In her 2003 Grammy Award-winning song, “Cry,” Warner Music artist Faith Hill asked if her partner could “pretend that he was feeling some pain.” Nine months later, Warner employees were getting a preview of the pain that was going to come with the private equity buyout of their employer.

In 2001, Intelsat became a privately owned company, and three years later was acquired for $5 billion by a consortium of private equity firms—Apollo Management, Apax Partners, Madison Dearborn Partners and Permira. The consortium invested $515 million of their own money in the deal and called themselves “Zeus Holdings.” The new company went to work slashing labor costs, reducing the workforce by 18 percent between June 2004 and September 2005.

In December 2000, at the height of the busy Christmas shopping season, Bain Capital purchased KB Toys in a highly leveraged buyout worth $300 million. Bain invested only $18.1 million of its own money and financed the rest with bank loans and other assorted I.O.U.s.

Potential investors are told that one of the strengths of private equity investments is that they are not beholden to the tyranny of short-term returns like the public markets. “Private equity firms are not under public scrutiny … so they can focus on long-term business growth,” they are told. And so when a consortium of private equity firms, including industry giant the Carlyle Group, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice (CD&R), and Merrill Lynch, bought Hertz, the car rental company, from the Ford Motor Company in the autumn of 2005 for $15 billion, it was expected that they would formulate a long-term plan to build on the value of this household brand name. But the firms had some short-term plans as well.

McAlester, Oklahoma residents are by no means wealthy—the median household income is about $29,000 a year. The manufacturing jobs like the 300 that exist at the aircraft parts plant pay decent wages in a town where most have a high school diploma but few finish college. n 2005, the stability of those jobs was in question. Boeing announced that it was selling the McAlester plant, as well as one in Tulsa and another in Wichita, Kan.,, to Onex, a private equity firm based in Toronto.