What follows is a conversation
between journalist Kim Kelly and Marc Steiner of The Real News Network. Read a
transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the
post.
MARC STEINER: Welcome to
The Real News, folks. This is Marc Steiner. Good to have you with us.
I have a guess many of you
have been reading about what happened to Deadspin, the sports site where
writers gave the middle finger to the owners who tried to stop them from being
political. They didn’t want them write political stuff, just sports stuff
straight. Well, they did that. And let’s think about these private equity firms
for a minute. They are vampires sucking the lifeblood out of our country,
businesses, and the workers. The analogy is really apt. Private equity
capitalists symbolize, let’s say–I found this out in an article I just read;
we’re about to talk to the author–the 16th century Countess Bathory who bathed
in the blood of young girls, or the vampire stories from every country on the
planet.
Our guest they put these
analogies together in a bold context when she wrote about the destruction of
the sports website Deadspin. And she looked beyond that; looked at the role of
these venture vampire capitalists and what they do in our world, what they play
in our world, what they’re doing to our world. So I want to welcome Kim Kelly
back to The Real News, who wrote the article This Is a Horror Story: How
Private Equity Vampires Are Killing Everything, for The Nation magazine. And
Kim, welcome. Good to have you with us.
KIM KELLY: Thanks, Marc.
Thanks for being interested in my weird bloody little tale.
MARC STEINER: It was very
strange article, but a really good article. I love the analogy. So let’s take a
step back for just a second. So you took these, we’ll probably jumped into who
these private equity people are and what they’ve done, what happened to
Deadspin directly. You create this analogy, this historical analogy with both a
mythology and reality of vampires in our world, wherever culture they came
from, to what private equity people are doing to our world today. So talk about
how that came to you. How did that come into your head? And as you told me
before, you said three in the morning, which is probably a very apt time to
write it.
KIM KELLY: Even better.
I’m not going to lie to you. I wrote this on Halloween, which sounds a little
too on the nose, right?
MARC STEINER: I love it.
That’s great.
KIM KELLY: I mean, the
piece came about because some editors of The Nation hit me up and said, “We saw
what’s happening with Deadspin. Do you want to write a piece for us about
this?” Because I’m a labor reporter and that’s sort of what we do. This is very
much in my realm, given that I came out of the digital media organizing world.
I used to work at Vice, I was an organizer there–yada, yada, yada. So they
asked me if I wanted to do this and I was thinking about it. I was like, “Well,
what’s a way that I could write about this in a way that was new; that was
interesting; that wasn’t the same piece that was being written because it was a
huge story, because it was such a huge event?”
But I started thinking about
these “capitalist vampires.” I was like, “Hang on… vampires.” Because we see,
even just on Twitter, the way people speak about private equity and the general
capitalist class; they’re vampires, they’re bloodsuckers, they’re leeches. This
is the language that makes sense when you think about the way that capitalism
is structured; the way that these people, these robber barons at the top, are
dealing with the working class. But I kept going back to the vampires. And it
was Halloween, so maybe I was feeling a little spookier than usual. And I just
started thinking about how this is a horror story.
Like what’s happening here:
these craven aristocratic jerks are literally sucking the life blood away from
workers who don’t have any much more of a defense than a metaphorical
pitchfork. And they’ve been allowed to do it for centuries, since time
immemorial, since way back in the 16th century when Countess Bathory was out
there in her dungeon. And we just see the same story over and over again. It’s
almost become its own legend, the private equity vampire. So that’s what I was
thinking about when I approached this piece, and I just rode that metaphor out
to the very end.
MARC STEINER: Yeah,
you’re certainly did. As I said, I love this piece. But let’s just talk a bit
about… You were commissioned to write a piece about Deadspin, which we’ve been
talking about here, at Real News for the last couple of weeks in what’s
happened to the workers at Deadspin. And so that’s where this began, right? And
I was shocked. I did not know the whole backstory of Deadspin and the other
online magazines and news journals that are owned by the same companies. Talk a
bit about that story and how this is private equity, owning all of these kinds
of new sites and what they’re, what they’re doing to suck the lifeblood out of
our work as journalists and Americans who want to read this stuff.
KIM KELLY: Right. I mean
we’re seeing it play out across various industries, but right now it’s just
really blatant and concerning in media. Specifically in digital media where you
have these private equity firms and soulless billionaires who swoop in and they
buy a website or package of websites, and then they decide to either scrap it
and sell it for parts or try to remake it in their own image. And what happened
with Deadspin was other workers resisted. They weren’t willing to be led to the
slaughter. They fought back. And we’re at a point where the free press is under
attack from the highest office in the land. Just in general, journalism is in a
crisis. And now we’re seeing the economic side of this crisis where it’s
difficult for digital media publishers to make money, and so they’re
looking for other ways to acquire that capital.
And this is where private
equity comes in. They come in: they’ve got all this money, they’re going to
sweep you off your feet, they’re going to get you out of bankruptcy, they’re
going to fix everything. And then, they acquire these independent, thriving
websites and then they just suck the blood out of them and toss them aside. And
what happened with Deadspin, the reason people are so captivated, is because
they disrupted that narrative. That’s the horror story. The vampire comes in
and sucks away your blood and that leaves you lifeless. In this case, the
villagers fought back and that’s why people are responding so viscerally to it.
MARC STEINER: So talk
about the company that actually bought these sites. It was more than just
Deadspin. I didn’t realize the sites, that some of them… I read they own this
long list of sites of all kinds. So tell me a bit about that company and what
exactly they did.
KIM KELLY: It’s a whole
constellation, right? This company is now known as G/O Media, which is run by
the CEO Jim Spanfeller who is a Forbes guy who came in and bought up. It’s like
Jezebel, Kotaku, The Route, Splinter, was Deadspin, Life Hacker. This whole
constellation of former Gawker media sites except Gawker… You know, R.I.P. And
they were all swept under this deal after this Peter Thiel-funded Hulk Hogan
chaotic situation where the company was sued out of existence. Jim Spanfeller
came in and this was… man, it’s been a crazy one, right? Because it was Gawker
media, and then Univision bought this damaged company and then Univision
couldn’t figure out what to do with these websites and they weren’t making the
kind of money they wanted to see.
And so Jim Spanfeller swept
in. He bought all these websites and it seems like from reading some really
incredible reporting that now former Deadspin writers and Splinter writers
within the organization wrote about what that process was then like, it seems
like they just came in and screwed everything up. It seems like this man, he
came in and installed a bunch of his cronies from Forbes, who I mean, that’s
Forbes is doing its thing, or no disrespect to Forbes, but oops. And the
Deadspin and Splinter and the Gawker media verse, they’re intrinsically…
They’re diametrically opposed. So they came in and they essentially wanted to
quash worker descent and quash all of this sort of fiery irreverent vibe that
everybody working there had. Because it was a beautiful collection of weirdos.
And they ended up killing off
Splinter, which was a really… It was a fantastic sports–or not sports. That was
the next one. It was a fantastic political commentary site and they just killed
it off. And then they came for Deadspin. And I think the people that Deadspin
sort of saw the writing on the wall and they knew something was up; something
bad was going to happen. And then it all happened so quickly and so chaotically
and so definitively that now Deadspin–I mean, to reference another horror
trope–Deadspin is just a zombie. And everyone else, everyone who used to work
there, is gone.
MARC STEINER: So you
mentioned a lot of other equity firms that took over many things in our
country, from grocery store chains to retail, and just putting everyone out of
work. Tens of tens of thousands of people we put out of work because of the
equity firms buying and pushing people out, which is why I thought it was the
analogy to vampires was very apt. So you can talk a bit about that? But also
just what happens in our country when private equity takes over all these
companies, shuts them down because there are not the kind of profits they want
to make. Thousands of people thrown out of work. This is the 21st century
version of the gilded age, what’s happening to people out in America and around
this world. So what do you do? And talk a bit about some of the examples that
you gave. But also, what we do to drive a stick through the heart of these
equity firms and stop them from destroying what we have?
KIM KELLY: Yeah, you’re
entirely right. We’re basically in a new gilded age and these are the robber
barons. And back then, the only thing that really happened to rein them in was
increased government regulation and antitrust laws. And now we’re at a point
where regulation is a dirty word because of the current administration who seem
to just love making it as terrible as possible for working people to
survive. So we’re in a place where we have these private equity firms,
they’re buying up digital media properties, but they’re also buying up
hospitals. They’re buying up nursing home chains. They’re buying up places
where you get payday loans, they’re buying up… They even bought the Playboy
mansion.
There’s every possible area of
American economic industry, they’re there. They’re lying in wait. They might be
in the shadows, they might be waiting, they might not have struck yet, but
they’re going to. And the only way, like I said, at the end of the piece, my
original ending was a little strong, I think, for my editor who asked me to
tone it down. Because my first ending was more along the lines of, well, we
need to bring back the guillotine. And my editor was like, “Well let’s
maybe think about a different way to say that because we can’t advocate for mass
murder.” You’re the editor. That’s the only way you can really rein in these
sort of vicious corporate raiders is to regulate the hell out of them.
MARC STEINER: So what
would be the guillotine?
KIM KELLY: I mean,
remember the French revolution?
MARC STEINER: I don’t
know, other than really chopping off their heads. What would be the guillotine
in your mind? What would it be? I mean, in other words, if you look at what
happened to Deadspin and all the other companies you talked about, hospitals
being shut down to be made into condos or whatever they want to make them into,
in poor black and Latino communities, all the stuff you wrote about in this
article… So there has to be a way to stop them. There has to be a way to say
no, this is not the kind of world we’re going to have. So what is that
guillotine? What is that stake in the heart of the vampire on the coffin? For
you, what is that?
KIM KELLY: That’s a
really difficult question, right? Like, how do I solve capitalism?
MARC STEINER: Yes. How do
you solve capitalism? Let me ask that right now. How do you solve capitalism?
KIM KELLY: I mean that is
always the question, right? Here is this horrible thing that’s happening. We
don’t know how to stop it. What can we do to put the brakes on the speeding
train? And I don’t have the answer either. I think in terms of private equity,
I’m not as studied in the economic, scary weird numbers realm as they are. I
don’t know how to deal with rich people. But I think Deadspin… What
happened to Deadspin is a really good example of the kind of thing that we can
be doing. The only way we can actually fight back is if we’re relying on
collective worker power.
When you look at what happened
with Toys”R”Us, when they were bought up and then driven into bankruptcy by
more of these vampires and they were deprived of the severance pay that they
were owed, they came together and they fought back. They sued the bejesus out
of them and they finally got their money. It’s like what we saw with the black
jewel miners. That wasn’t a private equity situation, but it was still a
situation where this big horrible company with a whole lot of money was
withholding those funds from the workers who actually earned it and created
that capital. And they were like, well, we’re not going to let you get away
with that. We were going to do something about it. We can’t allow these
vampires to continue to stalk the world unopposed, right?
Even going back to this old
analogy–and it’s not quite the vampire analogy, it’s a little bit more
Frankensteiny. But what happens when there’s a monster in your midst? You
gather your friends, you gather some pitchforks and you do what you can to get
them out of your hair, right? It is a big question, but I think really all we
can do is realize that you can still kill a vampire, right? There are wooden
stakes, then there are silver bullets and there’s garlic. And to translate that
into real world terms, there are unionizing your workplace and talking to your
coworkers and refusing to take this BS lying down. It’s been a great example of
that. Just being like, “You know what? No, we’re not going to let you walk all
over us. We’re going to walk all over you first.”
MARC STEINER: Yeah. And
as you were saying, the stake in the heart is workers organizing themselves and
being strong, and regulating these industries so they can not do what they do
and not allow them to do it in the first place. Make it against the law, not
allow them to do it. And for me, it’s really refreshing, Kim, to have somebody
of your generation and all these young people coming up and really writing
about labor and doing the fight, which is really important. So I’m glad you’re
out there writing about vampires and equity capitalists. And we look forward to
talking to you a great deal more.
KIM KELLY: Thank you so
much for having me.
MARC STEINER: Thanks for
your writing. And I’m Marc Steiner here with The Real News network. Let us know
what you think. We’ll have Kim Kelly and more folks like Kim Kelly on this
network so we can really make some changes. Take care.
