Maybe I’ve fallen for an AI hoax. For Ben’s sake, I hope I have. He looks ridiculous in this photo.

There really are great private equity firms turning around struggling companies and investing in young start-ups. They’re doing some genuine societal and economic good. Unfortunately, there’s also a subsector of the PE industry that specializes in effectively strip-mining companies and then dumping them into bankruptcy court. This partly explains why PE-owned companies are “about 10 times as likely to go bankrupt as non-PE-owned companies,” as the Enterprising Investor notes. And it largely explains what happened at Steward Healthcare, the local hospital chain driven into bankruptcy by its PE owner after it squeezed the real estate value out of Steward and left the rest of the system in financial shambles. Steward’s demise was ultimately tied to a deliberate ‘sales-leaseback’ strategy often used by PE companies.

Which raises the question: Are some PE firms, or divisions within PE firms, basically the modern business equivalent of plundering pirates? I’d argue ‘yes’  — and that the plundering needs to be banned as it applies to former non-profit entities (like hospitals) that PE firms buy. Brendan Ballou, a former federal prosecutor and special counsel for private equity at the US Department of Justice, has a more nuanced answer in a Q&A at EI, but he makes clear he’s no fan of various PE strategies.

Btw: The American Prospect has a story on how PE firms are “maneuvering to invest in college athletes, their schools, and the conferences they play in.” They’re going after another non-profit sector. What could possibly go wrong? 

Massachusetts lawmakers failed to pass Mayor Wu’s property tax plan that the city’s business community hated. It’s likely to resurface later this year, reports the BBJ’s Greg Ryan, “although at this point it would need to do so in what is known as an informal session, when even a single lawmaker could prevent the measure from becoming law.”

Update – From Bruce Mohl at CommonWealth Beacon: “After failing to complete action on many of their legislative priorities at the end of the session, Beacon Hill Democrats appear to be warming to the idea of finishing their work during informal sessions running through the end of the year.”

True-believer progressives can’t do it, i.e. move to the center. They think it’s immoral. They fear the wrath of fellow progressives. They seem clueless that other valid worldviews exist out there. But Kamala Harris? She’s tacking to the center fast – and it’s a politically smart move that may win her the presidency and prevent Donald Trump from regaining the White House. Peggy Noonan has more on Harris’s “bold to the point of shameless” shift.

Personally, I love her shameless shift to the center. She’s doing exactly what she needs to do to win a general election.

Update – She’s driving the right crazy: “Kamala Harris’s Border Chutzpah.”

Update II — I should point out Noonan has legitimate concerns about Harris, including this one: “People will continue to wonder how liberal she is, and how strong she is, but I think an equally or more important question will be how serious she is. Does she think seriously, deeply, soberly? I haven’t seen her betray this tendency. “

It’s not supposed to work this way. The BBJ’s Greg Ryan has the details on the life-sciences building bust. …

He became an instant Dem star by calling Donald Trump and J.D. Vance et gang “weird” – and they are weird. But, is it me, or is Tim Walz’s explanation of his “weird” comment itself weird? It’s definitely unclear and meanders all about. … No matter, I guess. As long as the word is sticking to the weirdos. 

There’s a lot that lawmakers left out of the just passed $6.5 billion housing bond bill, such as a local-option transfer fee. But it did include a provision allowing so-called accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to be built as a right in single-family zones. … Abundant Housing Massachusetts is rightly praising passage of the ADU provision, noting it could lead to construction of thousands of apartment-like units attached to single-family homes in Massachusetts. 

This has to be one of the strangest mini-issues in presidential-election history, showing just how petty and low our politics have sunk, to wit: the dispute over the correct pronunciation of Kamala Harris’s first name. Is it KA-ma-la, or Ka-MA-la , or KUH-ma-la? For a person who has a medium-low Boston accent (some of those ‘r’s really are difficult to say) and who has trouble correctly pronouncing words like ‘banal’ (no matter how many times I’m corrected), I’m not going to find fault with someone getting a pronunciation wrong. It happens to everyone. The brain can get locked into a mispronunciation, and that’s that for life. 

But … but Donald Trump is now openly mocking the VP’s name in speeches, when he’s not calling into question her racial identity. He certainly seems to be ridiculing the non-European nature of her first  name, as linguist John McWhorter notes at the NYT. But you know what? Let him. He’s on the defensive. Harris is gaining. And he loses independent support every time he plays the racial card.

Update – True: ‘Trump is suddenly running scared.’

The state’s misguided emergency shelter program has not only cost  Massachusetts taxpayers more than a $1 billion, hotel owners are earning millions via the program … 

A commercial property tax hike, as approved yesterday by the Massachusetts House, will hurt businesses in Boston at a time when the city’s post-Covid economy needs all the help it can get. There’s little doubt about this. But … but the business community needs to calm down a bit. Politicians do this all the time when they have to choose between raising taxes on voters or raising taxes on businesses. 

Mayor Menino raised commercial rates in 2004 and repeated it (to a lesser extent) in 2009. (You gotta love the Herald’s “Scrooge” headline in the latter link.) And now Mayor Wu is pushing a similar tax plan. She’ll win no Profile in Courage Award for doing so. Though she’ll try, she’ll also win no Most Moral Person award. But she will win politically. And the business community will survive.