillance drones.

Police finally swooped on the suspects after one of them posted on Facebook a picture of himself with a looted artifact, Cantone said.

The pair face charges related to theft and trading in stolen goods, and risk jail sentences of up to 10 years, said prosecutor Annamaria Greco, who led the investigation.

Another Etruscan tomb, belonging to the same “Pulfna” family, was found in Città della Pieve in 2015. At the time, the farmer who made the discovery reported it to authorities and got about 100,000 euros ($105,000) as a reward.

Città della Pieve is close to San Casciano dei Bagni, a Tuscan village where a major archaeological discovery was announced in 2022, with ancient bronze statues found among the mud of thermal baths once used by Etruscans and Romans.

[eretzyisrael]

Looting Jewish History

Every story about Israeli archaeology buries the lede, if you’ll excuse the pun. The latest is an ongoing debate over how to protect ancient

by Seth Mandel

Every story about Israeli archaeology buries the lede, if you’ll excuse the pun.

The latest is an ongoing debate over how to protect ancient historical artifacts from Palestinian marauders in Judea and Samaria. One proposal would grant the Israel Antiquities Authority, a civil administration agency, oversight with regard to archaeological digs beyond the “green line,” the temporary 1949 armistice line treated as a de facto border. At present, the IAA only has authority over sites inside Israel proper, and the military oversees the rest.

A Times of Israel story about it, after going through the requisite motions of he-said-she-said finger-pointing, extracts from this contested earth the following:

“A separate survey by a group of Palestinian archaeologists in 2024 found evidence of looting at 309 of 440 West Bank sites, according to Salah Al-Houdalieh, an archaeology professor at al-Quds University.”

That’s the most important fact to know about the controversy: The Palestinians admit that Palestinians are regularly looting and destroying artifacts at most of the archaeological sites in the West Bank.

What’s the explanation for the ISIS-like obsession with destroying evidence of history? Well, the real reason is because the modern Arab-Palestinian fable of Jewish colonialism doesn’t withstand the inspection of a single grain of sand. But the Palestinians have their own ready explanation for why they are destroying the historical record of the ancient Jewish land on which they live. Here is the aforementioned Palestinian archaeologist al-Houdalieh, writing in January:

“Looting has always been an issue, but the recent escalation of hostilities by Israel against Palestinians has led to an increase in antiquities looting, as tens of thousands of unemployed people struggle to meet their most basic needs.”

The Palestinians, the academic claims, have been forced to become tomb raiders because the areas under Palestinian governance have no jobs.

This deflection is risible, but we should instead focus on the fact that there is no disagreement on whether Arab Palestinians are actively destroying the history of the world. They do not deny it.

While this is going on, of course, the French and British and Canadians and Australians are recognizing a “state of Palestine” on that very land. (Well, presumably on that land; the magical state of Palestine has yet to be assigned borders by its recognizers.) The facts, of course, argue for a different approach: Palestinian sovereignty should be earned, and it certainly cannot be granted before the artifacts under their feet can be protected from those who are carrying out a modern version of the destruction of the Great Library of Alexandria.

What kind of destruction are we talking about? Here’s just one example of the hundreds and hundreds, from an Israeli expert:

“The burial grounds of Hasmonean kings—the largest necropolis in the Middle East from the Second Temple period—have been plowed and used for farming and construction. In one case, we found human bones scattered in the fields. The Israeli Civil Administration had to collect and rebury them.”

Still, Israeli archaeologists oppose the proposal to expand the IAA’s reach to the West Bank. That’s because a civil agency would have far less legal freedom to operate than the military does, since the land is under military stewardship. Therefore, Israelis worry, it would be easier for Palestinians to delay or block access to the sites.

There are two other reasons that Israeli archaeologists oppose the bill. One is that they fear the existing academic boycotts would expand in retaliation. The second is that some people argue that Israel is attempting a sort of back-door sovereignty expansion by allowing civil agencies to manage affairs over the green line. This one’s less convincing, because there is a genuine crisis here that the bill is aimed at addressing, and therefore one cannot claim that the intervention is unnecessary. Something must be done.

One proffered alternative would be for the military’s own archaeological authority to increase its budget and beef up its staff so that experts can do the same work under military supervision. That seems like a perfectly reasonable solution.

What is not reasonable, however, is the status quo. That the UN doesn’t care about preserving world history is unsurprising. That France and Britain don’t care is shameful. But Israel cares, and thankfully that is the one that matters.