The Private Equitization of America
Chaos and immiseration
“No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” Matthew 6:24
“For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, for which some have strayed from the faith in their greediness, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” 1 Timothy 6:10
They say the government should be run like a business. Well, they are wrong, but believe them when they state their intentions: they mean it. If someone tried to impose the private equity model on the U.S. federal government, treating it like a business acquisition, it would likely result in a scenario of extreme cost-cutting, privatization, debt-loading, and short-term profit-seeking at the expense of long-term stability.
Private equity firms often acquire companies using large amounts of debt, so-called leveraged buyouts, and then implement aggressive cost-cutting measures to improve short-term profitability. This frequently leads to mass layoffs as firms seek to reduce expenses, wage reductions, and benefit cuts for employees, as well as outsourcing to cheaper labor lacking the expertise of the firm’s existing and more expensive, knowledgeable workers. Many private equity takeovers involve high borrowing levels, leaving the acquired company burdened with debt. This increases financial risk, making companies more likely to fail. Of course, this leads to bankruptcies, as the priority is short-term gains over long-term business health. The failing business may still have assets that retain value even as the enterprise itself collapses, such as a retail footprint, which can be exploited by private equity. You can sell the storefront to a developer or even spin the business off from its property, turning a former owner into a renter and siphoning more profits into the hands of the private equity firm rather than reinvesting in the business that employs workers and serves customers. See the impact of private equity on Sears, Red Lobster, and others.
It seems that private equity firms typically aim to sell acquired businesses within 3–7 years, making a term of four years something like a sweet spot. The stereotype of stripping assets for quick returns, often at the expense of long-term investment, is a stereotype for a reason. For your troubles, you get reduced innovation as firms prioritize immediate cost savings over research and development, leading directly to lower product and service quality, particularly in industries like healthcare and education. Your bill may not change, but you are getting less. Their goal is to make more money doing the bare minimum; gone is the pride in your work product that you saw from titans of industry in years gone by. The virtue of pursuing excellence is not to be found; private equity is happy to sell you a junk product.
In 1944, FDR said,
"We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. 'Necessitous men are not free men.' People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made."
He was warning us. Likewise, thinking back to over 200 years ago, we should not dismiss the Founding Fathers' fear of democracy as just a guise for elite ambition; they were serious men who realized that desperation would make independent thought and action hard. We should take this to heart. An active democratic population is dangerous to the private equity mindset. They do not want you educated to know your ancestors stopped this kind of behavior before. Private media propaganda pushed by corporate news outlets and the entertainment they produce are tools to freeze your imagination and make you passive. Their media is a tool to shape public opinion by limiting how people think about important issues. In the United States, this sort of infotainment propaganda relies on fear, repetition, and framing to keep people from considering new ideas or solutions to major problems. These tactics make it easier for those in power to maintain control and discourage you from changing policy in your favor while changing everything to favor their greed. Change happens, but not for your good. You are witnessing a lot of change right now.
Fear works; it is one of the strongest ways to influence people. When people are afraid, we are more likely to accept whatever solutions are offered, even if those solutions take away rights or limit freedom. The urgency interrupts our thoughts, like moving fast and breaking things quickly, so we cannot think about the consequences of what is happening. If you have more time to think, you might surprise yourself and challenge the bad behavior. Fear-based propaganda constantly warns about real dangers such as crime, economic collapse, or foreign threats, but its goal is to stop you from pausing to consider the consequences of the options put in front of you. This keeps people from questioning whether better alternatives exist.
Repetition reinforces these fears and makes repeated ideas seem like common sense. If a message is repeated often enough - through the news (controlled by oligarchs), social media (controlled by oligarchs), and think tanks (funded by oligarchs) - people start believing that is the way it is. This works especially well when something about the government is out of the ordinary or its purpose is unclear. Why call something a bad idea or explain why it is foolish when you can call it "fraud?" Anyone who points out that it is not fraud - but may be stupid or wasteful - is then accused of being in on the fraud. Or, for example, if the public constantly hears that they do not benefit from existing diplomatic arrangements, people may come to believe it, or if you keep pushing propaganda that a odd rich businessman with an exotically weird outlook on life is that way because they are smarter, then the public might think that person knows what is best for everyone so long as they shower a little attention on the lower classes. Because major news organizations are corporate entities, they reflect the needs of their owners and not the general public. Americans must take this seriously. People who own things use them the way they want to and can repeat the messages they want.
For example, the Fox Corporation owns Fox News, and the Australian Murdoch family, led by Rupert Murdoch and his son Lachlan Murdoch, controls the Fox Corporation. MSNBC belongs to NBCUniversal, which is a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation. CNN is part of Warner Bros. Discovery, formed after the merger of WarnerMedia and Discovery, Inc. And Gannett Company, Inc., a publicly traded media holding company, owns the major national newspaper, USA Today. Private equity firms Vanguard and Blackrock are among the many insiders who invest in these firms. America has freedom of the press, but the media is owned and operated by business interests, not charities.
Framing shapes how people think by deciding what information is put out front and center when a conversation begins. And, of course, this also means deciding what to leave out. For example, when politicians debate healthcare, they often focus on the cost rather than whether it should be a basic right or what impact overall morbidity - the amount of unhealthiness in the population - has on happiness, public productivity, military readiness, or social order; making it seem like the only question is how to pay for healthcare rather than whether the system itself should change. (Unhealthy America wants to contain a relatively healthy China that is rapidly catching up to us in tech, surpasses us in shipbuilding, has nuclear weapons, and would be fighting hundreds of miles from its shores and thousands from ours? In that case, health care and access to health care is a national security matter.)
Propaganda holds people within a narrow way of thinking through fear, repetition, and framing, imposing a paralyzing possession on your openness to new ideas. Basically, it trains you to think “that would never happen” or “that would never work.”
A private-equity-style takeover of the U.S. government might begin with loading it with massive debt and later using public assets as collateral. This debt would be used to fund tax cuts for the wealthiest, while essential safety-net services (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and education) would be cut or abolished. They would want to overturn the New Deal mindset and the empowerment that Americans gained after the Second World War.
Just as private equity firms fire employees to improve short-term profits, federal agencies would face pressure for massive job cuts by any means, even illegally, as in the private equity mindset the government rules that ensure bureaucratic competency and protection from political interference in the technical aspects of their jobs would be deemed inefficient and manufactured grievances would be used to undermine public support for the bureacratic. Essential public sector employees - air traffic controllers, postal workers, and federal regulators - would be laid off or replaced with low-wage, non-union contract workers, glitchy AI, or corporate-contractors seeking to profit and evade public accountability. Entire departments (such as the EPA, FDA, or Department of Education) could be downsized, outsourced, or eliminated because they are “inefficient." Partial truths about needing reform would be used to wreck the system, while the so-called opposition, not wanting to concede the reality of needing reforms, would play into the hands of the wreckers by making the crooks look like honest men.
Public intellectual property and scientific research (such as NASA discoveries or NIH-funded medical research) would be sold to private companies instead of benefiting the public; the public funding for those innovations would be cut to prevent competition with less useful proprietary commercial discoveries. The justice system might be increasingly "monetized," with more for-profit prisons and expanded surveillance technology contracts. AI-based surveillance technology, partnered with emerging tech from China monitoring behaviors and purchases, could be used to create a de facto national gun registry without Second Amendment advocates even knowing they have been betrayed.
The military and especially NASA could be further privatized, with more reliance on contractors doing work the government figured out how to do in the 1960s, reducing accountability while actually increasing costs because the private firms want to profit while public servants operate at cost and save taxpayer money. National parks and other federal land assets would be sold to private developers to extract short-term profits and permanent rents, not to ease the housing crisis by boosting family home ownership. Just like private equity takeovers result in higher prices for consumers, a private equity-run government would likely pass more costs onto individual citizens, such as higher passport fees or higher inflation without wage growth.
Market-dropping tariffs would be inflicted on foreign trading, allowing insiders to buy low while citizens lose their retirement as their IRAs tank, and then lifted at will so that those same insiders can profit while buying assets of cash-strapped regular Americans.
The cost-cutting only works in one direction; you get cut, and they benefit from the cost. When they cut the bottom line in government, they cut out the citizens, and what remains to funneled to the profiteers. Good government cannot be run like a business - which they claim means ruthless and efficient but really means heartless - because the government is not a business and should not be. But the ones gutting America would not care, nor care to be made to see why this is wrong. Alliances and reputations would be sacrificed with no regard for the time it took to acquire them because the private equity mindset is about exploiting that which you did not create and have no loyalty to. They would not even see the value in what they are sacrificing because the ones doing this may be rich; they have a gamed a system in need of reform, but they do not know what it took to build the American order, and they do not care. These are not the men who built America.
It matters how you do things. It matters that you reform government according to the law and the constitutional process that begins with Congress. It matters how you treat your allies. It matters how you treat employees. It matters that government is different from business. The response to chaos should be a new coalition of government reformers dedicated to the rule of law, federalism, and a Newer Deal to confront the consequences of our new digitally connected economy and its imbalances.
Now, the response to what I have proposed will be met with “That can’t happen,” etc. Remember that the goal of the propaganda is to make you think you are powerless. But you must demand change and ruthlessly oppose any Democrat or Republican too tired or compromised to propose and vote for clear reforms. As Frederick Douglass said, “power concedes nothing without a demand.” Go make demands.