Good – this part:
Time to Restore Honest Capitalism
Part of what’s going on with WeWork is that monopolies and private equity have eliminated profitable opportunities for investment, which is why the Federal Reserve is increasingly powerless. Republicans like Mitt Romney are noticing that excess capital is harmful. Capitalism itself is breaking down in the face of business models that are simply organized around loss-making and endless access to the small number of (largely) men who can enable unlimited access to the capital markets.
Across the West, the basic problem of a corrupted productive process is becoming a quiet crisis. The reason is simple. The people that do the work in organizations are increasingly excluded from the decision-making about the work. That is why Boeing is losing its ability to build planes, why we can’t build infrastructure, and why New York City is on the verge of disaster. And the cherry on top is investors pouring money into enterprises that aren’t even speculative, but are purely loss-making, because they find a destructive personality like Adam Neumann compelling.
That’s why Neumann was given an unlimited charge card and a license to abuse his employees. As it turns out, the S-1 was correct; he was pivotal to WeWork, because WeWork only exists due to his ability to get money from investors.
It’s a good thing Neumann’s stepped down. And if we restore laws against predatory pricing and centralized financial control, the entire counterfeit capitalism model will go away. We can then get back to the business of making and selling things to each other without engaging in celebrated cases of fraud and abuse under the guise of ‘quirkiness.’
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