Happy Birthday, Mr. President
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  June 12, 2025 Howdy, Meteor readers, This weekend is Father’s Day, and while it’s not my favorite holiday (dead-dad girlie 💁🏽♀️), in this moment when fathers are being ripped away from their families unjustly, it feels like the right time for us all to be a little pro-dad. Here’s a little love to some real ones: Al Berrios, thank you for not leaving me in the woods; to Anthony, Tito, Diop, Fya, and Littlefinger, your friendship and fatherhood have changed my life. And to Ruben, whose love has made one little girl the happiest in the world. In today’s newsletter, we help you get ready for a protest-heavy weekend. Plus, Nona Willis Aronowitz asks author and journalist Megan Greenwell three questions about the impact of private equity on our lives. Johnny’s daughter, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ONEverybody’s workin’ for the weekend: When Taylor Swift warned us that a cruel summer was imminent, she may not have been referring to the president setting off a war on this country’s most basic rights. But alas, here we are. As anti-ICE protests spread across the country this week—Seattle, Spokane, Chicago, New York, St. Louis, and San Antonio have all seen action—the administration is threatening a harsher, implicitly violent position against people exercising their First Amendment rights. Elected officials like Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.) and, most recently, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) have become targets of GOP ire simply for challenging false narratives around immigration policy. On the bureaucratic front, Republicans in Congress are doing their part to quash freedoms by launching an investigation into 200 NGOs that provide food, shelter, and legal services to immigrants.  SENATOR ALEX PADILLA WAS FORCIBLY REMOVED FROM A PRESS CONFERENCE HELD BY HOMELAND SECURITY SECRETARY KRISTI NOEM AFTER ACCUSING NOEM OF EXAGGERATING THE SITUATION IN LOS ANGELES. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) But this weekend will be a true test of just how far Trump is willing to go to silence his detractors. Saturday, June 14, is his birthday, and to celebrate, he’s hosting an incredibly expensive military parade in D.C., a move that reeks of authoritarian pageantry. The president has warned that “those people who want to protest” will be met with “very heavy force.” (Yes, you read that right–simply protesting merits violence.) Considering the number of “No Kings” rallies scheduled for that day, it’s highly likely he and his tanks will come across some protesters. While many of the protests we’ve seen have been peaceful, Trump’s antagonistic stance has stoked a long-simmering fire. Many of us were raised on the schoolyard adage of don’t start a fight, but be sure to finish it or the very adult adage of knuck if you buck. The administration is bucking. So if you’re planning to hit the streets this weekend (or anytime) and have concerns about encountering police tactics like gas or rubber bullets, here are a few safety basics to keep in mind:
Perhaps being outside in this way is not your ministry. No judgment! You can still support the cause by donating to one of the NGOs being targeted by the administration. Stay safe and never forget, somos semillas. AND:
 MILDRED DIDN’T JUST WRITE LETTER SHE ALSO SERVED LOOKS. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 Three Questions About…Private EquityIn her new book, author Megan Greenwell humanizes the horrors of a secretive industry. BY NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ  COURTESY OF MEGAN GREENWELL When journalist Megan Greenwell scored her dream job as the editor-in-chief of the sports website Deadspin, she hadn’t thought about private equity at all. She had never done any finance reporting, and she had only the vaguest sense of what private equity even did. But when, in 2019, Deadspin was being destroyed by the firm that owned it, she wrote a scorched-earth resignation letter and resolved to learn more about the human cost of this ubiquitous and insidious industry. Her resulting book, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, tells the story of four people whose lives were upended by private equity–and how they all fought back. John Oliver once said, “If you want to do something evil, put it inside something boring.” Your book is not boring, but I think for many of us, our eyes glaze over at financial terms we don’t know. How do you explain private equity to get laypeople to care? The only way I wanted to write this book was if it was for people who have some sense that private equity is important and has negative consequences, but have zero idea what that means. Here’s how I describe it: The engine of the private equity machine is leveraged buyouts, which are when a private equity firm pools money from outside investors–pension funds, university endowments, ultra-wealthy individuals, what have you–and combines that money with a huge amount of bank loans, then uses that combined fund to buy companies. The trick is that the debt from the loans is assigned not to the private equity firm but to the company it is acquiring. That’s the detail I think gets people scandalized. They take companies that are pretty strong in a lot of cases and turn them into companies absolutely hamstrung by debt payments, and as a result, 10 times as many companies owned by private equity declare bankruptcy than other kinds of companies. The private equity firms themselves don’t take on any risk, but this has horrible effects on communities, workers, tenants, patients, everybody. The book’s subtitle mentions “the death of the American dream.” How did this theme play out in your reporting? (Also, I have to ask: Was it just a coincidence that three out of four of your protagonists were women, or do you think there’s a throughline there?) I picked the industries first, and I landed on media, healthcare, retail, and housing. Private equity didn’t cause the root problems in these industries; instead, they capitalized on those problems for their own gain. Once I had my protagonists, the interviews drove the American Dream theme rather than the other way around. One is a Mexican immigrant who moved here in middle school, not speaking a word of English, and who managed to become a professional journalist. Another grew up poor in Texas, and his version of the American dream was becoming a community doctor who provided care to his neighbors. Another was a woman who escaped public housing (and a lot of other things), so for her, living in her apartment complex really was the Dream. And the last woman is an Alaska native who moved to the mainland and supported a family of five on a Toys “R” Us retail salary so her husband could go to pharmacy school and make a better life for all of them. In each case, private equity ended up tearing down the things that were most important to these people. [And about the three-out-of-four women factor,] it’s not surprising to me that women were the majority of people I ended up talking to–not just [of] the four, but the 150 to 200 people I spoke with before I found my protagonists. In part, it’s because there are specific vulnerabilities of being a woman in 21st century America [like poverty] but also because I chose people who were fighting back, and women seem to be more involved in these community fights. Yes–all of your subjects actively resist their circumstances to varying degrees after private equity shatters their lives. What can someone whose job or industry is being eviscerated by private equity learn from the people in your book? The four characters in my book all fight back in very different ways. Some put pressure on elected representatives [to regulate private equity]–although there are limitations to that at the federal level, because fully 88% of members of Congress and the Senate take private equity donations. Another character does some lobbying in front of pension funds to get them to stop investing in private equity firms that hurt workers. There’s some true grassroots community organizing to build something new. Some of the most interesting reporting I did was in the media section, where the focus is on people who are trying to create a new nonprofit system. Is that at a big enough scale now that it is fully replacing private equity-owned corporate media? No. But some startup nonprofit local news sites are doing really, really well economically and are becoming amazing sources of news in places that didn’t have news. I think about Mississippi Today, which did not exist until a few years ago, but which won a Pulitzer by exposing a massive scandal in the governor’s office involving Brett Favre. That’s genuinely inspiring to me.  WEEKEND READING 📚On what you just read: It may take you longer than a weekend, but Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company is certainly worth the extra time. (Bookshop) On dark humor: Singer and activist Joan Baez has a really good joke about what it’s like living under Trump. We’ll let her tell it. (Rolling Stone) On “stillness and homogeneity”: Liv Veazey reports on the unsettling vibes in New York City’s immigration court. (n+1)  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
