The Private Equity Heist
And How We Rebuild
The heist wasn’t an accident.
And it wasn’t isolated.
It wasn’t just Toys R Us.
It wasn’t just JoAnn Fabrics.
It wasn’t just one hospital, one town, one lost job, one empty mall.
It was — and is — a system.
A machine designed to strip-mine value out of the real economy while protecting and enriching the people already at the top.
Private equity didn’t invent this machine.
They simply became its most efficient operators.
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 Dirty Secret Behind Every Deal
If there’s one thing every great heist needs, it’s a way to destroy the evidence.
Private equity has one:
Debt.
Debt is the smoke bomb they throw as they loot the building.
The fire they set to cover their escape.
And for decades, it’s been their most powerful, least understood weapon.
How Wall Street Gutted American Healthcare
It didn’t start with a bang.
It started with a bankruptcy filing, quietly buried in the business section.
A hospital here.
A hospital there.
Another rural clinic shutting down.
Another wave of layoffs in critical care units.
It looked random.
It looked unfortunate.
It wasn’t.
It was part of the same heist — just playing out in a place where the victims aren’t just laid off.
They’re left to die.
JoAnn Fabrics and the Death of Main Street
It didn’t happen all at once.
There was no sudden bankruptcy.
No headlines screaming the company was dead.
Instead, JoAnn Fabrics — a beloved American retailer, a gathering place for crafters, quilters, teachers, and entrepreneurs — has been slowly hollowed out, store by store, job by job, community by community.
Not by Amazon.
Not by changing tastes.
But by the same quiet financial looters who killed Toys R Us.
Killing Toys R Us for Profit
It should have been a comeback story.
In 2005, Toys R Us was still a titan:
A household name.
Profitable.
Beloved by generations of American families.
Sure, online shopping was starting to grow, and Walmart and Target were squeezing margins.
But Toys R Us had something they didn’t: a brand synonymous with childhood itself.
There was no fatal flaw in the business model.
No inevitable Amazon-driven doom.
The company was still standing — battered, maybe, but alive.
And that’s when the wolves closed in.
How to Gut a Company and Get Away With It
There’s no smash-and-grab.
No gunmen in ski masks.
No vaults blown open at midnight.
The private equity heist is quieter.
More technical.
More devastating.
And it starts with a move so clever, so simple, most people never even notice it’s happening.
You buy a company — not with your own money — but with the company’s.
It’s called a leveraged buyout, but it might as well be called what it is: a hostage situation.
The private equity firm promises new investment, new growth, new prosperity.
In reality, they’re tying the company to a ticking debt bomb — and lighting the fuse.
Once the ink is dry, the “new owners” owe almost nothing.
The company owes everything.
And that’s just the beginning.
How Wall Street Plotted the Perfect Crime
No alarms were triggered. No headlines screamed.
There was no raid, no getaway car, no televised trial.
But across America, a silent heist was already underway.
The clues were scattered in plain sight:
Shuttered toy stores.
Empty shopping plazas.
Small-town hospitals closing their doors.
Workers showing up one morning to find their jobs — and pensions — gone.
At first, it was easy to explain away.
“That’s just the market,” they said.
“Amazon is killing retail,” they shrugged.
“Healthcare is complicated.”
But beneath the surface, something more deliberate was unfolding.