President Joe Biden spent Thanksgiving at the estate of billionaire David Rubenstein, a co-founder of the controversial Carlyle Group. I do not understand why President Biden would do something like this only a year before the next election.
Biden’s Thanksgiving Tradition Includes Dinner At This Billionaire’s Nantucket Estate (Forbes)
For a brief description of David Rubenstein, see:
David Rubenstein Cofounder And Co-Executive Chairman, Carlyle Group (Forbes)
In recent decades, private equity firms, allegedly including the Carlyle Group, have caused numerous bankruptcies by forcing companies that they buy to take on unwieldy amounts of debt. The Carlyle Group has been credibly accused of helping to push the nursing home chain HCR ManorCare into bankruptcy after buying the company.
HCR ManorCare files for bankruptcy with $7.1 billion in debt (Reuters, March, 2018)
After buying HCR ManorCare, Carlyle (or an intermediary company), has been accused of forcing HCR ManorCare to sell property, and then rent the property from the new owners. This is alleged to have provided Carlyle with significant profits, but damaged the long term viability of HCR ManorCare. Health code violations are claimed to have skyrocketed during the period of Carlyle’s ownership. For more about this, please see the excellent book:
Plunder: Private Equity's Plan to Pillage America, by Brendan Ballou
When they don’t bankrupt companies, private equity operations often invest in companies that have very destructive business practices, as this article points out:
Investigation Exposes Carlyle Group’s Hidden Climate Impact (Global Energy Monitor, April 2023)
A new investigation released today reveals that the Carlyle Group (Carlyle), a private equity titan with $373 billion in assets under management, has been quietly scooping up fossil fuel assets over the past decade, in contravention of its stated climate goals. Its billions of dollars of investment in fossil fuel assets produced an estimated 277 million metric tons of CO2 emissions over just ten years, as much as the “carbon bomb” that Alaska’s Willow arctic drilling project is set to emit in its entire lifetime.
Here at Daily Kos, we know that there is a huge difference between Republican politicians and Democratic politicians (the Republicans are almost always considerably worse). But tragically, there are occasionally some similarities, and this leads some people to the mistaken idea that there’s no difference between the parties. President Biden made a major public relations error when he chose to celebrate Thanksgiving at the $34 million Nantucket estate of private equity billionaire David Rubenstein.
I hope that President Biden will make better choices over the coming months.