The Getaway
Who Profited and How We Fight Back
The vaults were emptied.
The alarms stayed silent.
And the thieves walked right out the front door — smiling, shaking hands, cashing their bonuses.
That’s the real genius of the private equity heist.
It wasn’t just that they stole from America’s businesses, workers, and communities.
It’s that they convinced everyone else to clean up the mess they left behind.
The System That Made It Possible
It wasn’t just one firm.
Or one CEO.
Or one unlucky company.
The entire financial system was rigged to make the heist possible — and to reward the looters.
Private Equity Firms
They operate within a system that incentivizes extraction over investment — because stripping assets and maximizing short-term profits delivers faster, bigger returns than building sustainable businesses.
Wall Street Banks
They package, finance, and profit from the debt that makes these buyouts possible — collecting their fees up front, no matter how many companies collapse later.
Politicians and Regulators
Decades of deregulation, tax breaks, and weak oversight have created a playground where financial engineers can do legally what used to require fraud.
Institutional Investors
Pension funds, university endowments, and wealth managers pour billions into private equity funds, chasing returns — even when those returns come from hollowing out the real economy.
In this system, it doesn’t matter if a company succeeds.
It doesn’t matter if workers are laid off, if towns are gutted, if entire industries are destroyed.
What matters is that the people at the top get paid first.
The Victims Are Always the Same
Workers, stripped of jobs, pensions, and dignity.
Communities, hollowed out and abandoned.
Customers, left with fewer choices and worse service.
Taxpayers, forced to clean up the wreckage.
This isn’t a story of individual bad actors.
It’s a story of a system that rewards looting — and punishes anyone who tries to build something lasting.
The Grift Continues
Today, in False Promises, we explored The Debt Delusion — how political leaders sell the fantasy that debt can be made to disappear without consequences.
Private equity runs on the same delusion.
The debt they create isn’t designed to be paid off.
It’s designed to be someone else’s problem.
They front-load the profits, dump the risks, and walk away before the roof caves in.
When the collapse comes, it’s always the workers, the communities, and the taxpayers who are left trying to patch the holes — while the looters move on to their next “investment opportunity.”
This isn’t bad luck.
It’s not incompetence.
It’s a business model.
It’s the model.
Fighting Back
The good news is: the heist isn’t inevitable.
And the thieves aren’t invincible.
Some ways to fight back:
• Regulate leveraged buyouts — limit the amount of debt that can be loaded onto a company.
• Ban dividend recapitalizations — prevent owners from extracting cash through forced debt.
• Hold PE firms accountable — make them liable for the debts and pensions they destroy.
• Support worker ownership models — help employees, not financiers, buy and run companies.
• Divest public pension funds — pressure state and city pensions to pull their investments out of predatory PE firms.
• Shine a spotlight — make sure every community knows the real story behind every store closure, hospital bankruptcy, or mass layoff.
This isn’t about “saving capitalism” or “hating capitalism.”
It’s about saving the parts that serve people — and smashing the parts that serve only parasites.
Coming up tomorrow:
Final Reflection: Two Crises, One Cause — and How We Rebuild.
(Because private equity’s heist and America’s political collapse aren’t separate stories. They’re chapters in the same book — and it’s time we started writing a different ending.)