Reading Recap: The money guys are still crying into their wallets about Zohran Mamdani
A weekly roundup of current events including private equity turning everything it touches to dust, steaming-mad billionaires, and what Couture Week in Paris tells us about the horrors of the world
Hi friends and welcome back. I took some time off for my birthday (I turned 3,000 years old as humans measure time, thanks!) and, while puttering and lounging, decided to experiment more with several ideas for this newsletter. One of them was changing up these weekly news roundups, exploring readable summaries instead of the previous lists. I value your thoughts, so opinions, commentary and jokes are welcome in the comments. Thanks for reading!
American politics
I continue to be grimly fascinated with Zohran Mamdani Economic Derangement Syndrome, an (incurable?) affliction by which all the worst people in the country lose their minds whenever his name comes up. We’re not even going to discuss the New York Times screaming, crying and throwing up with non-stories about his college applications and SAT scores, because to indulge such nonsense would diminish us both.
Let’s stick with the hard news: Mamdani won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary by a record number of his votes, and then winning the love of several unions this week. New York gives him the cover, with a satisfied smile and a single-word cover-line: Surprised?
Most New Yorkers are surprised, because in a city like New York you come to expect existential levels of doom each day. We’ve been primed to prepare for the worst, which is, probably, great for how delighted we become when rare good things happen — as shown by New York’s excellent roundup of New Yorkers shocked that things went their way for once, and this gleeful campaign video of New Yorkers asking Mamdani for selfies every few feet.
While Mamdani’s landslide win is still surprising, his appeal isn’t: He’s practical, energetic, puts policy first and created a political-video style that is already being imitated (badly) by his opps. This podcast has a great discussion of how Mamdani won, according to his own campaign team, and it’s nice to hear some Democratic analysis of voters that doesn’t assume that anyone who isn’t a political consultant is a moron. Mamdani’s campaign also used a clever tool that turned Instagram comments into 20,000 politically-engaged DMs, as
at Link In Bio found out in this thorough interview. Anna Ciezadlo at The New Republic has a charming, and astute, take on Mamdani’s most effective form of political propaganda: Associating himself with delicious New York food. (This is a nice pairing for Christopher Bonanos’s well-observed piece at New York a couple of weeks ago on Mamdani’s bodega-inspired iconography.)Meanwhile, billionaires continue to seethe. With each passing week, they suspect that maybe money can’t beat the Mamdani policy juggernaut, and it’s making the money guys who are used to buying elections very nervous: Wall Street is “rushing to build an anti-Mamdani war chest,” the WSJ breathlessly reports. New York points out that the money guys aren’t even behaving rationally, completely spinning out.
What I wonder is this: Is their $20 million in potential political bribes (to call a thing what it is) going to somehow improve on the $45 million that Andrew Cuomo raised only to lose spectacularly? Mamdani spent only around $6 million and beat Cuomo decisively. It feels like Democratic politics only solves for money, and the electorate is trying to solve for better policy. It’s not the same language.
Elsewhere in crying billionaires, Trump even threatened that if Mamdani won the president would seize management of New York — the city that repeatedly killed his own political ambitions, so we can assume this is just envy.
Speaking of politics and food, Claudia Sheinbaum continues to dazzle with her leadership of Mexico, including, this week, a fairly priced bar of local chocolate from Mexican farmers. (50% chocolate, 35% sugar, for the chocoholics among us). The chocolate, which will come in a candy bar, larger tablets for melting and a powder, pays Mexico’s cacao farmers a fair price — unlike US multinationals — and will be sold at Tiendas Bienestar, a public grocery chain, not unlike the one that Mamdani proposes for New York City. When a popular Mexican leftist account that shared the news was asked why Mexico would bother, this was the tart reply:
Corporate America and Finance
Private equity is one of those industries that manages to maintain a much more positive public image than it deserves. This is probably because people don’t have to interact with PE guys personally — they’re much too rich — so they don’t look too closely at it; folks don’t like to think about their own debt, which lets the debt of coiffed billionaire go largely unscrutinized as well. In the popular mind, private equity is Richard Gere in Pretty Woman, or even Gordon Gekko in Wall Street: A Steward of Capital, striding to and fro in steel-gray hair, a sharp gaze and finely woven shirts, making unquestioned demands on everyone around him because of the sheer glory of all his abundant, inarguable, trickle-down money. These sleek, suited private-equity guys (in the movies) stand in contrast to the working stiffs of the Wall Street trading floor — cinematically represented as guys from Brooklyn or Queens or Staten Island who clock out after the market closes and run on instinct along with giant sub sandwiches. (Lloyd Blankfein, the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, was one such schlub in the commodities department, trading gold futures in unkempt form, until he got a makeover — no beard, expensive suits — and rose to the corner office).
In reality, private equity exists is anything but a world of politesse. Elbows are sharp and profit margins are slim. Its leader is Henry Kravis, who was memorably profiled in the classic nonfiction book Barbarians at the Gate. (Kravis is also the author, or maybe just the promulgator, of one of my personal favorite pithy quotes about paying attention to the facts and reality in business, media or anything else: “Arrogance kills.”)
Few in private equity, however, share Kravis’s years of experience, his “killer instinct,” as they used to say in the 1980s or his caution. The past 20 years of private equity has been more or less like a room of kindergarteners running recklessly with scissors, as Megan Greenwell reports in her new book Bad Company. The outcome has been a series of bankruptcies that have killed beloved brands, including Sears and Toys R Us, and threatened to kill entire industries, like housing, in which private equity has been squarely and correctly blamed for usurious jumps in housing costs.
The result: Private equity knows it has a problem around its failed deals and subsequent bad reputation, but refuses to do anything to fix either one. In Private Equity International in 2020 about the industry’s failing image, a number of PE people bemoaned the fact that private equity is fundamentally good, but just tells the wrong story. (This is the same interesting tack of denial that the Democratic Party has taken to explain why it keeps losing elections for moving to the right even though voters of all parties overwhelmingly want Democratic policies to the left.)
The solution to this tension might be: Don’t be evil. But private equity refuses to simply improve. This week’s ill-advised private equity foray into killing a beloved social staple: Taking over Little Leagues and other youth sports — which would, of course, hike the prices and make the sports inaccessible in many communities. Can we not?
Genocide and Fascism
If you’re like most people of conscience, you’ve been looking at the devastating pictures and accounts of human suffering inflicted on Gaza by Israel and the United States, every single day and asking: What does it take to end this? How many more dead children, starving families, bodies broken by apartheid, teen amputees, burning refugee camps in schools, will add enough to the scales to tip them in the direction of justice? The entire world has been waiting for two years for Israel to tire of the smell of death.
800 starving people who lined up to get food have been slaughtered by Israel and its mercenaries just over the past 6 weeks, the UN says, including mothers and fathers hoping to feed their hungry children. Two partners at the Boston Consulting Group, Matt Schlueter and Ryan Ordway, were fired — “have been exited from the firm,” as BCG put it — for defying orders to stop doing “pro bono” work to form a concentration camp in Gaza. BCG said it was “shocked and outraged” by what would transparently have been a war crime, and that the partners took the project off the books and worked on it secretively “even though the lead partner was categorically told not to. This work was not a BCG project. It was orchestrated and run secretly outside any BCG scope or approvals. We fully disavow this work. BCG was not paid for any of this work.” The firings occurred because staff complained of the firm’s backing of Israel’s genocidal relocation plans to slaughter Palestinians to create a “regional trading hub,” the Financial Times reported, as well as BCG’s early work in forming the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which was pitched as an aid facilitator and is now a team of mercenaries paid by the US and Israeli governments to lure hungry Palestinians with food and then kill them. Save the Children, a well-respected global charity, has suspended its work with BCG, calling the forcible relocation plan from the disgraced partners “utterly unacceptable,” and the UK parliament is investigating the firm.
So. What stands out about the BCG incident is how rare it is for rich people, or anyone prominent, to face even the mildest consequences or accountability for enabling Israel’s genocide. At the same time, Israel has still been drafting plans for concentration camps, with or without BCG — so transparently genocidal that even Haaretz called it out. The New York Times, which has been home to largely disgraceful pro-genocide coverage, made a feint at journalistic objectivity by pointing out that the Israeli genocide in Gaza has been driven by Netanyahu’s careerism and his political ego — something that everyone knew back in 2023, so it’s unusual to think of it as news now. Netanyahu’s corruption trial, which has been in process in 2017, has been repeatedly delayed, most recently last week by threats from Donald Trump himself against Israel’s Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, as Rashida Tlaib accurately tweeted, genocide is bipartisan. A picture of Democratic and Republican Senators posing with Netanyahu — a wanted war criminal — goes viral every time anyone posts it.
The two things people talk most about when it comes to this picture: The fact that both parties are represented, and the fact that Cory Booker looks like he’s trying to hide behind his colleagues. Netanyahu’s expression is one of pure giddy bliss, and it’s no wonder: This kind of triumphant reception among US lawmakers is how he makes his case in Israel that only he can lead, that no one else would be able to extract billions in weapons from the United States. Netanyahu, ever the flatterer, even wrote a letter nominating Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize, an honor Trump has thirsted after ever since Obama won one.
And there’s another reason Netanyahu stays in office: He is doing what Trump, the US Congress and his electorate wants from him. “As Netanyahu Quashes Democracy, the Supreme Court and Most Israelis Surrender,” a Haaretz news analysis pointed out this week. A Hebrew University poll found that 82% of Israelis support forcibly expelling Gazans from their own land — a war crime and an act of genocide.
The poll and the picture with US lawmakers together tell a clear story: Netanyahu, as monstrous as he is, is not just acting alone in his own political interests, as the NYT implies. Netanyahu is, instead, responding to incentives set for him by the US government and his own voters.
Fashion and Culture
Fashion may seem frivolous — and it is often is — but it’s a useful gauge of societal temperature. I’m fascinated with fashion as not just art, but as sociology. (Because, as Stanley Tucci accurately says in the Devil Wears Prada, it’s art that you live your life in).
This week was Couture Week in Paris, the week that the most fanciful and expensive custom-made gowns are shown, and it’s interesting how many of the new collections repeatedly represented ghosts, monsters, horrors, and shrouds. It’s dark, and it’s escapist — in the sense of literally trying to escape or hide — at the same time. I think it’s accurately summarized as fashion in the time of genocide.