Over the last two weeks I've been documenting the abuses endured by workers and residents within the Atria assisted living chain, while Bruce Wasserstein, CEO of the Lazard investment house (and controller of Atria through an affiliated real estate fund) makes millions in bonuses even as the investment itself tanks. You can read my collected posts here.
What's happening at Atria--the gouging of seniors' meager disposable income to ensure profit margins are met, even while services and benefits are cut and rents are increased dramatically--is an extreme, but all-too-real example of what's happening all over the globe...the systematic transfer of wealth and the power to create wealth from the larger mass of the human community to a select class of uber-wealthy players at the top of the social scale. It's worth looking at the issue in a larger context, if only to reiterate what I think most of us already know...that we're being robbed, cheated, gouged, and nickel-and-dimed to death to make others rich.
Yesterday, a Huffington Post reader commented on my previous article about the campaign against Bruce Wasserstein's gouging of seniors to fatten his own pockets. "Sadly," they said, "nobody cares."
I will admit, it's tough to raise interest in an issue like this. Everything from high gas prices to the crumbling economy to the Iraq war is demanding people's attention--and that's before you have to deal with the filtering effects of the media that reduces complex issues to trivial "gotcha" games. But a small group of committed citizens got out on the streets yesterday to say "Yes, we do care about the health and well-being of our elders, and the workers who take care of them. Do you?"
Over the last week, I've been documenting the struggle between workers and residents of the Atria assisted living facilities chain, and Bruce Wasserstein, CEO of the Lazard investment firm, who has reaped enormous profits from an affiliated fund's holdings in Atria, while the workers endure low pay and terrible conditions, the residents suffer neglect, and the shareholders continually lose value in their investment. If you've been reading thus far, you're probably asking yourself, "Okay, this is a terrible situation. What can I do about it?"
Yesterday no less an authority than Seeing The Forest's Dave Johnson explored the tangled web binding private equity firm Lazard, its "real estate investment fund" Lazard-Freres Strategic Realty Investors Fund II, and the fund's largest asset--the Atria assisted living facilities business. In discussing my own post about this terrible story, Dave made a point that I myself hadn't considered:
Martin, I think you have it wrong here. Who is Lazard's customer, in this situation?... Lazard's customer is people and companies with a ton of money. They hand the money to Lazard and expect a good return. The seniors under Atria's care are Lazard's product, not their customer! In today's America the vulnerable, elderly, sick and captive are a product to be exploited.
When it comes to telling a story that you want people to understand and connect to, nothing beats hearing the words of other people. I can pontificate, theorize, and analyze all I want, but to simply read the stories of people who are in the trenches, being affected by the issue, drives the point home.
In the case of the ongoing campaign to force Lazard CEO Bruce Wasserstein to clean up the conditions and improve the standards of the Atria assisted living chain, I wanted to take a moment and share some more stories from people affected every day by the decisions Wasserstein is making...everyday people like you and I who are in tough spots and being forced to make tougher decisions because of Wasserstein's greed. Read on.
We're all familiar with the black-hole collapse of Enron, where millions of employees who were forced to vest their retirement savings in Enron stock lost their shirts and more when the company imploded. Since then, there's been a much more comprehensive focus on ensuring that pension fund investors make sure that whatever holdings they put employee savings into will at least maintain enough stability to, y'know, actually be there when the investor hits the golden retirement age.
Given that, why would Pennsylvania's school employees retirement system (aka PSERS) make the move of investing a whopping $350 million into the terribly underperforming Lazard-affiliated fund, the biggest asset of which is the "troubled" Atria assisted living chain?:
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