The US is enduring late-stage capitalism where it’s more profitable to loot rather than to create or build. Even worse, the looters are celebrated as “makers” rather than the takers they obviously are.

Under Trump’s benevolent gaze, the financiers that control private equity are cosplaying as modern day pirates who exist to pillage and loot. Many of them make up the cohort of billionaires now driving the Trump Administration’s policies, where they’ve belatedly realized that the US global position is weakening and it’s a zero sum game and they need to grab as much loot as they can before the music stops. It’s the same mindset I described in my last post, what with the elites desire to escape rather than help create a better world for everyone.

Private equity or PE firms such as KKR, Black Stone, Carlyle and Bain Capital have found an exceptionally profitable model to use debt leverage to buy out retailers, utilities, and healthcare providers, aggressively cut costs, asset strip, and then force them into bankruptcy for breakup sales. It’s all legal and represents certain vision of the America, where powerful corporations can arbitrarily coerce Americans and damage them economically. It’s oligarchy.

The target companies include well-known brands such as Toys R Us, Sports Authority, Sears, Payless, Red Lobster, and Genesis Healthcare.

These PE firms follow a standard operating procedure with their predation model:

• Buy out the business with debt that uses assets of the target itself as collateral
• Pursue deep cost cutting such as layoffs, cutting employee benefits, squeezing suppliers, and reducing maintenance, quality and services
• Raise prices to consumers
• Asset strip by selling off the valuable parts of the target such as real estate, stores, equipment, brands, and profitable subsidiaries or divisions
• Force the target to load up additional debt, often to pay dividends to the PE owners
• Liquidate when the business fails, causing wholesale layoffs often without compensations

There are over 4,000 PE firms and 18,000 funds operating in the US, with over $10 trillion under management, that are actively engaged in the leveraged buyout (LBO) business.

Fuck! That’s a lot of looters.

As a result of such prevalent predatory finance, more and more US businesses are driven into debt-fueled bankruptcies, turfing out employees and destroying communities. I’m positive that the violence, suicides and “deaths of despair” that have plagued our country are directly related to the looting. Many Americans may not comprehend all of the intricate details of the vast looting operation but they understand that their lives have gotten worse and the realize that the lives of their children will be worse still.

Then there’s the monopolization of the economy. American corporations are not really interested in making things anymore and, like PE, have financialized too, while striving to ensure that there’s no competition in their field. They all want to be a monopoly or part of an oligopoly so that other companies can’t compete with them. All of this behavior ensures ever rising prices.

Trump can boast all he wants that we have the best economy ever but for most Americans, the economy doesn’t work for them anymore. I guarantee that by next November that will be the main issue influencing how Americans vote.

Whatever the fuck we’re going to do politically, the first thing is to stop the looting. Start with just outlawing PE. Get rid of stock buybacks. Stop pumping the stock market. Ruthlessly go after everyone deliberately raising real-estate, rent, food and other prices. (By the way, this possibility is why there was such elite hysteria over the election of Zohran Mamdani, who may or may not be allowed to reduce the prices of food, rent, healthcare and all of the other prices that are crippling average New Yorkers)

Unfortunately, at this point the US economy will have to essentially collapse and the looters will have to be driven entirely out of power and replaced by a more responsible elite concerned with building things, healing communities, constructing infrastructure and truly pledging to make America great. 

Like I say, a guy can dream.