Out of Service: How Wall Street Turned Fire Trucks, Fabric Stores, and Public Safety into Collateral
It starts with a closing store. Joann Fabrics, bankrupt. Hooters, shuttering locations. Retailers disappearing not because the public stopped caring, but because someone, somewhere, quietly decided there was more money to be made if these companies died slowly under a mountain of debt. And as Americans watch their favorite shops vanish and their towns hollow out, most never realize the true cause isn’t market trends or bad business decisions. It’s financial engineering, executed with surgical precision by private equity firms, and silently financed by trillion-dollar asset managers who have woven themselves into every crevice of the global economy.
The story of Joann’s and Hooters mirrors what we’ve seen in dozens of other industries. A private equity firm buys a company using borrowed money, loads that company up with the debt, extracts value through dividends, fees, and sale-leasebacks, and leaves behind a husk. Eventually, the company buckles under the weight. Chapter 11 becomes inevitable. Workers lose their jobs, towns lose their anchors, and the very firms that orchestrated the collapse walk away richer.
The Environment Is Under Attack. The Rights of Nature Movement Can Save It
Will the Great Lakes, one of the natural wonders of the United States, be allowed to go to court to defend their rights to exist on equal terms with the human race? Last month, a bill was introduced in the New York State Assembly granting them and all other bodies of water in New York those legal rights. The waters, the bill declares, “shall possess the unalienable and fundamental rights to exist […] free from human violations.”
The bill comes at a time when the Trump administration has decimated the National Park Service, directed the Environmental Protection Agency to roll back environmental regulations, and tried to revoke billions in climate change-combatting programs. Just days ago, President Trump issued an executive order allowing commercial fishing in one of the world’s largest ocean reserves. Now, more than ever, nature is in need of protection.
Granting rights to certain natural bodies or ecosystems is an idea that’s been a long time coming. Five decades ago, Christopher Stone, a professor at the University of Southern California law school, penned the idea. “I am quite seriously proposing that we give legal rights to forests, oceans, rivers and other so-called ‘natural objects’ in the environment,” he wrote in the Southern California law review. “Indeed, to the natural environment as a whole.”