Bad Company, Death of the American Dream, American workers whose live

     

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Singular reportage, told through the lives of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the private equity industry, and a damning indictment of the private equity industry, in good time.

Private equity runs our country, but few Americans know how deeply it’s woven into their lives. Private equity owns our hospitals, our daycare centers, our supermarket chains, the makers of our voting machines, our local newspapers, our nursing home operators, our fertility clinics, and our prisons. The industry even operates highways, municipal water systems, fire departments, emergency medical services and has purchased an increasing share of commercial and residential real estate.

In the meantime, private equity executives are among the wealthiest people in American society and have become modern-day barons with outsized influence on our politics and legislation. The CEOs of firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR and Apollo are rewarded with seats in the Senate and on the boards of the country’s most august institutions, as entire communities are hollowed out as a result of their buyouts. Workers are canned. Communities lose institutions. All private equity wins.

In the new book Bad Company, acclaimed journalist Megan Greenwell explores the secret history of private equity by examining the lives of four American workers who were devastated as private equity upended their employers and communities: a Toys R Us floor supervisor, a rural doctor, a local newspaper journalist, and an affordable housing organizer. Their stories also peel back the curtain on a larger project: how private equity reshaped the American economy for its own benefit, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes and their sense of security.

With the tradition of deeply human reportage like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Megan Greenwell pulls back the curtain on shadowy multibillion dollar private equity firms to tell a larger story about how private equity is reshaping the economy, disrupting communities, and hollowing out the very idea of the American dream itself. Timely and expertly told, Bad Company is a powerful indictment of America's most consequential, and yet least understood, economic forces.

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