TAKING ON THE BUYOUT GUYS.

Any day now, private equity firm The Carlyle Group will complete a $6.3 billion buyout of nursing home provider HCR Manor Care. But for the 60,000 workers at Manor Care facilities across the country -- as well as the residents of those facilities -- there are still outstanding questions about what that buyout will mean.For the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), one of the country's largest and fastest-growing unions, the deal is an entry point into a larger conversation about private equity, a way to raise critical questions about its role in the nursing home industry, workers' lives, and the future of the American economy. ...Private equity is an investment model that, though it has existed in one form or another for 25 years, is beginning to play a major role in the U.S. economy. In 2006, private equity firms accounted for roughly a third of all mergers and acquisitions in the United States, and they are on track to shatter that record this year. The firms operate by leveraging debt to buy large, public companies and take them private, where their profits can be classified as capital gains and taxed at a rate of 15 percent rather than the 35 percent rate on corporate income. Under a typical buyout, the private company firm will take on a portfolio company, spend three to five years working to cut costs and make the company more profitable, and then resell.For the most part, these deals have gone down with little public scrutiny; as private companies, the firms are excused from filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission and are subject to a lesser level of examination from both the federal government and shareholders. Private equity fund investors and partners, as well as the executives of the companies they buy up, turn high profits on the deals, while the firms pay significantly lower taxes and often make their money at the expense of workers and the quality of service they provide. Firms have spent millions on lobbyists to protect their tax loopholes, with Carlyle and its portfolio companies alone dropping $23 million in the past five years, according to SEIU figures.