The New York Daily News has has just fired half of its reporters:

This past spring, Michael Ferro resigned as chairman of publicly traded media-looting hell-company Tronc, Inc., just ahead of the publication of sexual harassment allegations against him. As a parting gift, Tronc paid him $15 million, voluntarily bundling up the total value of a three-year consulting contract into one lump payment expensed against the company’s earnings and putting itself $14.8 million in the red for the first quarter. Today, Tronc gutted the New York Daily News, laying off at least half of its editorial staff to cut costs. In a society not crippled and driven completely insane by capitalism, motherf%$#ers would go to prison for this.

When people talk pejoratively about “class warfare,” they almost never are referring to things like the above sequence of events. But what happened to the Daily News at the hands of Tronc is class f%$#ing warfare, a massive redistribution of wealth from the paper’s working people to a disgusting handsy sh%$bag multimillionaire, in a decision made far above those working people’s heads by a small handful of executive- and investor-class vampires. The journalists who lost their livelihoods today in effect had their salaries and benefits re-routed to Michael Ferro’s bank accounts. Against their wills, they were made to pay him for being a f%$#ing pig.

Versions of this are happening all across the media industry: Ownership parasites writing checks to themselves and each other that must be cashed out of the livelihoods of real people with no say in the matter. Deadspin’s parent company, Univision, recently bought out dozens of people across our network of sister sites—originally they’d intended layoffs, before negotiating with our union—not because we’re doing unprofitable work, but simply as a means of passing along the outrageous debt the company’s owners took on when they purchased Gizmodo Media Group in the first place. Next they’ll sell us off—altogether or piecemeal, as best suits their wallets and nothing else. It is, pretty much exactly, the F%$# you, pay me! sequence from Goodfellas, playing out in real time.

I really do think that there needs to major changes to corporate bankruptcy codes to make this sort of behavior a bit less remunerative.