Grubstakers - Episode 135: Gerry Schwartz & Heather Reisman (Billionaire Pete Buttigieg Supporters)

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

This week we take a extra deep dive into the Canadian billionaire power couple Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman. With his predatory private equity acumen and her tenacity to run other bookstores and plant shops out of business they have accumulated a vast net worth which they’re using to host fundraisers for Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg. Why have so many billionaires lined up behind his dark horse candidacy and what do they hope to gain? And did these two scions of Canadian business actually do anything to “earn” their money besides asset stripping, corporate bust outs, age discrimination, and fraud? Find out here! *EPISODE CORRECTION*: Gerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman *have not* donated money directly to Pete Buttegieg. Canadian citizens are not allowed to donate to US candidates for federal office. They did however use their Nantucket mansion to host a fundraiser for him so providing that material benefit is to us functionally equivalent to being donors. Apologies for not clarifying this distinction though. Some sources used in this episode: https://www.courtlistener.com/opinion/1918821/kipperman-v-onex-corp/ http://archive.rabble.ca/babble/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=004821 https://www.winsightgrocerybusiness.com/amp/retailers/military-vets-accuse-save-lot-owner-fraud-racketeering https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-us-boeing-discrimination-071609-2009jul16-story.html

We'll be right back. And I don't like what I read about. We have more than just one coin. We create the world around this coin. Cop. Invention. Cop. Cop. In 5, 4, 3, 2, the evil has gone. Welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I'm joined here today by... Steve Jeffers. Yogi Poliwog.

And so we've been doing this podcast for just about two years now. We're celebrating our two-year anniversary. We've been profiling a new billionaire every week, and it comes at a very opportune time, this two-year anniversary, because as of Monday, February 3rd, 2020, that will be the Iowa caucuses for the Democratic primary. And in the event that Bernie Sanders

wins those caucuses, that will be very bad for every single billionaire we have profiled. That will be a five-alarm fire, you know, all-hands-on-deck emergency will be a five alarm fire, you know, all hands on deck emergency. So we wanted to spend, you know, this and then the episode we do on the Patreon. This will be the last two episodes we release before we know who actually wins those Iowa caucuses. That's right.

And we wanted to spend both these episodes talking about, you know, a couple of the billionaires linked to Bernie Sanders' opponents in the Democratic primary. You know, this one we're going to talk about a couple billionaires linked to Pete Buttigieg, these Canadian billionaires Jerry Schwartz and Heather Riesman. But next one we'll talk about a billionaire linked to Joe Biden. To add to the gravity of today's episode, as of today, January 27th, the latest Iowa poll still shows Sanders in a slight lead at 26%, Biden's at 25%, and Buttigieg is in third at 22%. Nice. Right.

I've basically compared this. Democratic strategists are like the Vermonk marching into Russia, where they didn't sleep for like a month but the country is so vast that no matter how much effort they're still more ahead of them and they're they're you know they're bringing out the joe rogan smears they're like finding old videos of bernie saying the word wage slavery the phrase wage slavery that's right but it's like there's there's still this vast country ahead of them and you know the russian divisions just keep coming and the polls just get worse and worse and you know there will be a lot of bunker suicides is what i'm predicting here you know what people

don't realize is that there's a lot of hot girls in iowa and all of those people are for burning that's true so 90 of i hot girls yeah so buddha judge is either in second or sorry in third or fourth place um nipping at the heels of warren or in some cases overtaking her such as in the last two iowa polls so um he has he has i think he has a record for most billionaire supporters or no he's uh below biden actually okay so he's in he's in the running right and that's actually kind of where i wanted to start this, is because there is a Forbes article that I found was pretty interesting from November 2019. Here are the billionaires funding the Democratic presidential candidates.

And this is, you know, a good introduction. They go through the number of billionaires who have donated to each Democratic presidential candidate. According to Forbes, roughly 20% of all American billionaires have donated, either directly or through their spouses, to a Democrat candidate for president. And they go through the number of supporters. And according to Forbes, Joe Biden has 44 billionaires who have donated to him. Pete Buttigieg has 40. But it should also be noted that Kamala Harris had 46. So another brilliant investment by the smartest and hardest working people in America. It's fucking awesome how bad billionaires are at guessing which candidate is probably going to win.

The fucking worst. Cory Booker had 45 billionaire supporters. Also rest in peace. Amy Klobuchar has 21. Elizabeth Warren has six. And Bernie Sanders had one, and the campaign returned the donation when they found out they had one.

I was actually worried for a while that maybe one billionaire would actually get to sneak their donation in, and they wouldn't find it. And then the news people would be like, see. Sure, sure, sure. You are supported by billionaires. I mean.

Even though it's one and it was a mistake. Listen, whichever billionaire chose to donate to Sanders' campaign, we have a special Patreon tier for you and only you. And if you want us to not do an episode on you, it's just a flat fee. And we will never talk about you on this show ever again. We'll even edit this part of the show out just because we love and support your Patreon niche. It is true. Giving us money to not do an episode on you is a much better investment than giving it to Bernie Sanders.

Yeah. Because Bernie's still going to come after you. But we can be bought, people. We're reasonable. You saw Tom Steyer didn't give us the money. You saw what happened to him. That motherfucker. We had to end his presidential campaign.

We don't like to do this. Fairlawn Capital is a household name now. Look, every day I don't get to play PSVR. I get more angry and I take it out on the billionaires who are not funding our podcast on the Patreon special tier. You know that one VR game where you're just like slapping like shit to the beat?

We should make one which is just billionaires slowly coming up to you and you're just fucking pounding them in the face. You're just hitting pictures of billionaires. Just a solid punch in the face

as they are slowly walking up towards you and they're coming from all angles like a billionaire would. You can make a Doom mod for VR. Yeah, that'd be nice.

But it's all billionaire's faces. Right, right. Like, your secret is his cover. Right, just punching fucking Bill Gates in the face. Punching Epstein, a secret Epstein Easter egg penis in the face. It's like the Bernie Sanders secret police training video. Right. You gotta, like, it's like the army.

You gotta, like to remove any sense that the enemy has humanity by getting kids to play drone video games before they go on to do stuff. But as we mentioned, today we're going to talk about a couple billionaires linked to Pete Buttigieg. On the Patreon side, we'll talk

about one billionaire linked to Joe Biden. But I think Pete Buttigieg is an interesting topic to start with because, again, he's the mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He won 10,000 votes in his election to be the mayor. So how the hell does a person like that go to be one of the best funded candidates in the entire Democratic primary? This is a nobody in like a tiny mayorship. And my personal theory on that is that Pete Buttigieg is the Jeffrey Epstein candidate. And I will just offer a couple pieces of support for that thesis. One is this guy named Oren Kramer is a hedge fund millionaire we've talked about.

We talked about him on the Jeffrey Epstein Part 2 episode. So he was a major Obama fundraiser. There was even a 2008 article called In the New York Observer where they dubbed him, quote, the Obamasaurus because he said other fundraisers were dinosaurs who were lining up with Hillary Clinton. Gotcha. And he was, you know, the guy who was behind Obama.

The New York Times has recently described him as, quote, one of Pete Buttigieg's top fundraisers, unquote. And the story about Orrin Kramer, just to go through it again, this is from The Daily Beast. Orrin Kramer met Jeffrey Epstein. Orrin Kramer is the founder of Boston Provident Hedge Fund. Jeffrey Epstein put $30 million in there. And he said he wanted to invest several hundred thousand dollars from Alan Dershowitz, again, quoting from the Daily Beast. But when the fund tanked the following year, Epstein called the founder, Oren Kramer, and demanded,

quote, one of us is going to make Alan whole, and if I have to do it, that is an outcome you will regret, unquote. Kramer agreed to restore Dershowitz's money if Epstein left the remainder of his investment in the fund. So this guy, who's, according to the New York Times, one of Pete Buttigieg's top fundraisers, unquote, is threatened by Jeffrey Epstein and immediately returns Alan Dershowitz's money. So what the fuck is going on here? And don't think too much about how many people are alleging that Jeffrey Epstein was running a recording blackmail operation. Sure. That Oren Kramer was apparently threatened enough by to return his money. Well, Kramer might not have been somebody that was being blackmailed, but he certainly burst in every room to see what was going on.

And Kramer was the only guy. Epstein didn't have a tape of him with somebody underage. but he certainly burst in every room to see what was going on. Kramer was the only guy. Epstein didn't have a tape of him with somebody underage. He just had a tape of him saying the N-word at a comedy club. He just kept busting into rooms with Jerry Seinfeld dating 18-year-olds. And again, you know, like anybody who's looked at the Epstein stuff knows there are a lot of allegations that he had, like, secret recording equipment and recording, you know, studios for this kind of stuff. So, I's just very okay but billionaires are idiots like

we've talked about several times and recording equipment is uh surprisingly simple if not moderately sophisticated so how hard is it to catch a billionaire being an idiot uh probably not that hard i mean the only thing that's hard is maintaining it and using it as blackmail which jeff repstein perfected. Yeah, no, you really do need the level of intelligence to think that Cory Booker is going to be the next president of the United States to walk into a room with like several blinking red lights on the corners and have sex with a child. being alleged with Epstein and Mossad. He may have had some equipment that was moderately sophisticated, but we literally record on devices more sophisticated than what Epstein must have used to blackmail the individuals that he's blackmailing. This podcast is produced better than the blackmail tapes of Epstein.

Believe it or not, we actually have better video encoders than the Epstein operation. That's right, yeah. And then the other piece of evidence I had for that is Glenn Dubin. We talked about, we did an episode on the Patreon site about Glenn and Eva Dubin. They've been accused of rape by Virginia Roberts

as an Epstein accuser. She's accused them of rape. Glenn Dubin, according to Forbes, donated $2,800 to Pete Buttigieg. He also supported Michael Bennett and Steve Bullock, who both dropped out. And so, you know, it's just one of those things where it's like, why are these kind of weird,

let's say, Epstein-adjacent billionaires funding this totally unknown South Bend mayor, and what do they expect in return? And, you know, again, it's where does he come from? There's this wall street journal article that says he just kind of cold called a bunch of former obama donors and they were so won over by his charisma that they were just like hell yeah let's do it he's a manchurian candidate yeah he's a rhodes scholar uh enlisted to fight in afghanistan even though he came from a somewhat

wealthy background so you know he's insane sure well he likes to kill for fun he likes to have that history so that he can run for office yeah and uh yeah his mom controls him with psy uh psyop technology to activate him right um and then just the subjects of the episode today heather reisman and gary schwartz they hosted uh one of his first major fundraisers july 6th 2019 they had a fundraiser at their nantucket home uh for pete budaj and it just so happens that heather reisman is a uh member of the bilderberg group oh that's a fun so don't read into that at all. Unintended. Pete Buttigieg himself was recently implicated, or not implicated, but connected to a bread price fixing scandal in Canada. There was a string of supermarkets that hired him when he was a McKinsey associate to sort of optimize their pricing strategy.

And it led to this hilarious video. So the proposition that I've been on the front lines of corporate price fixing is just to get that out of the way. You worked for a company that was fixing bread prices. No, I worked for a consulting company that had a client that may have been involved in fixing or what was apparently in a scandal. I was not aware of the Canadian bread pricing scandal until last night.

Do we know if the bread pricing thing is connected to Schwartz at all? It could be, but it might be connected. I didn't find anything specifically to him. Boy, I love this guy interviewing him. His face is so perfect. Yeah, it's just laconically. This is like, you made bread more expensive

for working people but actually like so uh a ctv news canada article suggested that i like as part of their mckinsey's results they got a consortium of supermarkets and bakers in Canada to, over a number of years, increase their bread prices more than you would expect a piece to do over a period of about 15 years. Huh. Yeah.

So how much? Like if bread costs a dollar, I mean, obviously it doesn't cost a dollar. Well, it said that it increased by $1.50 more over that period than you would expect given just regular sort of inflation, which doesn't sound like much, but if you're a part of working class person who needs this staple food

to feed your family every single day, then that really adds up. And it's just all going straight to these companies. Right. And so it's this Canadian chain Loblaws, which Pete Buttigieg worked with during his time at McKinsey. He is denied being involved in the bread price fixing scandal, but while McKinsey was consulting for them, they were fixing the prices of bread in Canada. And I guess just one last thing I did want to mention here. When we talk about Pete Buttigieg as a Manchurian candidate, there was in April 2019, a New York Times article, which was talk about these what to do about Bernie meetings that the Democratic Party was holding, or at least unofficially.

The longtime party financier Bernard Schwartz was holding these dinners in New York Times, the gatherings have included scores from the moderate or center left wing of the party, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, former Governor Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, himself a presidential candidate and president of the Center for American Progress near a Tandon. So Pete Buttigieg was an attendee at these what to do about Bernie Sanders meetings. And, you know, I think it's interesting that the Democratic Party as a whole didn't line up immediately behind Joe Biden, which I think was their best strategy. But clearly they wanted somebody with the, you know, supposed Obama charisma. And they thought that that person was Pete Buttigieg. So if anything, you know, they split themselves by not immediately lining up behind a non-Obama singular alternative.

Or sorry, non-Bernie singular alternative. Yeah, I think that all of them got backropes from Biden. And they were like, you know what? I can't deal with four more years of clammy Biden just fucking touching my shoulders. Yeah, that's not going to work. Why? Why, why, why, why, why? Even Jeffrey Epstein was like, this guy's a fucking creep.

He's got to really lay off those massages, you know? I'm like, look, man, three a day is enough. Listen, we got all the tape we need. You can leave. I think that the establishment wanted to be like, Bernie's too old. And so they couldn't be like, Biden works and Bernie is too old. So that's why they went with the young, rat-faced Buttigieg. And that's a good point.

Yeah. But again, it's just like, where the fuck does this guy come from? Where does Pete Buttigieg come from? He's the mayor of a nobody town, and suddenly he's one of the most prolific democratic fundraisers and you know uh one of the top four candidates for president of the united states he's out raising biden in terms of campaign donations and so like that money that money is coming from these billionaires our apologies to any listeners in south bend that sean's calling a nobody town. Hey, you South Bend listeners, go fuck off. Fucking mayor sucks.

I think he means numerically, you know? Yeah, no, I know what Sean meant, but I mean, any of our South Bend listeners immediately went, fuck you, Sean. We can't piss off the powerful South Bend contention of grub-stakers. It is crazy how much money this motherfucker's raised, though. Yeah, well, we weren't planning to do a tour there anyways

because Pete would have had the police department kill us. But yeah, and also just one last thing on the Buttigieg angle. So he's been getting these major donations from billionaires and millionaires and stuff. So his campaign was trying to make their average donation look lower. So they held a contest, is uh the lowest donation to pete buttigieg contest uh which was you know like trying to encourage people to give a dollar or like two dollars or some shit they were planning to give a thousand dollars you should just split up into like 20s or something wow but it's just so funny because it's like you know they're getting

you know 2000 or whatever the maximum is from all these millionaires and billionaires and then they'll just like try to get people to give a dollar so they can be like, yeah, our average donation is just like Bernie. Can you donate to us on layaway? What fucking crooks. Yeah. I need to appear more working class. But so just to kind of start the story of Jerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman,

and, you know, so he's a Canadian billionaire worth, according to Forbes, about $1.6 billion U.S. And we don't quite know where they met Pete Buttigieg, but it should be noted. So Jerry Schwartz manages Onyx Corporation. Onyx is a private equity firm, the largest private equity firm in Canada. They've got about 33 billion assets under management, according to EuroCanadian.ca, about about 218 000 employees across the various companies they own they own companies like beatrice foods husky oil cineplex alliance atlantis and save a lot thrift stores among others but you know so we don't quite know where they got contact with people to judge but onyx has had a a lot of McKinsey corporate people work for it in the past. You know, Jerry Schwartz, of course, is a Canadian businessman, is linked to, you know,

the founders and directors of Loblaws, the Canadian bread price fixing store Pete Buttigieg was involved in. But regardless, you know, they did a big fundraiser for him July 6, 2019. So they clearly are hoping this guy will represent their interests and make them money. So we should explain to people who these people are and how they made their money. And, you know, it took a while to find this stuff, but I think it's a very fascinating story. A lot of the links we looked at when we were trying to find research on this episode just kept saying, sorry, no information here. Well, you know, there is, it's interesting where,

again, we've talked about this with previous Canadian billionaires. Americans maybe have the idea that this is a more benign or enlightened country, but one of the only like, let's say hostile journalist sources, at least adversarial,

not just ass kissy, is a profile written for Toronto Life, which you cannot find online anywhere anymore i had to get quotes from it from a forum post discussing this piece that was taken down uh that apparently the author of it admitted in the piece that uh jerry schwartz and heather reisman sent her a notice saying uh if you're going to write this you need to save all of your notes in case legal action is eminent.

And another source told her that if he was quoted, he would drop her an acid or something like that. So it's like just this really kind of fucked up thing that does beg the question like, okay, so what are these people hiding? Why are they so secretive? They're all over the place in Canadian media, but just none of the sourcing is at all adversarial or hostile. There's no question of their position. What did they do? Do they deserve their position?

No, they're just Canadian folk who enjoy poutine and smoking legal marijuana and watching hockey from time to time. Enjoying Celine Dion and Justin Bieber and the finest maple syrup that this country can produce. Those things every Canadian does. Yeah. Yeah. But so Jerry Schwartz, and we'll focus on Jerry Schwartz, at least for the beginning of this, because Jerry Schwartz made a fortune in private equity. Heather Reisman has some rich family, but it was more just she kind of spent his private equity money buying into bookstores and various other things.

Yeah, she mentions in interviews that they married when she was 26 and she married her mentor, essentially. I mean, very easy to make your husband your mentor when he's literally flush with cash to fund your ideas of business expansion and things that you want to do to get her off your back yeah and uh just according to the canadianencyclopedia.ca this is like a short little biography of jerry schwartz he was born in uh winnipeg uh manitoba manitoba um in 1941 his father was andrew schwartz his mother was Lillian Schwartz. His mother was a lawyer. His father was trained as a pharmacist, but worked in the family run car parts dealership. Jerry Schwartz started to work in the store when he was 10 years old.

At age 17, he and a friend started a clothing store called the Stag Shop. He worked there Friday nights and weekends and it's just kind of an interesting thing where uh generally 17 year olds who get to start their own clothing stores did not grow up in poverty like at least statistically uh from my experience that is the case but what i found amusing is from this other profile in globalnews.ca they quote from an online video where jerry schwartz accepted the 2016 horatio alger award for those not familiar horatio alger was an american author in the 19th century who wrote rags to riches stories and it actually might be something worth discussing more in future on a future episode because a lot of american culture is informed by this horatio alger idea right this idea that if you just work hard and are a decent person or dedicated you will

become rich because he wrote all these pulp novels about poor kids who just like worked hard and then became rich overnight you know it's called the horatio alger myth and it's just kind of amusing that jerry schwartz is there accepting the horatatio Alger award after his fucking dad bought him a clothing store at 17 years old. But in this video, according to the write up at Global News dot C.A., Jerry Schwartz explained how his mother was deaf, which resulted in her being very distant. But he was extremely close with his father, a local businessman and auto parts dealer. My dad was a fantastic guy who I looked up to, admired, and loved, Schwartz said in the video, adding his dad, quote, came from a much more humble beginnings. He worked his way up.

His mom was a deaf lawyer. Oh, wow. That's, I don't know. She's closer to the Horatio Alger myth. Yeah, seriously. Well, I don't know She's closer to the Horatio Alger myth Yeah seriously Well I don't know her background Just like a fucking 99% win rate Because nobody in Canada wants to be impolite to her Oh we'll put that guy in prison eh

Wouldn't want that lady to be sad I know they talk just like us But you gotta Your card is guilty yeah sure i mean if this is what you say it's where i believe that's that's the defendant lawyer just nobody in canada is allowed to dispute anything a deaf person says it's like checkmate cross-examining the witness just like the fucking uh homicide perp feels so bad for the deaf lawyers like yeah all right i did it i guess yeah i was there i made up the alibi most complaints about this show are when

we laugh at terrible things and i'm pretty sure this is going to get us a whole bunch of people being like uh you know i wanted to learn more about reisman and schwartz but when they were laughing at that deaf mother of his, I got mad. Yeah, but in fairness, we are like at least five years away from the technology where deaf people will be able to listen to this podcast. So we've got a little bit of a buffer. But so starting when he was 10 years old, Jerry Schwartz worked at his father's auto parts store.

So he's working at his dad's auto parts store at 17. His dad buys him like, you know, this fucking clothing store. That's kind of what he's doing So he's working at his dad's auto parts store at 17. His dad buys him like, you know, this fucking clothing store. That's kind of what he's doing when he's a kid. Um, just continuing from the Canadian encyclopedia write up. He took an undergraduate degree in commerce at the university of Manitoba.

Uh, during the time he and a friend invested in a carpet store. So, uh, he got more money from his dad to invest in a carpet store, uh, with outlets in Calgary and edmonton and then he did a law school at university of manitoba uh in his first year at law school he

started a business that sold government issued coin uh coin sets yeah you know the kind of the commemorative yeah yeah that kind of bullshit uh after completing his law degree he worked as a lawyer for two years with winnipeg tax lawyer Izzy Asper, which will become relevant later. They would go on to co-found the company CanWest together. We'll talk about that in a second. He obtained an MBA from Harvard University after he worked with this tax lawyer, Izzy Asper, for two years um he got uh again just uh from the uh canadian encyclopedia he got his start in finance at the new york city brokerage firm esther brook and company soon after he joined the wall street investment bank bear stearns and company there he worked alongside investment

bakers jerome kohlberg henry kravis and george roberts who later formed the investment company kkr we've talked about KKR a bit. They're like one of the first major private equity firms in the U.S. in the 80s. We'll do a future episode on them more in depth. But what's relevant about that is from the encyclopedia, the trio pioneered the, quote, leveraged buyout, i.e. buying companies with borrowed money and using their assets as security for loans. So he kind of works with these original buyout guys, and then he takes the buyout formula, the private equity asset,

flip it and strip it, or strip it and flip it, however it goes, back to Canada. But I did just want to mention one other connection. He starts working at Bear Stearns in, I think, 73 or 74. He leaves it in 77. Jeffrey Epstein starts working at Bear Stearns in 1976, leaves it in 80. So for about a year, they were both working at Bear Stearns. No idea if they ever met each other, no way of knowing,

but worth pointing out that they were both working at that cursed company. But so he leaves Bear Stearns in 1977. He goes back to Canada. He meets with that lawyer, Izzy Asper, that he was working with briefly. And they found this company called Canwest, Canwest Communications. And apparently they kind of do this leveraged buyout stuff, at least according to the Canadian encyclopedia canwest bought several small companies over the years um but eventually the the business relationship

broke down but uh steve has a little bit more research on canwest it's an important canadian media company so izzy asper uh his schwartz's business partner in Canwest, jumping backwards a bit in time. So he in 1973, he was he was elected. Sorry, in 1972, he was elected leader of the of the Liberal Party for Manitoba. And he actually he was part of kind of a right-wing strand within the Liberal Party that advocated a more laissez-faire approach to the economy. Interesting. And specifically they advocated for the elimination of the Canadian welfare state.

Oh. So he's like a right-wing libertarian sort of guy. So he wanted to do away with the welfare state, including Canada's famed single-payer health insurance program. Thankfully, though, in 1973, in the Manitoba elections, they got crushed by the New Democratic Party, like a socialist coalition government came into power. And like... They showed up and went, face! Yeah. into flower and uh like uh they showed up and went face yeah so it was kind of because of that

political drubbing right in that election that he said like fuck this i'm just gonna go into business now so i'm a free agent he said right right in the in a news article gotcha that so anyway in 19 in a year later in 1974 he starts starts what would later become Canwest. He started Canwest Capital Corporation, which would later become Canwest with Schwartz. Between 1974 and 1979, Schwartz and Israel Asper leading Canwest, they used a very aggressive approach of using debt to buy up controlling interests along with a consortium of other groups. They bought a controlling interest in the CIIDT network, which is a network of broadcasting transmitters in Ontario.

Oh, really? Ontario, Canada. Right. And that was kind of their first big venture as a company in terms of acquisitions. Gotcha. And they were initially part of this consortium and didn't have control. But later on, they bought their way into a controlling share of that in 1985. This was after Schwartz left.

Gotcha. Just to give some extra context on Asper, though. Yeah, so he had this sort of fledgling political career that went nowhere. And then with Schwartz's help and his knowledge of the LBO environment, the leveraged buyout opportunities in Canada, they were able to sort of grow Canwest.

And they eventually... Schwartz had kind of a falling out with him i think i couldn't find it exactly but i'm kind of thinking it was due to their politics well schwartz seems like a pretty similarly politically aligned guy where we'll go through so yeah as steve mentioned there jerry schwartz helps him uh co-found Canwest in 1977. Jerry Schwartz leaves Canwest in 1984. According to the globalnews.ca, Schwartz took a portion of the industrial assets from Canwest to start Onyx, which is his private equity firm that still exists today. But it is interesting where Schwartz, through his private equity firm, has consistently lobbied for privatization in the Canadian health care system.

And in fact, also, he holds a lot of U.S. health care and hospitals and other such things. He's lobbied for further privatization in Medicare in the United States. And we'll talk about that a little bit. So at least on defending Israel from criticism and privatizing the health care system, at least that you know israel defending israel from criticism and um privatizing the health care system at least that part of their politics are aligned even if it's not because their political differences every billionaire when they have a mentor that they surpass in one way or another at some point says i can do this better than you can so even if it was or wasn't the political differences i think schwartz at some point just went, fuck this shit. I can do this on my own. Yeah. Like, I just, I couldn't really find any sources for why they actually split up.

Right. So I was thinking either it was from their politics or it was Israel Asper's, like, extremely aggressive approach that ultimately led them to split. Maybe they disagreed on eating butt. You never know. Maybe Schwartz was like, I'm into it. He didn't get that butt wet enough. Asper was like, nah, dog, you can't go. You can't go down to Browntown. He's like, fuck that shit.

So I heard you were eating butt. I don't think i like you anymore israel asper was also like a self-described zionist and like he admired like people like vladimir jabotinsky and uh he like sometimes wrote in favor of the lakud party in Israel. So that was like another sort of touchstone between Schwartz and Asper. Likud is the ultra right-wing party that Benjamin Netanyahu belongs to? Yeah. Okay. And yeah, and so it is something where it's kind of depressing

that he makes a very smart calculation where he tries to run for public office, gets destroyed, and realizes, yeah, so my agenda is extremely unpopular and I can't actually implement it by winning an election. But I could just buy up a media conglomerate but they have no problem selling guns to Saudi Arabia. They have no problem protecting Israel's interests at the United Nations. towards a lot of various privatization schemes, a lot of, you know, corruption. So it is just something where over time, their influence of, you know, guys like Jerry Schwartz and his business partner, Izzy Asper, their influence was that much more for going into the private industry and then using their money and their, you know, media or whatever other empires to lobby the government, to pressure the government, to just slowly turn the levers of power in a more rightward direction rather than attempting to appeal directly to the people

where they would just get completely rejected. But yes, so Canwest, oh, and I guess we should just mention with Canwest, they've had policies that exclude criticism of Israel from their editorial lines. It is one of the largest media companies in Canada. And I think in like 2001, there was even an official policy directive that forbade criticism of Israel for human rights violations. Yeah.

Just one more example of Ken West and sort of the problem it presents for free speech in Canada, sort of a problem of centralization, of being a limit on the diversity of opinions. There's kind of a sad chapter where in the Montreal Gazette, it was reported on by a number of editors and interviews at that paper that they had to limit their criticism of Israel based on controls from the headquarters of Canwest, who owned them. Were they making criticisms and the higher-ups were then like, hey, you gotta cut this shit out?

Yep, exactly. Wow. And so there's actually one really egregious example where they had a professor from Waterloo. One of the Montreal Gazette editors spoke to an interviewer. He said, quote, we even had an incident where a fellow professor at University of Waterloo wrote an op-ed piece for us in which he was criticizing the anti-terrorism laws in Israel. Right. Little did he know that would be his Waterloo. And criticizing elements of civil rights abuses, etc. in Israel.

Now that professor happens to be a Muslim and happens to have an Arab name. We got a call from the headquarters demanding to know why we had printed this. So this is just one example he's saying of hundreds of instances where in order to in order to publish anything sort of going against Israel like this, they would have to first send it over to the headquarters to get the approval.

So the one time an Islamic person did it, they were like, you know what, how about you stop doing this? Wow. So, yeah, I mean, centralization of these opinions under democratic control of Ken West was, like, ultimately presented a barrier to democracy. Yeah, and we'll talk more about Jerry Schwartz specifically in his pro-Israel, pro-apartheid lobbying. But it is just something worth noting that, you know, this media company he helped found and certainly put some money into and who remains friends with the owner has lobbied for and censored viewpoints that he's opposed to. Yeah. And that's a very undemocratic thing that's happening all over the Western world.

But just to kind of continue with the jerry schwartz story so in 1984 uh for whatever reason uh him and the uh other co-founder izzy asper of uh can west they split up um jerry schwartz apparently takes a portion of the industrial assets to start his onyx corporation the private equity fund according to forbes magazine a profile in 2000, in 1984, Jerry Schwartz launched Onyx with $2 million of his own money and $50 million from outsiders, including Toronto Dominion Bank. So, again, it's hard to kind of trace where he got his money, but it seems most likely his dad was pretty rich. Sure. I think there might have also been like a Pete Buttigieg phenomenon because like he's this, he's somewhat unknown still, but he has this pedigree. Right. From his dad and going to a good university and he started a couple of businesses. Now he went to Harvard with an MBA.

So like people are willing to take a chance on him. And money begets money. So if you know someone with money, they know someone else with money most likely yeah so like there's if nothing else you have access right to this elite circle yeah and i think access to the elite circle is what billionaires need to exist because without that it don't fucking work well it certainly has a price so it commands a price on the market in addition to like the returns that they're going to promise people through their private equity firm you have access to all these elite canadian politicians these political circles right and i mean it's like frats and that entire like greek system is just

this it's just a common built idea of we got money and we all have the same value system so it's all fucking piling together to make each other's wealth grow yeah and um so it's interesting his strategy for this uh leverage buyout firm onyx during the early years um at least according to the forbes profile he's less focused on quick uh flipping as he is on like buying in and consolidated in and consolidating industries they give the example of his investment in Sky Chefs, which is an in-flight catering business of American Airlines. He buys their in-flight catering business in 1986. And then he helped that outfit buy six other in-flight caterers.

And then, you know, so he gets this kind of network of in-flight caterers. And then he sells a 25% stake to the German airline Lufthansa in 1993. So it is like he does that kind of stuff a bit, and then he also does the usual stripping and flipping, which we'll talk about more later. But that's just an example of his early strategy. wanted to highlight in 1987 uh a year after this first or this sky chef's deal he takes onyx public from the forbes profile this is one of the first private equity firms to become a public company most of them do this now but uh according to forbes he raises 246 million dollars in 1987 investors complained that schwartz had given them a raw deal. He had kept 60% control through multiple voting shares and was skimming off 20% of the profits as a fee,

similar to a private buyout's firm fee. He eventually dropped the fee, but other problems loomed. But that is just something where, though it is a public company, Onyx is, he controls, I believe they're called secondary shares, that actually control voting on the company. Yeah, there's different tiers of shares. Sure. Yeah. As there are in many large corporations now.

But he was kind of innovating the use of them to maintain control without it costing him personally too much money. Right. Right. So, you know, however the structure is set up, there is public money or public investor money flowing into Onyx, but the public shareholders have no input into how the company is run.

He's set up a structure where he controls all of the actual shares that can vote and impact the direction of the company at all. But it is interesting where in 1987, Onyx buys the Canadian operations of Beatrice Foods. And we might have mentioned this deal before. This was in 1987, the largest leveraged buyout up to that point. It was a $8.7 billion buyout of Beatrice companies. And it was orchestrated by KKR, the private equity firm we mentioned earlier. But I just want to spend one minute recapping it real quick because it's an important moment in american finance because we've talked a lot about michael milken and drexel and uh the junk bonds the savings and loans crisis

the beatrice deal was entirely financed or almost entirely financed with michael milken junk bonds drexel burnham lampart was uh michael milken's company they had this captive network of savings and loans and insurance companies where it was a Ponzi scheme. It was just like, hey, we own you. So if we raise these bonds, you have to buy them. And then you just get more and more people in the network to buy it. And then eventually the music stops. It's like any other Ponzi scheme. So they raise $8.7 billion to buy out Beatrice Corporation of just Ponzi scheme money. And then KKR is the lead on this deal. And they just strip it. They take advantage of the tax code in the US at that time,

where if you make a profit, splitting up a company and selling off component divisions, you actually did not have to pay any tax on that. It's since been fixed. But at the time, the way they did this big deal was they just sold off all the little pieces of beatrice each time coming with layoffs and then they made a fucking fat profit and the actual money to buy the thing was all junk bonds that would later go bankrupt or that would later default and have to be bailed out by public money so it was this giant scam that he was able to profit off of because j Schwartz buys the Canadian operations of Beatrice Foods. And one other thing is the Beatrice deal, like many other Michael Milken deals, insider trading was endemic.

So everyone who knew what was going on was insider trading on it. And he has this relationship with KKR. And it's never been proven, but you have to imagine he probably got a heads up from them because he worked with them at Bear Stearns when they were there. And they probably said, hey, we're doing this deal. And, you know, maybe he made some money on advance knowing what was coming or maybe he got a little bit of an advantage in this buyout. But it is just something where, like you were saying about the frats earlier, this is how finance works in this country. It's just, you know, a guy who has access to this fucking pile of fake money that's gonna have to be bailed out by the government and so you get to get in on the ponzi

scheme and you get to make a tidy profit and that's exactly what he did with beatrice foods in 1987 and it's incestuous it's just i know i literally like sean saying i know a person that knows a person that's going to make us some more money and it seems as if all these people that play with money don't give a fuck as to how it affects society and i will say schwartz buying all those catering companies for the planes i mean think about all the good airplane jokes that happened because of him you know all these all these good man these fucking airplane food sucks jokes how many comedians worked because Schwartz buying out those companies? It's like, look, I've seen the new Seinfeld special. We have to make these harder to open.

This man needs a muse. Well, so there's too many jokes about airplane peanuts. We got to switch to pretzels. Like, look, we got to put razors in the bathroom so he can wonder if people are shaving in there. There has to be a shaving stall. Yeah, undertake the LVO with the knowledge that this might lead to a comedian he likes improving. Yeah.

Years later. Good standard material is worth all the sacrifices. Look, these Michael Milken junk bonds are fake anyways. We might as well just get some good bits out of it. $8.7 billion. No, no, no. This is not real money. This is all going to be bailed out by the government.

I don't know how much debt he was using to get back to the actual deal. I don't know how much debt he was actually using, but around this time, I looked it up, and LBOs were typically using about seven times leverage to finance these buyouts. in about 15% against them, like if their return ended up getting like 15% less than they thought it might, there's a possibility that their entire principle that they put forward could be lost on the deal. Oh, really? So it's very risky. Right.

So if there's a bunch of LBO activity going on with large companies, they're on shaky footing. It's just, it adds so much risk to the system, basically. Right, all that debt. And, yeah. There's the legalistic control aspect where you're like, wait, I mean, these are people's livelihoods.

They're just being torn apart. Right. Like, based on their decisions in the business processes. And then there's also just a huge amount of debt that goes into it. And part of the potential upside, so if you, I mean, the reason why they do it is because it multiplies their potential profits. Right, of course. But it also multiplies their potential losses.

Yeah. High risk, high rule. Just to add some context to that particular business strategy. Right. And, you know, so this has been one of the major Canadian private equity firms. Canada and Toronto has what's called Bay Street, which is their equivalent of Wall Street. That's where most Canadian financial companies are based. So this has been, you know, one of the major Canadian finance companies, and we could spend

all day going through all their different deals. But I want to just kind of go through a few different examples of his business deals and where he's clearly hurt society and probably engaged in illegal practices that, you know, that we know of and that are kind of exemplaries of the larger trend in private equity. Though I guess the first one would be not even illegal, just very deeply immoral and unethical. There's this write-up in the globeandmail.com called What's the Big Deal? In 2005, it talks about Onyx a bit. Just quoting from it, in January 2004, Onyx Partners LP, the company's $2.2 billion private equity fund,

made four quick investments in mental health hospitals, ambulance services, diagnostic equipment, and group homes. The total, $571 million. So they're investing in U.S. healthcare. And around this time, they, of course, start lobbying for more privatization in Medicare and these sorts of things. And we've talked a lot about how private healthcare investments kill people because you're just putting a dollar and cents cost analysis onto human lives and you're closing down non-profitable operations you're firing staff you're trying to do more

with less you know like in a group home or a retirement home or whatever if you're firing nurses then people die because they don't get the attention they need all these other horrible things and um just from that same article they talk about the push into U.S. health care. Bobby LeBlanc, a New York-based partner of Onyx, who came over from Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, says Onyx has no plans to integrate its four assets, these health care companies in the U.S. they just bought. Onyx got into the sector because it is growing fast and there's a lot of outsourcing being done. Quote, it behooves us to be in that space he says but as that this is a strictly u.s play for now he hasn't come across any attractive canadian health care

firms but that he admits that he hasn't been looking either so it's basically because canada has you know a um universal care system right uh that is not the fucking hellhole we live in they have of course been lobbying to try and privatize that system but there's no money to be made killing people in canada yet yeah but there is in the united states and another example uh similar to this is what they did with boeing from the same article in um around 2005 they announced they would buy bo Boeing's three commercial aircraft plants in Kansas and Oklahoma for $1.5 billion. And so this resulted in a lawsuit for age discrimination. The Seattle Times wrote this up. Basically, the way it worked is there were at these three plants about 9,000 employees, and Boeing, as part of the sale, fired all of them, and then Onyx rehired them but they laid off or didn't rehire about

1 100 workers the majority of them were older people and so there's a an associated press write-up that goes through this because immediately onyx and boeing are sued for age discrimination for firing these older workers and from the associated press write-up lawyers for the workers filed documents to back up their request for class action status for the suit. The documents included depositions and internal company memos that say that Onyx, or its subsidiary company, cut older workers using a, quote, selective rehire process in which all Boeing employees were laid off and forced to reapply for their jobs with the new company. One memo Onyx presented to its board of directors to support the purchase noted that the Boeing workforce was, quote, older and more expensive, unquote, than the workforce the new company would have. Employees ages 45 to 54 were considered the most expensive, company memo showed. Due to their being more likely to collect a pension.

Exactly. Yeah. Just firing people before they can collect their pension. And, you know, of course, health care costs are higher for older workers. It was just entirely, let's get rid of the old people and then the company will be more profitable. Would it also be the fact that since they may have been at the company longer, they were literally being paid more than the new staff being brought in? Yeah, that too, as well. Yeah.

And then, so the subsidiary company Onyx set up to run these was called Spirit, and then they quote an internal document from Spirit, quote, we are moving from a demographically expensive population towards one that should be cheaper, unquote. Wow. So then that's an internal document where they just come out and say that they're engaging in illegal age discrimination by firing, you know, 1,100. More experienced labor isn't as cheap for some reason. You know, a lot of people are against millennials. Not us at Boeing, dawg.

We're pretty cool with them. We want to hire more of them. Fire the boomers, bring in the millennials. The court documents also indicated that when Boeing was trying to sell the division, it marketed potential cost savings perspective buyers could expect by reducing the number of workers. boeing even said to them hey buy this shit we'll you know

lay off all the workers and then you can not rehire the old ones and you know it's fucked up because they have the lawyers have these internal documents that clearly show age discrimination but the lawsuit is thrown out by a kansas judge wow the judge said they quote couldn't show a clear pattern of age discrimination which i mean it just goes to show you with what's going on with the trump administration and the judges like the law doesn't fucking matter right this is just corporate power and you get a fucking unelected legislator who's just going to ignore all these memos where they're like yeah let's get rid of the fucking boomers the judge dismissed dismissed the lawsuit saying, okay, boomers.

Capitalism doesn't work for the boomers either. Right, right. But, you know, it's just like a fucked up thing that they did is they got rid of all the old people to keep their pension and their healthcare costs down, and that's illegal, and it doesn't fucking matter

because they control, you know, the government, the court system, all of it. You may not have this information, but how many people ended up getting fired due to this so it was 1,100 there was just about 9,000 workers and Boeing you know laid off all of them as part of this sale and then Onyx rehired and they selectively excluded about 1,100 mostly older workers from the rehiring but yeah I mean it is something where Boeing got a better price for this sale by saying like,

hey, we can help you guys out on this shit. We'll fire all the workers and you just don't rehire the old ones. So there's just like both ends of this are making money, but the workers are getting fucked. In order for them to qualify for those pensions,

they have to work X years, usually more than a decade with the company. So, I mean, imagine yeah it is a lot but they've also earned it right of course and i can't believe the judge was like no i don't see any crime going on here that's fucking horse looks like we're still in kansas toto um but so what I wanted to move on to is this article I mentioned earlier is was written in Toronto Life magazine in June 2005 by a reporter named Marcy McDonald. It's called The Heather and Gary Show respond to this unauthorized profile. Because, you know, they have so much media attention that's authorized. But when she, the reporter, attempts to interview them, they decline.

They don't want to talk about their personal life. But she goes ahead with the story anyways and that's where um uh she says quote weeks after i began researching on them heather reisman phoned the editor of this magazine accusing me of posing nasty questions quote i think i'm a good person she said adding that she could call on 500 thought leaders unquote across the nation to attest to that perception three later, a two-page missive was hand-delivered to Toronto Life magazine on the personal letterhead of Gerald Schwartz. In more than three decades as a journalist, I have never received such a heavy-handed warning,

let alone one from a couple whose net worth is estimated at the time at $750 million. You and the writer are hereby put on notice, it said, that all records notes and sources doc and source documentation used in the course of preparing the proposed article must be maintained for litigation should this become necessary unquote um and then uh she also does speculate schwartz's letter was meant to deep six the story it also raised a question what is it that he and heather reisman are so worried about revealing and she goes through in the story, again, it's almost impossible to find it online.

You can get the first page on an archive.org link. You can get some discussion of it on various forums. But they talk about the liberal prime minister of Canada, Paul Martin, who's the prime minister from 2003 to 2006. And the Reisman's, or sorry, the Gary Schwartz and Heather Reisman had a very close relationship with him. Just quoting from the piece, not only had Onyx contributed $315,000 to Martin's $12 million war chest, but a former party official beat the corporate bushes for him directly out of Schwartz's office. The only questions on most party minds was not whether Schwartz and Reisman would flex their newfound political clout, but how. And they talk about, you know, there was an incident with in 2003 where student protests provoked authorities at Montreal's Concordia University

to cancel a speech by Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, at the time former prime minister. And this kind of sparked outrage in the Canadian pro-Israel Jewish community. So what they did, Jerry Schwartz and Heather Reisman, was they set up a group, the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish Advocacy, the CIJA. And then they, you know, funded the shit out of it. And it essentially engaged in a takeover of all the other Canadian Jewish Israel lobbying bodies. And, you know, because it's so well funded, they were able to, in 2005, get Prime Minister Paul Martin's liberal government in Canada to switch Ottawa's votes on two United Nations resolutions that had long been a thorn in Israel's side. Those votes were largely symbolic.

They vetoed two obscure U.N. committees on Palestinian affairs. But in foreign policy circles, the turnabout qualified as a diplomatic bombshell. As a diplomatic bombshell. And, you know, they speculate about how this came straight from Paul Martin's office, most likely at the direction of Jerry Swartz and Heather Reisman, to totally, you know, turn about Canada's Israel policy under his government and veto these UN resolutions. Now, was that ignited by that protest? Or switch votes, sorry. Was that ignited by that protest or switch votes sorry was that ignited by that protest uh against netanyahu

yeah so i mean it was basically the student protest against netanyahu was what led these two to set up this organization cija concordia university has like a really active uh like left liberal and socialist um student body right and then from the piece uh she found a source that said uh prime minister martin's office was quote under intense pressure from schwartz about this student body. Right. And then from the piece, she found a source that said Prime Minister Martin's office was, quote, under intense pressure from Schwartz about this. And so it is just something where CIJA is their Jewish Israel advocacy organization, and it is probably the most powerful Israel advocacy organization in Canada. And that was entirely a result of, you know, this protest made them kind of refocus their efforts and bring the entire pro-Israel community and their, you know, massive money and political influence to bear on this subject.

And they, yeah, they also talk, or she also talks about in this piece, the Middle East isn't Schwartz and Reisman's only interest. With most of Onyx's holdings based in the U.S., Schwartz has already fretted publicly about the state of Canadian-American relationships. On Bay Street, analysts have been on the lookout for signs that Schwartz has wrestled more elbow room for privatization within Medicare. Recently, Onyx's highest-priced purchases have been companies that provide ambulance and staffing services to U.S. hospitals, and Schwartz hasn't hidden his enthusiasm for exporting their wares north of the border should Canadian rules change. We would welcome it, he told a reporter, and without a doubt we could reduce costs, which we've shown we can do in the U.S.

That possibility, as it turns out, already has support within the government's own ranks. Two years ago, 2003, a federal report recommending the privatization of more hospital services in Canada was published by liberal Senator Michael Kirby, who sits on Indigo's board. Indigo is Heather Reisman's bookstore. So that is just something where it kind of goes through their power. And also, apparently, with Paul Martin, the then-liberal prime minister, they went to his official residence in Ottawatawa and watched the november 2004 u.s elections with him yeah and one article they said that they were at some other event and uh that was the prime minister you just said uh prime minister paul martin yeah he was like uh i want i want you guys to come and they're like all right we're gonna get out of here and then immediately they just left their dinner party and jumped on a private jet to go watch the election. Yeah, the room just watches as like the keynote speaker,

no, the main guests just leave. Right, right. Hey guys, come to my house at Six Row Party. Sorry, I got a call from Obama at seven. I'm going to get out. Y'all hang out here though. This is a great opportunity for me.

So I'm going to leave. Right. They're always fucking name dropping the prime minister. i'm sick of it um but yeah and uh then just like one last piece from that article talking about heather apparently uh heather reisman's loft style office on king street a framed memo from ayn rand offers a telltale clue to heather's ultimate book pick the fountainhead a title that she says changed her life and it talks about this story uh this uh story in the fountainhead a title that she says changed her life and it talks about this

story uh this uh story in the fountainhead of course the ayn rand you know pro um libertarian pro capitalist pro businessman novel where one of the characters uh blows up one of his own buildings rather than let nick nitpicking pragmatist tamper with the purity of his design and so there's a story where she uh uh in 2000 or sorry in in 2000 yeah indigo her bookshop was about to move into a new outlet in a town center she drove out took one look at the location she'd already approved and declared approved and declared that she'd changed her mind she, this store is in the wrong place in the mall. I'm not opening it. What?

Refusing to take possession of the space meant a penalty of several hundred thousand dollars. But she was undeterred. And then apparently the landlord cashed her check and then immediately rented it to a competing bookstore. Oh, great. Which was Chapters at the time. Well, that story doesn't end well.

Yeah. But it is just funny where it's like she thinks she's this fucking Ayn Rand character who can just waste hundreds of thousands of dollars of her husband's money to not open a store because she didn't like the vibe of it when she gets out there. Yeah. And in an interview with Reisman, she mentions that like the night before she opened the first bookstore, she was up at 4 a.m. And she called her husband and said, you have to come down here now. I don't know if this is going to work. And so Gary gets out of bed and goes to the bookstore and looks around and is like,

it's going to be fine. Don't even dream it's going to be bad. And it's clear that Reisman has a hold on Schwartz that makes him be like, I got to take care of my wife's fucking bookstore right now. Yeah, and so, you know, Heather Reisman buys the competing bookstore Chapters for $121 million,

thanks to her husband's money. It was actually a hostile takeover. Yeah. A rare example. A private company gang hostily taken over. They took a 50.1 percent stake yeah i mean because originally like for a book for a publisher anyway that's a rare story and the like government was against it they said that if you were to buy this would become a monopoly

and they claimed that like well we're losing money with uh our our book story indigo so us buying chapters is no big deal yeah like in order i like, in order, I mean, look at how bad of a condition I'm in, except for my husband's private equity money. In order to survive, you need to let me buy this larger competitor. Yeah, and Indigo at the time had like 16 super stores, and they bought chapters, which had 70 super stores and over 200 smaller locations. So it wasn't like Indigo and chapters were on equal footing it

was like uh it was indigo was had 16 less than 20 locations and they're like let's just buy the only other bigger bigger fish in the sea because we got more money than them so this was like between 2000 and 2001 they well they had to go uh fight it out in court for a bit on whether or not it complies with the competition rules. But eventually, the bid went through. Yeah. They got it. So they merged. Well, it was sort of like they called it merger.

But the brand of Chapters was eventually, over a couple of years, subsumed into her company, Indigo. In a lot of the posts of people talking about that merger, there's employees in the comments that mention that when Reisman took over, the company just went to shit, basically. Because it caused massive turnover to happen. They instituted things like loyalty cards to allow the customers to get a slight discount,

but then also give their personal information. You know how fucking bookstores started doing this around this time where you'd be like i'm trying to buy one book and they're like do you want to buy you want to give me all your information to get 15 off and you're like no like all right you want a tote bag so that you can fucking carry your book home it's like no it's like well if you got the card and the tote the tote's cheaper than the car it's fuck, I'm trying to buy a book. You fix book prices. They interview Heather. Right.

Yeah, no, so, like, there's these forum posts from employees that are like, yeah, they started tracking book sales per associate, which is like, it's a fucking bookstore. You're not doing upselling. And the books, the cashiers aren't making like a commission on these books and so one of the comments was like we have a 70 selling of the plum like group card for the inigo bookstores um horseshit is what it was would you like to purchase insurance on this book just one dollar that was when i worked at hollywood video before they went under the video rental store they were trying to get us to get people to spend a quarter insuring the videos that they rent it from us and they would count up our uh say the commissions we managed to generate on this this is a piece

from uh cbc news it's uh in 2000 lickman's book was facing bankruptcy it was a 91 year old toronto based bookstore and the owner said like the stores drifted away from competitive positions and other people offered a better assortment a better shopping experience many larger scale bookstores have cafes and stores which encourage people to stay and browse and so they asked

Indigo CEO Heather Reisman about this said that there's a lot of competition in the book business and Lickman did not necessarily do anything wrong. And here, listen to how this sentence goes next here. Our industry in particular is under extraordinary pressures from all sides. From technology, from competitors,

from new approaches to distribution. It is an extraordinary difficult time and as a result, sometimes there are casualties. In war. Yeah, that doesn't sound like a person that is interested in letting people have a nice book shopping experience. That sounds like someone that's willing to kill you to take what you got. I like that long sentence about there being so many pressures.

That can just be condensed into Amazon exists. Well, this is from 2000. So even at that time, Amazon did exist. But it isn't like what the market is right now. This is 20 years ago. That's when they're mostly to only a book company. At the time, Amazon.ca did not exist. So there is an extra about four to five year period where Indigo books could exist in a world where Amazon was not a major player in the Canadian market.

So Stephen's right that Amazon would eventually come in and be the competition that they're talking about. But also Indigo has a fucking private equity that's fucking the CEO basically. So they've got droves of money. He's a director, right? Yeah. He's a director in Indigo? In Indigo, yeah. In addition to being

the money man who helped do the buyout of chapters. Well, just one thing I wanted to say about that is, you know, it's noted that Heather Reisman, of course, you know, merged Indigo and Chapters, and under her steady hand, they've been absolutely shelled to pieces by Amazon.ca. But it's worth noting that between this bookstore and Jerry Schwartz's control of Cineplex and Galaxy Theaters,

which is the second largest movie chain in Canada, they have a major amount of control over cultural life in Canada, where if you control this major bookstore, you can make or break an author or publisher's career. You can say like, yeah, this book is going to be all over our shelves and this one is not, you know, and you can do the same with movies and this kind of stuff. So they exert power in a ton of different ways.

Right. And, yeah, I guess we could talk a little bit about Heather Reisman. Yeah, so from the Canadian Encyclopedia, she was born in Montreal, Quebec, to a middle-class Jewish family. Her dad, Mark, was a real estate broker, and her mom, Rose, owned a high-end clothing store where Reisman had her first job folding clothes. She's the niece of Simon Sowell Reisman. And Simon Sowell Reisman was the country's chief negotiator for the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement. So her family had many connections and were a middle-class family that had all the upward momentum to have Heather Reisman all the success that

she would need. She completed her bachelor's in social work at McGill University. You know my friend with McGill University? He said those people are racist as fuck. Where? McGill? McGill, yeah. Oh, in like Quebec? Yeah, in Quebec, yeah. Your friend was like, I've never heard the

N word followed by A before. Now my friend went there for a Middle Eastern Studies master's degree and he was like, oh man, all of them are rich kids that are focused on

learning the Middle East languages to benefit the CIA and the Canadian government and not at all about learning a language to understand a culture and to try and integrate their culture into ours, basically.

Well, no wonder they like Pete Buttigieg so much. Learning languages just to further your career, yeah. Right. Yeah, exactly. So she worked as a caseworker with troubled teens. She was a social worker. She married and had two kids. But this comes up a couple of times.

The marriage was unhappy. And there's no other talk about who this person was or even her children. She's got two kids with Jerry Schwartz as well. There's no information about her kids, all four of them. He was always reading Mein Kampf in bed. Yeah, she, in 2000, to go on Sean's point here, excluded Indigo from selling Mein Kampf at her stores because that's the worst thing about Indigo

is their access to Mein Kampf. Yeah, did you know that when the author of Mein Kampf found that out, he shot himself? That his book was banned from Indigo stores? Right, right. Very tragic. It was like a Confederacy of Dunces situation where his grieving mother went around selling the book and it became popular after his suicide.

So she got a divorce from her first husband. She joined her brother Howard's computer company as an executive before co-founding Strategic Change Consultancy Paradigm Consulting in 1979. In 1982, Reisman married investor Gary Schwartz. And the way they met was that she was working for a soda company called Kotz. And she got disgracefully fired and then met Gary Schwartz through

that entity. And then once she married Gary Schwartz, he became like her North Star, if you know what I mean. So, yeah, Reisman... Gary Schwartz is like, this dumbass who got fired from a soda company can definitely run some bookstores.

Well, this is exactly what happens. So she leaves Cod, and then Heather Reisman is contacted by Borders, which was a popular American bookstore, to act as a local partner for their expansion into Canada. But that venture failed

because they couldn't receive the required federal regulatory approval in Canada. And after this, Reisman went, you know what? Maybe I can do this whole bookstore thing that was completely set up by Borders a moment ago. So she sets up her own bookstores with the idea that, like, it's a place where people can sit and have fun. And she hires Bruce Mao to design the original stores.

And I want you to know this. There's like eight to ten different interviews with Bruce Mao talking about design. If you look at their most recent Indigo rebrand, it's literally just zoom in on the text and kind of make it look kind of shady. Like, this is not great design that Bruce Mao has done here,

and he's also a portly man who doesn't know how to wear clothes properly. So she marries Gary Schwartz. She starts Indigo in 97, her first year being in Burlington, Ontario, and then literally starts buying up and fucking over at the local bookstores until they have about 16 super stores. Fucking over the local bookstore market and then they purchase or they merge with Chapters. And from then on, they do a deal with this company called Kobo. And Kobo is an e-book company that Michael Serbens was the brainchild of.

And he, in like 99, was like, hey, fucking, you need to get in on this. And then by 2009, they launched their own thing. And when she was asked, like, hey, Reisman, don't you think, like, you know, getting into e-books might be bad for your brick and mortar store? She says, if my business was going to be cannibalized, I was going to do the cannibalizing. Which, that's fucking psychotic. That doesn't make any fucking sense. And then, so Kobo runs into the business was going to have its throat cut and left in a field to die somewhere with nobody eating the body at all and it just kind of decomposing i was going

to be the one who does that right precisely uh this is from good ereader.com and about kobo industries basically so kobo then goes into the e-reader market. They develop their own product, and instead of focusing on the American market like Amazon and Google and a few other companies would, they decided to focus on an international market. France is very hesitant to work with a foreign distributor in terms of books, but they eventually get that contract.

But then they get to a point where they're fucked. They've put too much money into their business and they kind of don't know if they're going to be able to pull it out at the end. And then all of a sudden, this company from America called Walmart buys them for $350 million. They initially put $35 million into Kobo.

And now you might be thinking to yourself, wow, what a godsend that this rich family got saved by another rich family. I don't know. Maybe Jerry Schwartz, a guy that's connected to several blue chip companies, had something to do with his wife's e-book company being bought up right at the last moment. But, yeah, I mean, this is just an example of how terrible at business she is. Like she had some sort of plant company, Crookshanks, which she ran into the ground beforehand. And listen, you want to hear how smart this person person is this person was asked how to be good at business

how to be a good leader and then she was asked what superpower she wants and this is what she said if i had a superpower i'd like to be the conductor of an orchestra the most boring issue of spider-man bitch you read a book every fucking day. It's not even a superpower. Bitch, you read a book every fucking day, you don't know what a superpower is? So, Heather Reisman is a person that is not necessarily terrible, but certainly is not good. And we haven't even mentioned Fort Schwartz, where they chose to buy four separate mansions, demolish them, and rebuild a super mansion. And by the way,

rich neighbors are like, fuck this noise, because I bought a house for X amount of millions, and now you're making this neighborhood a place where I'm not... I mean, it's funny because they're gentrifying

the richest neighborhood that you possibly could. And this is not, oh, these people, they've sacrificed their lives. This is this type of person. If I had a superpower, I'd like to be the conductor of an orchestra. What?

So, feel pity for the politicians who have to have a conversation with this woman. Just like, God, I want power, but is this worth it? From CanadaBusiness.com, they look at their net worth. And in 2011, it was at $1.4 billion. And by the end of 2018, it was $3.2 billion. So they've doubled their net worth in the last decade. And honestly, I mean... Six years.

Yeah. Or seven years. Seven years, yes. I mean, and this has a great chart. And it says 61% is public. Let's see. Stock. it says 61% is public. Let's see. Stock. Yeah, 8% is private, real estate 2%, and then the 29% is other.

I love when numbers like that show up. We just don't fucking know how the rest 30% of the net worth is all built, you know? But that is Heather Reisman for you. I mean, and there's a few other cases where she chose to exclude book sales of Mein Kampf as well as the magazine that had the Charlie Headbow publication. Oh, yeah. Listen, this is a person that's on the Bilderberg group. Like, you know, you can talk about, oh, she seems to be very connected. It's like, yeah, her fucking uncle was on the Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement.

This is a person that's been connected since birth. He helped write the agreement. He was like a civil servant in the trade department helping to write it. Right, he was the chief negotiator for this free trade agreement. So, send those jobs up here, eh? She was in the Bilderberg Group for a while, right? Yeah, I don't know. Or still is? She is still in the Bilderberg group for a while right yeah I don't know she is still in the Bilderberg group um I don't know how long she's been in it but I mean I feel like that's one of those organizations where you you only leave in a box if you know what I mean it's pretty

it's pretty loaded even to mention the Bilderberg group on a podcast weren't you saying the Bilderberg group was co-founded by a Nazi? Yeah, I looked at this thing because I was looking it up slowly and this is from theclever.com There's 19 shocking facts and theories about the Bilderberg group and the original one seems pretty credible. It's that founded by an ex-Nazi and an agent of

the Vatican, the co-founders of the Bilderberg group were two historical figures with checkered backgrounds. They were Prince Burhard from the Netherlands and Josef Rettinger, who was a political advisor originally from Poland who worked with the Vatican. Well, he would just be turning in his grave if he knew that his organization would go on to ban his Bible, Mein Kampf. Yeah.

Well, the Bilder, I don't know, maybe at some point we'll engage with the Builderberg group directly. Yeah. But it seems like they've been around for a while and there's like a core that actually, they just set up a large scale meeting every single year. And some of the Builderberg group stay on for many, many years and they're just administering this conference. Right. And other ones kind of jump in and out. And they want like new sort of thought leaders to come in and speak at these things.

It's pretty interesting. You can look up some of the old agendas from like past conferences. All the world's a stage, man. That's all I fucking know. Yeah. The destruction of the U.S. dollar. The fucking population reduction using pandemics. Media censorship.

Trade zones. Working for the end of national sovereignty, and the big enchilada. New world order, motherfucker. Yeah, if you have an Adderall prescription, feel free to just log on to prisonplanet.com and start clicking on links to do more research about the Bilderberg group, and you'll eventually get the truth. Crush your Adderall and snort it, and then really go down a couple of YouTube wormholes. If you want to learn more, very important to have a methamphetamine problem first.

Choose to do it at an Indigo location and not a public library. She thinks public libraries are becoming obsolete in the future. She said that in interviews and it's like,

bitch, you got the money to fucking fund these libraries. What are you talking about? It's going to be obsolete. Yeah, at least amazon's not putting them in a box uh but with the time we have left i just wanted to highlight a couple cases of jerry schwartz and his company causing you know damage real damage to real people and uh though i did want to mention first uh there's this straight.com article it's about canadian politics um they quote uh stephen clarkson uh wrote a study

of the liberal party the canadian liberal party called the big red machine and just quoting from it in 1988 the federal elections uh it's he says in toronto the prominent billionaire businessman gerald schwartz took charge of fundraising pleading with other executives that while they may not like um the then candidate turner's position on free trade, they should still shell out generously to the Liberal Party lest the socialist NDP sneak up the middle to exert a controlling voice in a minority government. And so this just kind of shows you that Jerry Schwartz's influence in liberal politics in Canada has gone all the way back to 1988 at least, if not before then. We talked earlier how close he was to Liberal Prime Minister Paul Martin. Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, his chief of staff was a guy named Nigel Wright, who was an executive at Onyx. He took a temporary leave, Nigel Wright did, took a temporary leave from Onyx in 2010 to become Stephen Harper's chief of staff.

He had to leave in 2014 because there was a major bribery scandal in Canada where Nigel Wright wrote a bribery check for $90,000 to a Canadian senator, probably with Stephen Harper's knowledge, but Stephen Harper made the decision to throw him under the bus. So he has to resign as Stephen Harper's chief of staff, and then he goes immediately back to work for Onyx. So it just shows their influence, where they're so influential in these liberal governments,

but then the conservatives come in, and their fucking exec is the chief of staff, who leaves their company and then immediately comes back to it. And, you know, one other thing I wanted to mention with regards to Israel, Schwartz and Heather Reisman have, uh, founded a charity called the Hesseg Foundation for Lone Soldiers, which provides money to cover tuition and living expenses for non-Israelis who serve in the Israeli army. Uh, that's again from that straight.com article, but it's just kind of disturbing where it's

like, Hey, if you don't have family in Israel and you want to go be a mercenary psychopath, they'll pay you money to go fucking unload on nurses in the Gaza Strip. It's like a right wing Lincoln Brigade to go snipe Palestinian

kids who are throwing rocks. It's a superpower. If I had a superpower I'd like to be the conductor of an orchestra she made army she is she's the conductor of an orchestra that plays ave maria for palestinian children um but so you know and again we could spend all day going through all the different deals of onyx's but i want to highlight two private equity deals because these touch on a lot of themes we've covered with all these kind of private equity billionaires we've run into. And these two cases are Save-A-Lot and a company called Abco or Magnatracks.

We'll start with Save-A-Lot. Save-A-Lot, if you live in the United States, you may or may not know, it is the second largest U.S. discounter after Aldi. They have about, or at least uh as of 2019 they had about 1115 stores um but interesting thing about those stores 698 of them are licensees they're like uh they're not controlled by the corporate entity they're licensed out to um franchised yeah franchised out um and so it's interesting where there's been this lawsuit according to a winsight grocerybusiness.com um there's been this lawsuit where a group of um

veterans who invested into getting licenses for these save-a-lot stores have sued onyx in the u.s eastern district of missouri alleging that Onyx had a, quote, secret plan to transform the company from a licensee-based system to a corporate-owned store model so it could then flip to a competitor such as Aldi. And the basic allegation here is that they had, you know, this business that's more than half controlled by these licensees or franchisees. They wanted to bankrupt the licensees and then just sell all of the corporate-controlled stores to another entity because that's more valuable.

That's kind of how the Aldi business model works, and Aldi might buy it if they didn't have to deal with these licensees. And so this is a group, the plaintiffs are a group of store owners composed of U.S. Navy and Marine veterans who invested in Save-A-Lot stores in 2015 in part to support a mission of bringing grocery stores to underserved trade areas. composed of U.S. Navy and Marine veterans who invested in Save-A-Lot stores in 2015,

in part to support a mission of bringing grocery stores to underserved trade areas. These are what are called food deserts in the United States, a lot of rural areas. There's just not enough people living there, so they can't get fresh vegetables at any sort of profitability. So there are these food deserts in the United States. It's a real tragedy. The veterans group opened about 10 Save-A-Lot stores from 2015 to 2017 in places like South Carolina, Oklahoma, Kansas, Virginia, et cetera, et cetera. But basically, they go through, and the lawsuit's very fascinating, but just to give you the nuts and bolts, they talk about how that at times Save-A-Lot, the corporate entity, when Onyx took it over, first thing they did was they fired everybody at the corporate entity who was responsible for dealing with the licensees.

They fired a bunch of people who were trying to manage the franchises and just kind of stripped that division out entirely. Right. And then they also, according to this complaint, save a lot prices the corporate entity sell sold to the licensees at wholesalers the prices were so high that quote at times it was cheaper for plaintiffs to purchase inventory from their local competitors across the street at retail prices than to purchase the inventory from save a lot at uh these uh quote unquote wholesale prices right so they're just overcharging their licensees, trying to drive them out of business. They're cutting off all of the corporate people who can actually like deal and help with their licenses.

They're just like burning all of their business, burning all of their bridges basically. Yeah. With their suppliers. They're literally called Save A Lot. That's the name of the fucking store and they're fucking over their franchise owners. In order to continue to save a lot, your input should probably be reasonably priced so you can actually make a profit yeah precisely right and so it is just something where another part of it is that these licensees these veteran veterans groups who bought it in 2015 2017 they alleged that the corporate entities save a lot

gave them fake data fake sales data fake price data and all this other shit to lure them into you know purchasing a license and then they were just trying to extract money from them and then as soon as they actually owned and operated the license like we said they're getting uh goods sent to them uh where it's like they'll make an order and like half of it won't be delivered or a bunch of goods won't be delivered it's all way overpriced even though it's quote-unquote wholesale they can't get anybody from the corporate office to respond because all those people were fired you know so it is just something where they allege very credibly and this lawsuit is ongoing that onyx's entire strategy was to purposely bankrupt them

purposely steal their money defraud them by lying to them when they bought those licenses and then once they bankrupt all the licensees they were going to try and flip it to Aldi or one of the other competitors. Yeah, predatory practices to make a profit because fuck people that need groceries. I want to make more money. And, you know, and so Save-A-Lot is currently in kind of free fall of profitability. You know, their long-term EBITDA has like fallen

all kinds of ways just according to the same article. It's fallen from $200 million in the fourth quarter of 2016 to just $13 million in the most recent third quarter of 2019. And they just recently refinanced, Save-A-Lot did, with the majority of their lenders. They refinanced about $130 million. They got $138 million in new capital. They cut their debt by more than $400 million. But it's like, in terms of profitability, Onyx has really just driven it into the ground.

So it's, I mean, we'll see what happens with the business, but it's a very fucked up story where they did that to these people who, you know, had a, I think, noble mission of trying to serve underserved communities and just got absolutely fucked and defrauded by these, you know these fucking venomous snakes at Onyx Corporate Entity. Fucking vultures and leeches. Snakes, vultures, and leeches. And so we'll see what happens with that lawsuit. But the last case I wanted to highlight

is something that I think is very important to the private equity business model that we've talked about a little bit, but I want to just spend a little bit of time here. And this is what's called fraudulent conveyance or fraudulent transfer um just to quote from yeve smith at naked capitalism she's written a lot about this uh private equity firms are seldom sued for their practices of levering companies for fun and profit and not caring much if they leave smoldering wreckage in their wake one big reason has been that it takes a lot of time and effort to prove fraudulent conveyance which is layperson terms meaning uh meaning means continuing to bleed cash out of a company into

your own pocket when you know it is a goner and to discourage these suits suits private equities uh general partners go into the legal version of scorched earth mode to deter other bankruptcy victims from getting bright ideas so basically if a company is pushed into bankruptcy the creditors do have the ability to sue if they believe fraudulent conveyance was done like this company was pushed into bankruptcy and then its assets were stripped out you know it's a like a mafia bust out it's functionally equivalent and these suits are very hard because of course you know private equity fights back with scorched earth tactics because they can't allow a precedent to be established. It's very hard to prove.

There's a short statute of limitations. But Onyx actually did have to settle one of these lawsuits. And this is the case of a U.S. custom metal building systems manufacturer called Magnetrex Corporation. It was originally called ABCO, A-B-C-O. And CanadianUnderwriter.ca writes up about this. In 2014, the Ontario Superior Court Justice wrote a decision, a major theme of this complaint, this fraudulent conveyance complaint. This is the trustee of the bankruptcy. This company, Magnetrex, was driven into bankruptcy in 2003 after, I believe in 1999, Onyx bought it out and it was bankrupt in 2003. The trustee of the bankruptcy sued them for fraudulent

conveyance. And a major theme of the complaint was that Onyx caused the bankruptcy. Acting through its directors it direct it ordered magnetrex to take a number of highly leveraged acquisitions that benefited onyx and its directors at the expense of the magnetrex creditors these alleged wrongful acts of the onyx directors were committed in their capacity as onyx directors they included breach of their fiduciary duty to magnetrex fraudulence conveyance of magnetrex assets and unjust enrichment so basically simply enough onyx buys this company it orders the company to bankrupt itself in order to enrich onyx and it doesn't give a shit and also that so private equity is constantly getting like management fees for for the assets that it acquires. To a certain extent, they're allowed to offload debt

onto the companies they acquire, but there are limits to how much that can be conveyed in these deals. And it's very easy to just hide what is these illegal conveyances in the midst of all these fees that are going back and forth. Right.

So Onyx has to eventually settle this lawsuit for about nine and a half million dollars. They try to get it thrown out a bunch of times. And you can actually read through if you go to casetext.com or courtlister.com. This is Kipperman v. Onyx Corporation. You can read through the documents and it's pretty fascinating. There's very long, lots of legalese, but the basic claim, or just quoting from from it the plaintiff's claims that uh transfers were accomplished through um the breach of fiduciary duty were concealed from magnetrex entities uh basically that onyx uh used magnetrex to buy up two other companies which made magnetrex functionally insolvent and then they just kind of collected the fees on top of it. You know, they buy these companies on debt using shell companies.

They collect interest on this. They collect their management fees. And I just want to highlight one thing about the management fee here. So they, you know, they sue this company. And Nigel Wright, we mentioned him earlier. He was the chief of staff to conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He was an Onyx executive involved with this deal. He was put under deposition for this to ask about the management fees.

So he's asked, can you tell me specifically what Onyx Corporation did for the company Abco that falls under paragraph two of the management agreement? Answer, what we did for them? Question, uh-huh. And then he says this, Nigel Wright says this, we would be involved in, you know, reviewing and working with the management on corporate and strategic plans, you know, in terms of where to take the company, you know. You saw the list of the other acquisitions opportunities that were suggested, and we would work with them in reviewing those, understanding how they fit in the company's strategic plans whether or not we could do them you know how else we were going to grow the business reviewing the company's budgeting process forecast succession planning blah blah blah this goes on for like another paragraph

but you read it and it's like one sentence this guy is bullshit he's just saying business terms like yeah we did this you know we did this right forecasts of EBITDA and, you know, strategic planning. But so this is just a guy who's subpoenaed like, so you guys are collecting your management fee, whatever it is, whether it's 2% or 20% or however much they're paying. This insolvent company is paying a management fee every quarter. And they ask him, what are you doing for that management fee? And he just gives a clearly bullshit answer. And then just one last quote from this. Plaintiffs asked Jerry Schwartz and Nigel Wright if they could point to any record or documentation indicating what services the defendants provided to the debtors under the management agreement or when these services were provided.

They could not. They could not point to one fucking document that indicated what they did to collect this management fee. Wright testified that there was no internal policy requiring the individuals at Onyx to keep track of these services. The debtors received invoices specifically detailing specific expenses to be reimbursed, but these invoices did not include any listing of the

services provided plaintiff presented testimony illustrating that onyx employees were sometimes confused as to who was providing services for example hilsen testified that a guy named uh iwat hersink provided services but hersink himself to state it quote i personally did not provide any of these services, unquote. The management agreement provided for the debtors to pay large sums of money to defendants for, quote, investment banking services, unquote. Yet plaintiff pointed to testimony indicating that, one, no employees at Onyx was an investment banker.

Two, the debtors found these two companies as possible acquisitions by themselves. And three, the debtors had independent investment bankers. And so, you know, and it just goes on from there. But it is something we've talked about on this podcast where, you know, hedge funds and private equity, they get these management fees. It's not clear what they're doing for these management fees. And in this case, it's like there is a smoking gun. They weren't doing shit. This is just fraudulent conveyance. They are just collecting their little fees off a bankrupt company for doing nothing, enriching themselves, driving the company to the ground, and destroying jobs.

This is what's known in the private equity world as the chaos is a ladder strategy. So you're using one company to underwrite the acquisition of more companies right right in order to underwrite your outside investment banking deals to acquire more because you said that they're using uh what is it called magnet uh magnet tracks or magnet tracks they were using transformer they were using the assets of Magnetracks to underwrite the acquisition of other companies. Right. That was sort of like, it's a ladder. It's a chaos ladder.

And this is the fucking private equity business model. Like, you know, as we quoted earlier, the majority of times they get away with this shit. In this case, the evidence was a way that they insulated Onyx from risk and increased the risk of the debtors' creditors. Onyx forced the debtors to incur massive debt, knowing that the debtors' management had made aggressive financial projections. And three, Onyx collected transaction fees, increased management fees, and increased valuations for its stock and,, quote, option value, with little concern about the ultimate solvency of the debtors. So, you know, the evidence was compelling enough. They tried to get this thing thrown out, but they had to settle. And it's just kind of a fucked up story where we talk about all these private equity billionaires.

They all do this shit. Right. And the vast majority of the time they get away with it. But it's just, I mean, it's worth remembering. These are fucking mobsters. These are bust out strategies where they just fucking asset strip companies, run them into the ground, collect their management fees, and they're worth billions of dollars. And they get to also run bookstores into the ground as, you know, projects to distract their wives. It seems to me that private equity is a game and that game is snakes and ladders uh but you know and so recently

onyx bought a west jet a canadian airline for about five billion dollar leverage buyout we'll see what they do with it but it's probably going to be you know like charging people 50 cents to go to the bathroom in flight or uh or you know whatever else like charging for snacks probably just increasing fees cutting staff staff, firing people, making the service worse but more expensive. Of course. And then they can flip it again. But the jokes, Sean, the jokes that are going to be written,

back in my day, we didn't have to spend 50 cent Bitcoin to take a piss on a plane. Sure, I'd do it in the glass of water they give you but that's two bitcoin right there you were fixing airline peanut prices uh but is there anything else we didn't get to about jerry schwartz and heather reisman it's a you know it's a fascinating story and i'm sure our canadian listeners know a lot more uh that can be covered but these are the kind of people that are supporting Pete Buttigieg, you know,

these, they clearly want something. And, you know, if Pete Buttigieg talks about, you know, limiting Amazon or whatever else, well,

Heather Reisman has a big interest in that. Certainly, you know, they don't want Medicare for all in the United States with all their healthcare investments. And they would like to lobby the Canadian government to privatize the healthcare system there as well. So they clearly have the ear of Justin Trudeau and just whoever's in power that's not the NDP.

Yeah. And with that, this has been Grubstickers. I'm Yogi Paiwal. I'm Steve Jeffers. I'm Sean P. McCarthy. Thanks for listening. Check out our Patreon side to hear us cover one of the billionaires who supports Joseph Biden in the Democratic primary. And also shout out to our Patreon listener, Jason Matthews,

for suggesting the topic of this episode. Feel free to hit us up anytime if you have ideas for who we should cover on the show. Thanks for listening. Bye. Rest in peace, Black Mamba. Bye. Did you hear about that?

No, what happened? Kobe Bryant died. Kobe did. He's dead. I'm serious. Really? Yeah, he died in a plane crash. Helicopter. It just happened. Your thoughts about the death? Kobe Bryant died. Kobe did. He's dead. I'm serious. Really? Yeah, he died in a plane crash. Helicopter.

It just happened. Your thoughts about the death of Kobe Bryant? Well, it's shocking. And I think we're all still in shock about what happened. And I think it's a reminder that our lives are often touched by people we never even meet. And there are millions of people, not just in Los Angeles, but around the world right now, mourning because they were inspired by what he did on the field, what he meant off the field. And it's also, of course, such a tough human moment to think about that he was spending time with his daughter.

And her loss is unthinkable, as is that of everybody who was on that helicopter. And I think all of America is united in mourning and sending our love and our thoughts and, of course, our prayers to the families. Thank you. My rule to never get on a helicopter with a billionaire is undefeated. Kobe Bryant, you should have listened

to the Patreon. That's right.