The Intercept has a three part series beginning with A Giant Pile of Money: How Wall Street Drove Public Pensions Into Crisis and Pocketed Billions in Fees.

Public pensions across the country now squander tens of billions of dollars each year on risky, often poor-performing alternative investments — money public pensions can ill afford to waste.

If you think that privatizing Social Security is a good idea, you’d better have a plan to protect the unsophisticated individual investor from these vulture capitalists who can dupe and corrupt people chosen to oversee public pension funds. Turns out that Franco Modigliani and Arun Muralidhar had such a plan, but it was nothing like what the Republicans propose. Also, just search this blog for either Franco Modigliani or Arun Muralidhar.

Naked Capitalism has the article How Private Equity Bankrupted Seven Major Grocery Chains for Fun and Profit.

…the seven large grocery chains that filed for bankruptcy since 2015 all were victims of private equity firms overloading them with debt, which in turn kept them from investing in updating stores and their product lines. No similar publicly traded grocery chain suffered a similar fate during this period. And as the authors and others like your humble blogger have pointed out, private equity firms extract so much in fees relative to their meager equity investments in the funds they manage that they profit even when they drive the companies they bought into a ditch.

If you do not understand this, then you are not qualified to discuss capitalism and socialism. The behavior of these private equity firms is why I call them vulture capitalists. Now that people like this are in control of our government, they are doing the same to our country.

The size of the federal deficit is not the problem as much as how the deficit is being created and what we spend our money on. With the willful refusal to collect high taxes from the predatory income of the vultures and the spending so much on armaments instead of investing in the productive capacity of our economy, the end of the USA empire is a foregone conclusion. If it weren’t for the suffering of the innocent victims, the demise of our empire could be considered a blessing for the rest of the world.