At Nation's Nursing Homes, Profits Rise as Care Slips
From the Boston Globe
Excerpt: Habana Health Care Center, a 150-bed nursing home in Tampa, was struggling when a group of large private investment firms purchased it and 48 other nursing homes in 2002.

The facility's managers quickly cut costs. Within months, the number of clinical registered nurses at the home was half what it had been a year earlier, records collected by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services indicate. Budgets for nursing supplies, resident activities, and other services also fell, Florida's Agency for Health Care Administration said.

The investors and operators were soon earning millions of dollars a year from their 49 homes.

Residents fared less well. Over three years, 15 at Habana died from what families contend was negligent care in lawsuits filed in state court. Regulators repeatedly warned the home that staff levels were below mandatory minimums. When regulators visited, they found malfunctioning fire doors, unhygienic kitchens, and a resident using a broken leg brace.

"They've created a hellhole," said Vivian Hewitt, who sued Habana in 2004 when her mother died after a large bedsore became infected by feces. Habana is one of thousands of nursing homes that large Wall Street investment companies have bought or agreed to acquire in recent years. ...

... Those investors include prominent private equity firms like Warburg Pincus and the Carlyle Group, better known for buying companies like Dunkin' Donuts.

Labels: carlyle group

Carlyle Group Sells Stake to Abu Dhabi Government
From the Financial Times
Excerpt: (The) Carlyle (Group) agreed on Thursday to sell a 7.5 per cent stake in itself to an arm of Abu Dhabi’s government – the latest US private equity group to bring in a sovereign wealth fund as a big investor.

Blackstone sold a near 10 per cent stake in its management company to the Chinese government in May. A different arm of the Abu Dhabi government bought a stake in Apollo Management in July. Selling stakes to international sovereign wealth funds has become a popular way for US buy-out groups to cash in on their booming businesses while expanding their influence in new markets. The Carlyle deal demonstrates that the credit squeeze has not halted such transactions.

The investment comes as Carlyle faces pressure on Capitol Hill from lawmakers who want to impose a tax hike on the private equity industry.

The deal could also come under political scrutiny if Carlyle pursues sensitive takeovers in areas such as defence, technology or critical infrastructure.
More

Labels: carlyle group

Arrested Russian Businessman a Carlyle Advisor
from the Washington Post
Excerpt: The arrest of two of Russia's top businessmen in recent months was more than a distant headline for Washington's well-connected private equity firm, Carlyle Group.
Carlyle, known for the glittering roster of former statesmen among its partners and advisers, has ties to both Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev, the jailed Russian tycoons.
More on The Carlyle Group

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Bombed Saudi Mercenary Firm was owned by Carlyle Group
London Times
Also see: Meet The Carlyle Group

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Pentagon considers mass graves for US Troops
From the Denver Post
"The bodies of U.S. soldiers killed by chemical or biological weapons in Iraq or future wars may be bulldozed into mass graves and burned to save the lives of surviving troops, under an option being considered by the Pentagon..."

Five Degrees of Osama
Fortune Magazine
Also see: Meet The Carlyle Group

Labels: carlyle group, iraq

Just found out...
Carlyle Group buys CSX Railroad Line for $300 million
also see
Bush nominates CSX Railroad CEO for Secretary of Treasury
CNN
also see
Meet The Carlyle Group

Labels: carlyle group

Bush and Blair share same false 9-11 memory
Both claim to have seen the first plane hit the World Trade Center on TV live on TV.
George W Bush:
"I was in Florida. And my Chief of Staff, Andy Card -- actually, I was in a classroom talking about a reading program that works. I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower -- the TV was obviously on. And I used to fly, myself, and I said, well, there's one terrible pilot. I said, it must have been a horrible accident. But I was whisked off there, I didn't have much time to think about it. And I was sitting in the classroom, and Andy Card, my Chief of Staff, who is sitting over here, walked in and said, 'A second plane has hit the tower, America is under attack.' "
Town Hall Meeting Transcript, December 4, 2001
Tony Blair:
"I remember it very, very clearly. I was about to give the speech to the Trades Union Congress in Brighton, and so I was preparing my speech and the television was on in the background. You saw the first plane crash, and then people came in and started to brief me on it, and then of course it became clear a short time afterwards that this was not simply a terrible accident but was almost certainly a terrorist incident, and then everything changed." BBC News, September 11, 2002

Nobody else saw footage of the first plane hitting until hours later. Were they watching some bizarre closed-circuit broadcast from the Twilight Zone? Do you think that's what they were watching at the DC Ritz Carlton on 9-11, when James A. Baker and Frank Carlucci of The Carlyle Group were meeting with the Bin Laden family?

Labels: bush, carlyle group, September 11

McKinney Wants Two Investigations
From WXIA-TV Atlanta
Excerpts: Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney seemed unmoved by President Bush's insistence Friday that he did not ignore warning signs about the Sept. 11 attacks. McKinney, who spoke as she tried to escape reporters in DeKalb County, said Congress should launch not one, but at least two investigations...
McKinney said, "Former President Bush sits on the board of the Carlyle Group. The Los Angeles Times reports that on a single day last month, Carlyle earned $237 billion selling shares...the army's fifth largest contractor. "McKinney asked Friday why Congress should not investigate the former president, his son, and the defense industries.

Labels: carlyle group

Crusader a Boon to Carlyle Group Even if Pentagon Scraps Project
From the Washington Post
Excerpt: Whatever the fate of the Army's multibillion-dollar Crusader mobile artillery system, it has already helped provide an ample return for some of Washington's most prominent power brokers...But the biggest winner has been the Carlyle Group, the Washington investment firm headed by former Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci and other stars of past administrations, Republican and Democratic.
Also see Meet The Carlyle Group

Labels: carlyle group

House Defense Bill includes $475 million for Carlyle's Crusader
From MSNBC
Excerpts: The House passed the biggest increase in military spending in decades Friday to help fight the war on terrorism, including money for a new mobile artillery system that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has ordered to be killed...The House-passed legislation includes $475 million for the Crusader’s development. The bill also contains nonbinding language directing the Pentagon not to kill the program until the Army has given Congress a study on alternatives.
...The Crusader was slated to be built by United Defense Industries, a company whose majority owner is the Carlyle Group, a Washington-based investment firm headed by former Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, who is a friend and former college roommate of Rumsfeld.
Former President Bush is a consultant to the Carlyle Group and former Secretary of State James Baker, who advised the current president during the Florida election recount, is a managing director of the firm.

Labels: carlyle group

Death to Carlyle's Crusader...Sad for the new Stockholders
United Defense's $11 billion Crusader program has officially been cancelled. What's really sad about this is that United Defense and The Carlyle Group sold $400 million dollars worth of United Defense stock to the public last December for around $19 a share. The stock is currently selling at just over $21, after a high of almost $30 a share a few weeks ago.

No comment on the alleged "tiff" between Donald Rumsfeld and Army Secretary Thomas E(nron) White over killing the Crusader project, because I feel like it was contrived to steer the public's attention away from the fact that White, while an executive at Enron, was in charge of the division that was responsible for manipulating California's energy prices during the energy crisis last year.
Also see: The Axis of Corporate Evil

Labels: carlyle group

Carlyle Group gets 6-month Extension on Money-Laundering Regulations
From the Washington Post
Excerpt: Venture capital firms, a little-regulated segment of the financial industry, will have up to six more months to prepare for new federal requirements aimed at preventing money-laundering schemes.
The extension, announced yesterday by the Treasury Department, spares many financial firms from having to comply immediately with new rules passed by Congress last fall in response to September's terrorist attacks.
also see Meet The Carlyle Group

Labels: carlyle group

Army Secretary White Plugs Carlyle's Crusader
Keep in mind, this is the same Army Secretary White that the FBI is investigating over Enron dealings, and the Crusader is the tank made by the President's dad's company, The Carlyle Group.
From Stars and Stripes
Highlights: "Critics who claim the war in Afghanistan is proving that the Army is wasting money developing the Crusader self-propelled howitzer and the Stryker family of combat vehicles are wrong, the Army’s top civilian leader said.
Speaking to Pentagon press members, Secretary of the Army Thomas White defended the Crusader and the Stryker as 'transformational' and 'absolutely essential to the Army’s future.'
But an ever-growing chorus of critics say that, in the case of Crusader, artillery is becoming obsolete in the wake of the Pentagon’s ever-increasing precision airstrike capabilities."

Labels: carlyle group