Blue Star NBR Has PEU Roots

The Virginia Economic Development Partnership announced last fall:

...a major joint venture has committed to build a manufacturing operation that projects to employ 2,500 people and produce 60 billion medical gloves a year.

As a direct result of the Commonwealth’s investments, Blue Star NBR, LLC and Blue Star-AGI, Inc., a joint venture between Blue Star Manufacturing and American Glove Innovations (AGI), have committed to invest $714.1 million to establish the largest, most advanced, one-of-a-kind nitrile butadiene rubber (NBR) manufacturing facility and nitrile glove production operation in Wythe County’s Progress Park.  

OpenGovUS shows the company to be a Partnership or Limited Liability Partnership.  It was established January 8, 2021.  Ten months later Virginia Governor Ralph Northam attended a groundbreaking for the historic project.

Four names are associated with the project, Scott Maier (CEO), Marc Jason (co-CEO), Victor Galati (CFO) and Arthur Stark (Chairman).  Blue Star NBR's website has no information on the company's leadership or board of directors.

Scott Maier has PEU roots with Cotton Creek Capital Management, where he was an executive vice president, and Hela Capital Partners, a joint venture PEU with GTCR.  An old bio of his states:

Mr. Maier has 14 years of private equity, venture capital and operations experience. For the past 7 years, Mr. Maier has assisted private equity funds with the turnaround and management of their portfolio companies. His titles have included COO, CFO, and Director of Operations and Business Development.

Marc Jason is Founder and Chairman of London Luxury and had the time to be co-CEO of this major joint venture.  London Luxury sued Walmart in January 2022.  

London Luxury LLC filed a Jan. 5 lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court against Walmart Inc., charging that Walmart owes the company about $41 million for boxes of nitrile gloves produced in Malaysia and Thailand. The complaint goes on to state that London Luxury could lose more than $500 million on a deal to sell tens of millions of boxes of gloves to the retail behemoth.

“Walmart has created uncertainty regarding whether it intends to accept and pay for the vast majority of gloves it committed to buy,” the lawsuit claims.

In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Walmart said the company has filed a counterclaim against London Luxury “for their repeated failure to meet product standards and delivery obligations.”

The case is scheduled to be heard in January 2024.

Virginia Business reported that lawsuit was the catalyst for a corporate divorce

Blue Star executives decided not to move forward with the partnership after learning of litigation involving Marc Jason, who was previously named co-CEO of the Blue Star-AGI joint venture.

...the joint venture may have fallen through, as Blue Star backed out of the partnership with AGI in January during the due diligence phase, according to Blue Star NBR CEO Scott Maier. “It’s just business,” Maier explained. 

Blue Star is moving ahead with the project on its own, Maier said, and the decision to exit the joint venture will not impact the amount of the planned investment or the number of jobs previously announced. “They weren’t bringing any capital,” he said of AGI.

However, AGI spokesperson Deborah Brown, a partner with global law firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, said the situation isn’t so cut and dry. “AGI is at least a 50% equity owner in [the project] and does not agree that it has departed or split from the venture,” Brown said in a statement. “AGI is committed to seeing the project through."

Brown also took issue with Maier’s characterization, saying, “AGI brought substantial capital to the deal and has invested funds into the venture.”

How is a major joint venture still in the due diligence phase a year after formation and two months after project groundbreaking?  

Current Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin knows how to exit a major joint venture.  The Carlyle Group dropped its lead developer role for the Harbor Island expansion at the Port of Corpus Christi.  Youngkin was co-CEO at Carlyle and over the firm's infrastructure projects.  Carlyle never gave a reason for exiting the planned port expansion to accommodate very large crude carriers.

Youngkin's Secretary of State Caren Merrick is also a private equity underwriter.  Merrick held positions with Bilbury Partners and Gladstone Capital.   All are familiar with holding multiple high paying roles simultaneously and slapping something together to take advantage of the latest trend or government opportunity.

Caren Merrick served on the board of Gladstone Acquisition Company, essentially an SPAC.

Gladstone Acquisition Corporation (the “Company”) is a newly organized blank check company incorporated as a Delaware corporation on January 14, 2021. The Company was formed for the purpose of acquiring, merging with, engaging in capital stock exchange with, purchasing all or substantially all of the assets of, engaging in contractual arrangements, or engaging in any other similar business combination with a single operating entity, or one or more related or unrelated operating entities operating in any sector (a “Business Combination”). While the Company may pursue an initial Business Combination target in any business or industry, the Company intends to focus its search on the farming and agricultural sectors, including farming related operations and businesses that support the farming industry, where the management team has extensive experience. 

If Bill Gates and Warren Buffet can buy farmland and farming operations so can Gladstone. 

American manufacturing left the U.S. for China courtesy of the greed and leverage boys.  The Carlyle Group sent auto parts jobs to China as Youngkin anchored his spot as a key top executive.  Before running for Virginia Governor Youngkin watched Beijing rush hour traffic as a sign of economic vitality.  

Re-homing manufacturing jobs is a national priority as the globe fractures.  

On Feb. 4, the Virginia House of Delegates overwhelmingly approved legislation to fund up to $4.6 million for VEDP to provide recruitment and training of employees for Blue Star operations in Wythe County.

Expect more public money for the PEU boys who earned big money offshoring jobs and want to do the same in bringing them back.

Creepy PEUs Seeking Immortality

Why is it the creepiest people want to live forever? 

Jared Kushner says he's keeping trim because he believes there's a chance he'll live forever.

Peter Thiel is on a mission to change the world through technology – and to find a cure for death.

Fee earning AUM in perpetuity for Peter Thiel (Founders Fund and Mithral Capital) and Jared Kushner (Affinity Partners).  That way they don't have to meet their maker and atone for their greed and misdeeds on this earthly plane.

Imagine private equity underwriters (PEU) waking up day after day, scheming to turn their billions into trillions at the expense of others.  Surprise medical billing, nursing home deaths up 10%, hollowed out local newspaper reporting, funneling money to Congress to keep PEU preferred "carried interest" taxation, finding PEU candidates for public office, the list goes on and on in a Greed-filled Groundhog Day. 

If Jared Kushner and Peter Thiel can live forever so can carried interest.  My rumination syndrome just returned.  

Politicians Red and Blue love PEU and increasingly, more are one.  Together the immoral can become immortal.

Update 8-29-22:  Imagine being able to permanently fund political campaigns in secrecy.

Update 11-25-22:  Peter Thiel backed "freedom loving" bank GloriFi burned through $50 million in investment money, laid off most of its staff on Monday, and informed workers it was shutting down.

Update 11-28-22:   While tech giants pursue immortality they may end life for the rest of us.  Extinction is on the table.

“People survive by passing information between themselves.  We’re putting that fundamental quality of humanness through a process with an inherent incentive for corruption and degradation. The fundamental drama of this period is whether we can figure out how to survive properly with those elements or not.”

Update 3-9-23:  Hollywood's new preferred villain is an:

...immediately recognizable type we've grown well acquainted with: a visionary (or so everyone says), a social media narcissist, a self-styled disrupter who talks a lot about “breaking stuff.”

So why do voters keep electing them? 

Update 8-27-23:   "Tech execs are buying $150,000 red light therapy beds and $70,000 hyperbaric chambers."  How lovely.

They may be behind large land purchases next to a California Air Force Base. 

Update 9-24-23:   A Greek economist says capitalism has been replace by technofeudalism. I'll amend that to PEUdalism.

Update 9-13-26:  TechGods have a vision that does not include us, "end times fascism."  And anyone who would get in the way of their plans is Peter Thiel's anti-christ.  

PEU Ownership = Rise in Nursing Home Deaths

Private equity ownership of nursing homes is once again front and center in The New Yorker.

In the autumn of 2019, Atul Gupta, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, set out with a team of researchers to measure how (private equity instituted) changes affected nursing-home residents. They sifted through more than a hundred private-equity deals that took place between 2004 and 2015, and linked each deal to categories of resident outcomes, such as mobility and self-reported pain intensity. The data revealed a troubling trend: when private-equity firms acquired nursing homes, deaths among residents increased by an average of ten per cent. 

The Carlyle Group ran nursing home giant ManorCare into bankruptcy.  It had quality problems like those discovered in the Penn study.

At homes with fewer direct-care nurses, residents are bathed less. They fall more, because there are fewer hands to help them to the bathroom or into bed. They suffer more dehydration, malnutrition, and weight loss, and higher self-reported pain levels. They develop more pressure ulcers and a greater number of infections. They make more emergency-room visits, and they’re hospitalized more often.“They get all kinds of problems that could be prevented,” Charlene Harrington, a professor emeritus of sociology and nursing at the University of California, San Francisco, said, of residents at homes with lower nurse-staffing levels. “It’s criminal.”

The greed and leverage boys sponsor compliant lawmakers so consequences are few to nonexistent.  Instead elected officials maintain the PEU boys preferred "carried interest" taxation. 

Consider the case of Richmond, Virginia nursing home. 

Before St. Joseph’s was acquired, it had been a single nonprofit nursing home. (PEU Executives) Simcha Hyman and Naftali Zanziper created a corporate web. They formed one company for the home’s property (called Henrico Va PropCo L.L.C.) and another for the home’s operations (Henrico Va OpCo L.L.C.). Accordius Health was the management company. The Portopiccolo Group, at the very top, was insulated from the nursing home by at least two corporate layers. In the event of a lawsuit, the nursing home would “dissolve into this welter of different legal entities,” Hughes said. “It’s like a sandcastle—when you touch it, it starts to break apart.”

Carlyle broke ManorCare despite promises not to do so to former Medicare Chief Gail Wilensky.  It's hard to avoid responsibility for care debacles when the PEU charges a management fee.  Yet, they do just that while pursuing earthly Mammon at the expense of the elderly. 

...management hiked up rent in the home’s apartments—in some cases, from five hundred dollars a month to fifteen hundred. Under Portopiccolo’s ownership, the home had gone from about a hundred employees to sixty.

Revenue up, expenses down is the PEU way.  People being harmed is a several decade long byproduct.  They are good for funeral home job creation. 

Update 8-26-22:  Private equity owns eight of the biggest companies doing autism treatment.  Uh oh...

Amazon's Expansive Profit Plans

Amazon is known for denying workers do certain things like peeing in bottles to stay on the job and meet productivity requirements.  Denying a worker died from heat is a risk management no-brainer but what did the Amazon Smart Thermostat say about temperatures in the warehouse that day?

Amazon wants to take its hard charging human abuse skills and put them to work in your home while taking "care" of your health.

I expect an algorithm that adjusts the temperature in your home just enough to make you sick and have to use their One Medical clinic for a pharmaceutical packaged and delivered by, you guessed it, Amazon.  The I Robot Roomba is in your home to vacuum up any leftover change.

Someone has to fund the next Billionaire Space Penis Rocket.

Update 8-27-22:  Amazon plans to monetize video shot via its RING doorbell via a Ring Nation television series..  

...the show is proof of why “we need to regulate Amazon’s monopoly power. This ecosystem allows them to use all of their different lines of business in ways to only further their market dominance.”

PEU Attorney Defends Blue Lucy Kyrsten Sinema

The Co-Chair of Snell & Wilmer's Venture Capital and Private Equity Industry Group wrote a piece in The Arizona Republic defending Senator Kyrsten Sinema's preservation of private equity's preferred "carried interest" taxation.  Public will has long demanded this unfair tax break be eliminated.

His "practice is concentrated in the areas of mergers and acquisitions, securities, private equity/venture capital, corporate law, and advising corporate boards.

His bio includes:

• Represented Phoenix-based private equity fund in the formation and raising of a $120 million fund
  
• Represented and advised numerous private equity sponsors in the formation and raising of opportunity funds, venture funds and private equity funds from private investors that focus on the investment in or acquisition of identified operating businesses, real estate, and distressed loans or assets

Former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blanfein, who's son Alex is a private equity underwriter (PEU), congratulated the PEU lobby for once again keeping its deeply unpopular tax break.

Here's how the PEU shill characterized carried interest taxation:

"it is an enduring recognition of the risks taken to aid the entrepreneurial engine that has forged American prosperity for decades"

I did not know America's entrepreneurial engine involved loading up affiliates with debt, charging them deal fees/management fees, bleeding cash for sponsor dividends, borrowing even more later to fund a massive PEU payout, and/or spinning off physical assets into another highly leveraged entity for free shares in the original entity.

American prosperity for the middle class has not been aided by the greed and leverage boys.  As they've exploded in number and assets under management wages have stagnated.  The middle class is disappearing as those at the top take and take and take.

Private equity is wildly unpopular as many workers personally experienced consequences from their greed.  PEUs turned housing into a volatile asset with one private equity accounting for a third of house sales.

It should not be a surprise that someone who makes their living serving the PEU class would write a nonsense defense of the ethically indefensible.  But that's where we are.  He can write it but I call horse hockey.  

Sinema is but the latest politician to tilt the already imbalanced scales in further favor of the PEU boys.  The public remains Charlie Brown trying to kick the tax fairness football.  Senator Sinema is the latest to pull it away after a seemingly serious run up.  Politicians Red and Blue love PEU and increasingly more are one. 

Update 8-22-22:  NYMag's Intelligencer saw through the PEU attorney's puff piece defending Blue Corporacrat Sinema.

Update 12-9-22:  Sinema hung her independent shingle to drum up funding from the billionaire boys.

Update 12-22-22:  Sinema expects aides to pick up her groceries, fix her internet, book her weekly massage and learn her criteria for choosing an airline seat.  That and more queenly expectations reside in a 37 page guide for staff. 

Update 1-24-23:  Sinema is fresh from attending the World Inequality Forum in Davos and rubbing elbows with the billion class.  It turns out the PEU boys were very generous with the Independent Senator after she saved their preferred taxation.  

Senator Krysten Sinema received at least $526,000 from donors in the private equity, hedge fund, and venture capital industries after killing a bill closing tax loopholes for private equity.

It sounds like the bidding has already started for her future services. 

Update 10-24-23:  Kyrsten Sinema said she doesn't care if she loses reelection because she 'saved the Senate by myself' and can go serve 'on any board I want to.'  For saving PEU preferred taxation I'll wager she gets more than a board seat.

Update 12-26-24:  As Kysten Sinema nears her Senate retirement, she is spending lavishly.  That skill should come in handy in her future PEU employment.

Update 1-11-26:  Former Senator Kyrsten Sinema  co-founded the AI Infrastructure Coalition, which pushes AI data center development.

Yet Another PEU Vacation for Biden

President Joe Biden will vacation yet again at an investment manager's beach house. 

“They stayed here before and they’re not paying,” a source close to the family told the New York Post. “They’ve never paid. They’re just friends.”

The beach home is on Kiawah Island and owned by the co-founder of Aetos Capital.

The 10,500-square-foot, nine-bedroom oceanfront retreat is owned by Maria Allwin, the Connecticut-based widow of real estate and hedge fund manager James Allwin, and she has hosted Biden in years past, including while he was vice president.

Aetos divided in two after the death of Jim Allwin.

"Jim's original vision was to have several different alternative businesses--hedge funds, real estate, private equity and venture capital." 

Biden often spends Thanksgiving at the Nantucket home of Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein.  It's almost become an annual event.

The Biden cabinet is chock full of former private equity underwriters (PEU):

Chief of Staff Ron Klain - Revolution LLC

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken - Pine Island Capital

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin - Pine Island Capital 

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo - Point Judith Capital

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm - Ridge-Lane Limited Partners 

Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack - Ridge-Lane Limited Partners

Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines - Tikehau Capital

Biden just nominated yet another one for a Department of Energy infrastructure position. 

Politicians Red and Blue love PEU and increasingly more are one.  The Blue Lucys and Insane Reds do their best to keep this romance behind the public curtain.

Update 1-4-23:  Raimondo has been mentioned as a future Treasury Secretary should Janet Yellen move on. 

Update 10-31-23:  Forbes asked one contributor covering Raimondo to back off before stopping his articles altogether.

Mariner Finance Sued for Abusive Credit Practices

Reuters reported:

A lender owned by private equity firm Warburg Pincus LLC was sued on Tuesday by several U.S. states, and accused of charging cash-strapped borrowers hundreds of millions of dollars for "hidden" add-on products that they never agreed to buy.

Mariner Finance, with more than 480 offices in 27 states, was accused of engaging in "widespread credit insurance packing," by selling costly policies and other products without telling borrowers or even after being instructed not to.

The plaintiffs - Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Oregon, Utah, Washington state and Washington, D.C. - also said Mariner encouraged employees to trick borrowers into refinancing loans unnecessarily, to generate higher fees and sell more add-ons.

"These kinds of predatory sales practices can lead consumers into a cycle of debt that's hard to overcome," the office of Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said.

Wells Fargo Bank got into trouble for similar practices.  

Mariner Finance is owned by Warburg Pincus (WP).  WP's President is Timothy Geithner.  On might expect a former New York Fed Chair and Treasury Secretary to be on the lookout for such misdeeds, especially as Geithner spoke out against predatory lending during his public service.

What other misdeeds is PEU greed driving in the WP finance family?

Warburg Pincus bought a 25% stake in Santander in 2011 and took it public in 2014.  

Under WP ownership Santander Consumer settled with the Justice Department for repossessing the vehicles of 1,112 servicemembers without a court order. 

Also, Santander settled a $550 million multistate investigation by various state attorney generals into their subprime lending practices.

Based on the multistate investigation, the coalition alleges that Santander, through its use of sophisticated credit scoring models to forecast default risk, knew that certain segments of its population were predicted to have a high likelihood of default. Santander exposed these borrowers to unnecessarily high levels of risk through high loan-to-value ratios, significant backend fees, and high payment-to-income ratios. The coalition also alleges that Santander’s aggressive pursuit of market share led it to underestimate the risk associated with loans by turning a blind eye to dealer abuse and failing to meaningfully monitor dealer behavior to minimize the risk of receiving falsified information, including the amounts specified for consumers’ incomes and expenses. Finally, the coalition alleges that Santander engaged in deceptive servicing practices and actively misled consumers about their rights, and risks of partial payments and loan extensions.

Under the settlement, Santander is required to provide relief to consumers and, moving forward, is required to factor a consumer’s ability to pay the loan into its underwriting.  Santander will pay $65 million to the 34 participating states for restitution for certain subprime consumers who defaulted on loans between Jan. 1, 2010 and Dec. 31, 2019.

The settlement period includes the time of Warburg Pincus sponsorship.

Due diligence is now PEU-diligence.  Steer the money to the people at the top of the economic food chain while starving the folks at the bottom of resources.  It's a PEU gang of dirty.