Invitation to join the Private Equity Creative Action Network (PECAN)
Hi,
:: a new collective project has started in London targeting Private Equity, with the view to establishing a creative and long term campaign to make visible the current invisible mechanisms and workings of finance capital. From our initial discussions with friends here and also in the US we have thought it might be useful to begin the campaign with a focus on a private equity trust who is the world's fourth largest employer - KKR.
If you didn't know KKR was the fourth largest employer in the world, don't worry - neither did we. We didn't know that much about Private Equity either. But then after a bit of digging around we realised that the scale and power of private equity trusts are increasingly getting bigger. Of course as their power expands so does ours, especially if you consider that
- 1 in 5 workers in the UK or 20% of the workforce now work for a PE firm
- 20 firms employ around 5million people.
- But unlike us, the top ten men who head up Private Equity firms are 'worth' $35 billion US dollars.
Without wanting to get too technical there are very real and legal mechanisms that Private Equity Firms like KKR use that enable them to make such huge profits. These profits are made at the expense of jobs, wages and conditions, by reducing the amount of tax companies pay (to basically nothing) and then enable huge transfers of wealth in management fees, commissions, and payouts to CEO's.
In the 80's the individuals who took money from the poor and distributed it to a small rich elite through buying up companies were known as 'corporate raiders' or 'vulture capitalists'. Today the story of debt and profit looks something like this.
---- Private equity firms like KKR raise investment funds (from pension funds, wealthy individuals) to buy out companies.
---- They then proceed to load the company up with massive debts (enabling them to legally pay little or no tax).
---- Use debt servicing as a rational for cutting wages and staff, sell off assets, cutting costs and 'increasing' profit - hence are able to provide high returns with little risk to the investors.
---- Before fleeing the wreckage taking their profits with them.
The PECAN collective is currently involved in trying to think of ways to open up the space of direct action and ideas against private equity so that we can better understand, campaign and take action against some the effects of finance capitalism in our own lives - like the current credit crisis, abolition of the 10p tax rate, increasing food and fuel prices, unsustainable developments, crashes in the property markets and unaffordable rental housing.
We would like to invite you to our meeting on Saturday 14 June at 3pm, at Transport House T&G Holborn Office, to help us build and plan for an initial day of action on 17 July. This will be part of a global day of action, involving both community and activists groups and unions, aiming to have around 125 actions in as many cities and 25 countries. We are hoping that this is just the first action targeting Private Equity in the UK, and to build a movement against the industry as a whole, and to use our campaign against this industry to highlight how so few people have managed to amass such extreme wealth in such a short amount of time globally.
If you are interested and want to come to the meeting, or just want to find out more, drop us an email.
solidarity,
PECAN
The problem is that you clearly are not well-informed about the private equity industry. Googling "private equity" for 2 hours doesn't make you an expert on the industry, nor does it entitle you to brain-wash other people with bleeding-heart, incorrect as well as unsubstantiated facts. I recommend reading the works of Harvard Professor Josh Lerner, or perhaps Andrew Metrick(Wharton Professor) on how these firms actually operate and their resounding impact on the society's in which they operate. It is completely irresponsible for you to make ill-informed claims with no facts to back-up your cause. You have wasted enough of my time and others.