Say you get a check in the mail and it says just sign me. You ignore it then some emergency crops up and you can’t cover it and then you remember the check. That’s one way companies owned by Private Equity Funds make money. In this case a company like Mariner Finance is owned by an $11.2 billion Private Equity Fund called Warburg Pincus, and the president of Warburg Pincus is Timothy Geithner, former Treasury Secretary under Obama, which makes the activities of Mariner Finance stand out all the more . They charge up to 36% interest to needy people who Continue reading “Private Equity Funds and Those in Need”
Category: Governance
68.5 Million Refugees
Being an immigrant is very difficult. I know from experience what it’s like to leave everything you know and have behind and go towards an unknown. And in our case we didn’t have to pay smugglers, we didn’t have to walk across borders, we had passports, visa, purchased our own plane fares and weren’t fleeing war. So when I read that the number of refugees and displaced persons from wars and persecutions has reached 68.5 million, I shudder. These are 68.5 million lives which have been Continue reading “68.5 Million Refugees”
Harming Children at the Border
There is something ugly, perverse and cruel about separating children from their parents at the border when they try to either cross illegally or seek asylum. Just because there is a law against it does not make them criminals. There is a difference between crossing a border to seek help, escape violence or seek a better life and willfully harming another. Besides some laws as Martin Luther King, Jr. well knew, are unjust. And he as St Augustine before him believed that we have the right to Continue reading “Harming Children at the Border”
Merger, Less Jobs and Smaller Paychecks
We’re so used to hearing about mergers, we don’t give them sufficient attention. Some are well known names, Amazon bought Whole Foods, Cigna bought Express Scripts, and some are names we may not often hear such as Marathon Petroleum buying rival Endeavor. There are also those which are proposed, AT&T merger with Time Warner or T Mobile with Sprint, for example. The number of mergers keeps growing; so far in 2018 $1. 7 trillion worth of deals have occurred and more are expected. We Continue reading “Merger, Less Jobs and Smaller Paychecks”