I think this might be interesting. anaxarchos's repeated call of what/where is capital has affected my thinking for the last few months. We're (our Workers Center) are working with the Teamsters on a campaign I can't talk about right now.

They told us about a national campaign at Us Food Services (USFS) they are fighting, including a Cincinnati venue: www.usfoodserviceworkers.org They currently represent less than 10% of the workers at USFS.

Here's the deal from the Teamsters website:

Private Equity Ownership

* U.S. Foodservice is owned by private equity firms Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P. (KKR) and Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, Inc. (CD&R). In 2007, CD&R and KKR purchased U.S. Foodservice for $7.3 billion, using $2.3 billion in equity and initially saddling U.S. Foodservice with $5 billion in debt.
* “Private equity” is a broad term for groups of investors or funds that invest in private companies or buy out public corporations. Private equity firms specialize in purchasing other companies by borrowing huge sums of money, either through bank loans or by issuing high-yield bonds. The purchased company then has to pay off the debt, not the private equity firm.
* KKR, one of the most famous private equity firms in the world, currently has assets of approximately $60 billion and either owns or has a major stake in numerous major corporations, including Dollar General, Sealy, Hospital Corporation of America, Nielsen and Toys “R” Us.
* CD&R specializes in acquiring distribution and industrial companies. In fact, CD&R purchased foodservice distributor Alliant in 1995 and later sold it to Royal Ahold, which merged it into U.S. Foodservice. CD&R currently has ownership stakes in The Hertz Corporation, Rexel, Culligan and HD Supply.

I'm on the listserve for this campaign, and will pass on anything I learn. How we fight these guys is another story.

...which in some ways is eclipsing the corporation. The term came into general usage for the cash funds that engaged in leveraged buyouts (LBOs) a few decades ago. Today, it includes everything from index funds to hedge funds to derivative funds to Warren Buffet's company. They are different from the finance capital which preceded them in their eagerness to actively take apart and put together corporations, unlike the preceding forms of finance capital which were largely "passive" investors (who "voted with their feet"). Take a look at your text above on CDR which lists ownership of at least half a dozen major corporations, which in a different day would be welded into one corporation OR organized as a trust to achieve a monopoly. These days, they treat their "holdings" as Lego blocks, even as they view those same investments as strictly temporary - a way station on the path to some new investment.

There is a debate over whether the funds are evolving into new forms of Capital or whether they are a product of globalization which will themselves fade away... much like conglomerates.

They are very hard to fight because you can't pin them down. They are like locusts, which disperse and leave desolation in their wake... only to reform again.

http://www.allhatnocattle.net/locusts%20egypt.jpg

Fortune magazine writes about this shit right out in the open these days...


http://money.cnn.com/2009/11/11/news/international/global_american_wages.breakingviews/index.htm

Americans are overpaid
For the global economy to rebalance, the pay gap between Americans and the rest of the world must shrink.
By Martin Hutchinson and Edward Hadas
November 11, 2009: 3:17 PM ET

U.S. workers are overpaid, relative to equally productive foreigners doing the same work. If the global economy is ever to get back into balance, that gap needs to be closed.

Of course, U.S. workers should earn more than their peers in China, Moldova, or Vietnam. The Americans take advantage of the higher productivity that makes their country rich: better education and infrastructure, abundant capital and a more developed work ethic. But how much higher should U.S. wages be?

The answer depends in large part on two measures: the difference in productivity in making goods that can be traded across borders, and the quantity of such tradable goods. Both measures point to a narrowing wage gap.

There are so many factors working to push up productivity in poor countries. Fast development, cheap capital, and more efficient shipping all help make foreign factories more competitive. Cheap global communication through the Internet reduces all sorts of costs and makes it easy to trade many more goods and especially services.

The global wage gap has been narrowing, but recent U.S. labor market statistics suggest the adjustment has not gone far enough.

One indicator is unemployment, which has risen unexpectedly rapidly in this downturn. The 7.3 million jobs lost are more than treble the 2 million of the next worst post-war recession, in 1980-82. Some of that huge increase reflects the turbulence of an unusually sharp decline in GDP, but there could be another factor: the recession has revealed many workers are paid more than they are worth.

Another possible sign is the huge surge in reported productivity, which has begun while output was still declining. That suggests that some production is being outsourced altogether, often to lower-paid foreign workers.

The big U.S. trade deficit -- cut in half but still at alarmingly high levels -- is another sign of excessive pay for Americans. One explanation for the attractive prices of imported goods is that U.S. workers are paid too much, relative to their foreign peers.

Global wage convergence is great for the poor but tough on the overpaid rich. It's possible to run the numbers to show that U.S. manufacturing workers should take average real wage cuts of as much as 20% to get into global balance.

The required cut may be smaller. But if U.S. wages get stuck above global market-clearing levels, as in the 1930s, the result could well be something approaching 1930s levels of unemployment.

Pretty well anything would be better than that. A combination of moderate inflation to reduce real wages and a further drop in the dollar's real trade-weighted value might be an acceptable combination.

Fortune magazine agrees with us about how the damned machine works.

Our so-called friends among the "progressives" deny it.

Fortune magazine: "increasing the wealth of the few will require a further screwing of the workers in the US - they ain't seen nothing yet. They have it too good now and that is an obstacle to progress. Obviously, logically, inevitably because this is the way the machine works. Anyone who thinks otherwise is living in a fantasy world."

Liberals and progressives: "I don't know where you Stalinists get these crazy ideas about Capitalism."

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x7011504