Blackstone exec among those killed in Manhattan shooting
Just a moment...
Wesley LePatner, a Blackstone executive who served as CEO of the firm's real estate income trust, was among four people killed Monday when a gunman opened fire in a Midtown Manhattan office building that houses Blackstone's global headquarters.
I love it when some shooting or tragedy happens, if it's workers then all they get is one line at best and their lives get abbreviated to a statistic, but when some capitalist dies every news site writes about how great and authentic they were for a couple days.
Though given how this shooting was an example of lone wolf adventurism, it's quite dumb to support it - the CEO will be replaced by an identical cog in the machine like always, a decent part of the public will get alienated thanks to anti-violence culture and media narratives (as seen in articles like there) and the shooter just threw away their life.
Though I won't lie that it doesn't make the day a bit better to see capitalist get gunned down
I don't think that decent part of the public you talk about, I don't think they actually exist. I think it's like the mythical centrist voters who are waiting for the perfect centrist candidate, that don't quite exist.
Many people have made the argument that you made, that violence doesn't solve problems, and that's true as long as we ignore all of human history.
There are a ton of people like that, but they're mostly found on real life, facebook and other similar social medias and not lemmy or reddit or twitter - those are terminally online echochambers, but I've seen one or two people going "thoughts and prayers" or "all violence bad".
Also, my position is more complex than "violence can't solve problems" - it can, but it must be organized, with clear goals in mind and people already behind and actively part of the cause.
If you just go in lone wolf style like Luigi or something and gun down a CEO, you expect for the public to see this, get inspired to take up arms of their own and start Years of Lead where rich people are fearing for their lives and suddenly we have a revolution like in some sort of Hollywood movie, but that's not what happens in reality.
Instead, media tries to demonize the shooter by saying how good the victim was and how their family is grieving (happening right now) to tug on heart strings which will at least turn some people against them, the shooter being made example of in court which essentially throws their life in the bin, the CEO being replaced by someone else in a week's time and people forgetting about all of this after news cycle moves on. I genuinely only see Luigi mentioned on lemmy here given how he's the liberal larp darling here, and nowhere else I visit or IRL.
Also, if we're talking history here, then here's a fun factoid - some Anarchist burnt down Reichstag in opposition to Hitler and his Nazi party, but this fire was later used by Hitler to expand his powers, suppress civil liberties and was pivotal in establishment of Nazi Germany. Of course, this is only something to think about with more brutal regimes, but nothing like that will probably come out of this shooting.
A good example of organized violence is probably that of the Bolsheviks pre-Russian revolutions - they had bank robberies, political assassinations that were used to fund the revolutionary underground and destabilize the regime, and not merely some bouts of individualized violence.
Fuck her. She kills people everyday. REITs cause home scarcity and rent increases that drive homelessness and poverty.
Didn't the CEO's hold "lone gunman" drills? Did they practice hiding under their desks? Were they children? No? Because that's what children have to go through every single day. This is just one day that the gunman went to a business, not a school.
I'd rather have gunmen shooting up slumlord CEOs than schools any day. Maybe if they kill enough CEOs, we can get some gun control laws that might save children. At schools. Because the CEOs that control the government sure don't give a single fuck about children being shot at school - and they never, ever will.
I'm glad our "mental health problem" is finally at least putting the crosshairs in the direction of people that actually hurt others.
I really hope this is the new Meta. Anything to protect our schools.
We have to implement "Children4CEOs" before "Children2CEOs" has a chance.
Three different articles I've seen about this and not ONE of them even ATTEMPTS to explain what Blackstone is.
Yes, I could, and did, google it, but it's infuriating, on principle. It's a bsic reading comprehension concept: don't assume your reader knows outside context, when your audience is essentially random.
That's because everyone hates hedge funds when you describe what they do. If you just say a "real estate investment group" a lot of people will still get it, so they say nothing in the hopes that your eyes glaze over and you don't think any more about it.
They make outdoor griddles right? My neighbor makes some mean fried rice on his, egg spinning and all.
They're the hedge fund that made sure you will bever own anything ever again. Especially not a house.
Blackstone is an absolutely massive, global company. Would you expect an article to also describe what Netflix is any time they talk about them?
To an extent, yes. "Video streaming giant Netflix" would suffice.
Are you for real?
Yes, that's literally taught in a high school level journalism class. Assume your reader has never heard of things before and give a quick, concise description of them. And then after giving the facts, if it's super relevant to the story, give a detailed description of them.
For example. "Video streaming giant Netflix announced today that it's going to be raising prices again. Subscribers can expect to see the new prices starting this fall. Base level subscribers yada yada yada...
Netflix rose to prominence with mail order DVDs, competing with rising prices and return fees from Blockbuster video, a brick and mortar video rental service. Netflix pioneered the streaming model yada yada yada"
Back to reddit, tankie troll.
autocorrect is my nemesis
So she was CEO of a company that owns 61,000 single family homes as rental properties that has been investigated multiple times for how they treat their tenants. They also own over 22,000 apartments.
She made her money running a company that removes 61,000 homes from the market as available for normal people to buy as their primary home.
EDIT: want to be clear that she didn't deserve to die for the work she did, just that she wasn't just some strong woman who made it in business by working hard.
Wikipedia's controversies section summarizes a few: owns Motel 6 and gave info to ICE, bought Ancestry.com stake including generic data, owns a slaughterhouse using child labor.
I had the displeasure of renting from them once. They screwed my young family coming and going, actively lied to us and misled us into making decisions that benefited them and squeezed us for every penny we had when we were just trying to get a footing in this world, and when we had enough and tried to fight back they responded by destroying my credit and making it impossible to rent elsewhere.
So you may say she didn't deserve to die for her evil deeds, but I'm not so sure.
About Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman, the deceased executive's boss:
In fact, Reuters recently found that Schwarzman is Wall Street’s largest political contributor in the United States, shelling out more than $27 million to campaign committees, Donald Trump, and other politicians. The billionaire is clearly attempting to shape American politics and policymaking to his favor. Schwarzman has already contributed $4.4 million to Trump’s campaign or political committees connected to Trump, according to Federal Election Commission filings.
People don't deserve to be murdered, but if you fuck with too many people for too long, they will murder you.
Hitler deserved to be murdered before he offed himself.
If you agree with the above, all that's being discussed is degree of horribleness.
People don't deserve to be murdered
I don't think I agree with such a blanket statement. I don't know exactly how to define where the line should be but I have no problem saying that there are definitely people alive who don't deserve to be.
People deserve to be murdered all the time?
When you're interfering with millions of people's lives and livelihoods you get exactly what you deserve. Stay in your lane rich fucks. Enjoy your wealth and just leave us alone, fuck off to an island or whatever.
they dont deserved to be murdered, but people arnt going to lose sleep for pos like the blackstone ceo. i wonder if they donate to dems to, im betting some of them to, if they are solely gop donors, good riddance.
I'm going to respectfully disagree with your edit.
Just to be clear, respectfully to you, not the dead corpo slumlord CEO lady.
It's interesting. When does a person deserve to die? Hitler obviously did, Netanyahu definitely does, not at all sad about the guy Luigi killed.. How many lives do you have to ruin in order to deserve it?
She made her money running a company that removes 61,000 homes from the market as available for normal people to buy as their primary home.
vs
EDIT: want to be clear that she didn't deserve to die for the work she did,
...
What would Spok say?
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few."
...
61,000 homes x bare minimum 2.6 avg household size = 158,600.
Homelessness rate in the US is now at least 3% of the total population.
158,600 x 0.03 = 4,758.
Homelessness is an extremely dangerous, life-threatening, often fatal condition.
In summary, nah, she absolutely deserved to die for the work she did, regardless of whatever the actual specifics of this incident are.
1 life vs almost 5k likely deaths?
This math ain't as hard as people seem to think.
If she ran a company that knowingly, intentionally, poisoned that many people's food or water, distributed that many HIV contaminated needles, sold that many defective airbags or brakepads...
...if the process wasn't so abstracted with so many steps, the moral judgement would be a lot easier for a lot more people to make.
Keep in mind: Her job was to literally operate and maintain the abstraction.
I have negative pity for this exploitative cancer formely emobodied in the form of a living human being.
Blackrock Blackstone is a fucking MASSIVE corporate residential landlord.
They are not a good company. They are an evil company, for that fact alone.
"They are not a good company"... are there any good corporations?
Well, isn't there a difference between a 'company' and a 'corporation', at least in how the words are perceived (corporations being those multinational giants built on exploitation)? I feel like there are plenty of good small and medium sized companies - like the one I work for is medium sized and mainly promotes and researches green technologies (to keep it vague..). Corporations always seem to have plenty of skeletons in the closet.
There are some that are a heck of a lot better. Oxfam, Ben & Jerries, maybe Valve; but it does seem that on a large enough timeline all of them turn to the dark side.
Presumably that's a question of the founders, the rules and laws of the system, the state of the market and technology. For example if profit can be improved mostly by marketing, this will lead to marketing people be promoted and run the corporation. If it's a publicly traded company it's likely to become more like an artificial intelligence hellbent on profit (or a demonic entity incorporated into a swarm of drones).
What are the factors that make corporations like good or bad for society should be long studied and taught in high school and everybody should know them - if you'd wanted capitalism to work as advertised. It should be a major focus of our society.
Is that a Mario Kart joke?
Amongst other things
Blackstone
Well deserved
Phew! I was worried it might have been an innocent victim.
Thoughts and prayers
BlackRock and BlackStone are two separate companies people.
Both are evil, but very differently
Weyland yutani, omni consumer products, and viridian dynamics: also different companies. Explain the difference.
Invest in BlackRock, your money is used to buy up stocks and bonds. In fact, buy shares in an iShares ETF and you're part of the famous BlackRock cabal.
BlackRock has been controversial for many legitimate reasons as well, but in recent years the biggest one has been ESG efforts ("environmental, social and corporate governance"), due to which they're now referred to as.... woke??? Several states stopped doing business with them because of their advocacy against fossil fuels. Florida pulled 2 billion invested with them because of ESG. Also, apparently they're all Jews and caused COVID.
The legitimate reasons for which they're controversial include the fact that their funds own large shares in literally everything. See healthy competition among publicly traded companies in the US by some miracle? BlackRock still owns a large percent of all of them. Or rather, BlackRock funds do. Again, these are mainly ETFs (exchange-traded funds), anyone can buy into them and own a piece of those pies. BlackRock owns things fairly passively.
Blackstone is different. They also have diverse investments from insurance to entertainment where they usually invest directly in companies, but they're controversial for their real estate investments. They own tens of thousands of single family homes and apartments in the US and during COVID made news for buying SFHs above market value so they could buy up entire neighborhoods to ensure people couldn't buy homes in those neighborhoods and would have to rent from them. They have a bunch of commercial real estate too, but that's not as controversial, since it's not actively removing homes from the market. If you travel at all, you're essentially guaranteed to have stayed at some Blackstone owned hotel at one point or another.
Ah and extra fun fact: While BlackRock is the bigger company these days, it's actually a former subsidiary of Blackstone.
TL;DR: BlackRock owns a bit of everything, or rather profits from everything from holdings that their customers own through their funds. Blackstone actively buys up shit you need to live.
They're the same picture.
You can't trick me into reading the AvP books a second time!
I hear you, but there are people literally confusing the two with specificity.
Best news I've heard all day.
Here I was afraid that a child got killed, but a Blackstone CEO? Happy day.
If that exec fought harder for Work From Home maybe his work-life balance would still be in decent order
Don't worry, they'll just do that. For executives position only. You plebs can still rot in traffic
sometimes bad things happen to bad people 🥹
Am supposed to feel bad about this?
Well, at least someone terrible was among those lost. I’ll take the silver-lining where I can get it. Rot in hell, corporate robber baron.
Yeah but the CEO was a women and therefore "woke". /s
glass ceiling effect.
That should make the rw happy then, too.
And nothing of value was lost.
He was targeting the NFL? Yeah, because the NFL is a regular contributor to ruining the lives of entire generations.
Of course he was targeting the NFL. If he was targeting Blackstone, the news would have to talk about who Blackstone is.
Feels weird with how little information is in that article they also mention the NFL. If that's the case, targeting the NFL should be the lede and she happened to be collateral damage. This almost feels like wild speculation just to misdirect the news from another CEO possibly being targeted. I'll doff my tinfoil hat for a bit but something smells fishy.
Last week, the Department of Justice announced it had filed an amended complaint to its antitrust lawsuit against RealPage in order to sue six of the largest U.S. landlords for their alleged participation in a nationwide rental price-fixing scheme. According to the complaint, the six landlords allegedly coordinated their rents with each other through use of RealPage’s pricing algorithms and direct communication with competitors about rents and occupancy, among other tactics. Of those six landlords, three are owned by private equity firms: Blackstone, Greystar Real Estate Partners, and Cortland Management.
Blackstone, the nation’s largest landlord, with around 350,000 rental units, has faced years of scrutiny from advocates for its poor treatment of tenants. In August, the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) and the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE) published a report examining how Blackstone has profited from rent hikes and ramped up evictions in California. In 2021, Blackstone acquired 5,800 rental units in the San Diego area. Since then, the report showed, Blackstone has increased the rent at these properties 38% — almost double the 20% average rent increase for all apartments in the San Diego market during this period. The rent increase at some Blackstone-owned buildings was especially high – up to 79%. The report also noted how Blackstone touted to investors multiple times how the firm’s real estate investments benefit from declining new supply of housing, a key driver of the affordable housing crisis.
“As more and more Americans struggle with the cost of putting a roof over their heads, corporate landlords were allegedly colluding to raise rents ever higher,” said Jordan Ash, Director of Housing at PESP. “Everyday Americans can’t keep up with the cost of rent. Homelessness is skyrocketing. Folks are choosing between medicine and a place to live. We applaud the Department of Justice for taking decisive action to hold profiteers like Blackstone accountable.”
And she was CEO of that.
I will bet you a dollar that she would speak at charity dinners talking about how her company creates safe living spaces for low income women or some shit. She would say anything to spin the fact that she made the world a worse place for hundreds of thousands of people.
She can rot.
Cool.
Nothing changes until more of this trash is scared to leave their homes.
always a silver lining :)
(good fucking riddance)
Reading headlines like this and thinking the next week of podcasts is going to be lit.
Definitely post if you hear of some!
Just keep your eyes on TrueAnon. They did a banger of an expose on Luigi Mangione as well as the Zizians
Player 1 has returned
Oh, there's a competition? I'm curious what the high score will be.
Just to clarify, it would be wise to avoid a lot of the language around scores and so on. Many of the mass shooters over the last few years have been related to the Terrorgram group, a bunch of idiots who glorify violence in the language of video games. They include the Christchurch shooter who live streamed his attack on a mosque in New Zealand. If you want to use the phrasing around a high score it would be a good idea to be very clear about what you mean as those idiots have a tendency to see anything that is not outright against them as probably in favour. If you are interested a podcast called Weird Little Guys is great for learning more about far right weirdos.
The shooting is troubling, but this highlights another aspect. Even those at the top of their game and working for trillion dollar companies can be killed by random violence at work targeting a neighbor.
Perhaps the wealthy companies need to step off of people's necks. Make being poor less of a pressure cooker. (Doesn't even matter if this specific shooter was poor.)
The wealthy don't mind losing a few ofvthier own, less competition. They just don't want to be the one to die.
This wasn't random violence targeting a neighbor. She was the target.
Unless she also works for the nfl. No.
Zero sympathy.
Ohhhh noooooooo
my thot sand prayers go out to the pig that got murdered.
Pour one out for Luigi 2
Two in the thoughts, one in the prayers. Here’s to Luigi.
Ah, too bad the guy killed himself.
It makes me wonder - do prisoners get the news? I like to imagine Luigi getting this article and smiling.
In a mass shooting?
LOL friendly fire, i guess nazis can do good things sometimes.
Finally, some good news
So...anyway.
Womp womp
Oh no...
🍽
👏
It is believed the shooter had meant to target the National Football League, which also is based at 345 Park Ave.
Especially by nervous robber Barron execs, I'm sure. What could someone possibly want to target the NFL for?
Sharts and bus fares.
I'll go ahead and be the bad taste in everyone's mouth:
Good fucking riddance. Blackstone is an explicitly evil company, and everyone working for them should be ashamed. It is not possible to be an executive at Blackstone and also be a good person, they are diametrically opposed ideals.
If I believed the US justice system gave a single fuck about the evils that the rich committed, I would be more aghast by this... but I don't, and I'm not.
Lots thinking the same. It takes courage to say it.
There’s the unwritten rule you don’t speak ill of the dead. It’s weird, you can call them an a$$whole all you like when the are alive, as soon as they die then it’s bad taste. Death does not absolve them. They were horrid and peddled misery to others. We need to be voicing this more.
The threads about Hulk Hogan dying were interesting. Lots of love for Ozzy in there.
Fuck social rules, you deserve the death you lived. And this piece of shit deserves to have his corpse desecrated and his name run through the mud.
Immediately at death is when we should discuss someone's legacy, good or bad
Ya I have zero sympathy for elite members of society whose only way to the top is by taking from the countries poorest. Fuck em.
In surprised it’s taken this long for someone to take action against Blackstone.
Oh it was accidental. Somebody just let loose in a manhattan office and managed to hit a few parasites, go figure. They really meant to attack the nfl for suppressing research into the effects of head trauma on football players
Luigi 1:7
I'm wondering if they're purposely reporting this differently than they did the United Health Care CEO because they didn't like how that went
I think so. They keep saying the gunman meant to go to the NFL offices in the same building. With the source being "trust me bro". Like they've released nothing.
I think the truth is this is a copycat killer going after the corporate elite and they want to hide that.
In the mid-aughts, I had an opportunity to do IT in Iraq for one of these mercenary outfits. It was good, tax-free money, but I declined because I didn't want to work for evil. Every person who works there had to make the same choice and chose to work for evil. Have no sympathy for anyone who works for these fucks.
This right here is exactly why I have no issue with the Luke and Lando destroying either death star.
Were there independent contractors present? Tons. Heaps, even.
I can tell you a contractors personal politics comes into play heavily when choosing jobs.
Anyone who knows the score and chooses to actively participate in evil and morally dubious business gets no sympathy if shit hits the fan.
Also as 3rd party labor, most recently I refused to do any jobs that took me into a Target. Lost out on about $3000 of work, but they will never get anything from me, even if they're paying me for it (directly or not)
I first learned of this shooting via chat, and was lacking some context. I also didn’t know Blackstone INC was a thing.
I got so confused about why someone would target the CEO of a griddle company.