Johann Hari explains in “Stolen Focus” a phenomenon readers likely know, that sleep is not wasted time. Sleep is when the brain files short-term memories into long-term memory. It is when cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF, washes out waste products, including the toxins associated with Alzheimer’s. Not getting enough quality sleep more immediately reduces our ability to focus. But our capitalist system incentivizes staying awake and “productive” longer so we can consume more, Hari suggests. A lot of us walk around sleep-deprived.
I imagined dystopian spas where enthusiatic capitalists with ports installed in their skulls might, dialysis-like, have their brains flushed. The goal? To extend without sleep their ability to make more money and buy more stuff.
Because the Midas cult sees humans primarily as raw material for the creation and accumulation of wealth. Just as The Market intended, praised be Its name.
David Dayen offers a fresh example this morning.
“As I have said before, the most soul-crushing, exploitative, and just plain sleaziest industries in America today will invariably have private equity firms lurking behind them,” he begins, offering several examples before turning to a new one (The American Prospect):
So the revelations in a new report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, provided exclusively to the Prospect, should come as no surprise. In youth behavioral services like “troubled teen” centers, for-profit foster care, and services for young people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (in particular services for people with autism), private equity has increased its investments, capitalizing on government health care dollars and a steady stream of at-risk youth.
Private equity’s goal isn’t to provide a safe and comfortable environment for those in its care, it’s to make outsized returns. And while private equity firms have pulled hundreds of billions of dollars in dividend and management payments out of these facilities, reports of inadequate staffing and training, substandard living conditions, physical and sexual abuse, and the use of restraints and solitary confinement have proliferated. They’re a by-product of the private equity business model.
The usual, noirish suspects are here, seeking profit wherever human need is predictable and government funding is reliable. Money has no morals.
It’s worth stopping here and asking why these facilities were privatized and pushed out to for-profit companies at all. The state has an interest in ensuring a safe environment for troubled, orphaned, or developmentally disabled youth. Anyone on the street hearing that these children were being exploited as a profit center for wealthy financiers would recoil. Yet foster care and other services have been almost entirely privatized, as a way to lighten strained government budgets. The horror show of private equity bottom-feeding is the result.
It’s who they are. It’s what they do. Probably on too little sleep.
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