Vulture Capitalism Grows Up

Um, Are You Gonna Eat That?

Vulture capitalism is the practice of looting a company for all of its cash and assets, and then selling or discarding the remaining lifeless hulk.

Mitt Romney was infamous for it. By the time he ran for president in 2012, he’d accumulated a personal fortune over $200M raiding and looting companies with his group, Bain Capital.

You start by cutting every outgoing cost you can find. You fire all of the highest paid employees and don’t necessarily replace them, even with cheaper ones. You gut every department you find superfluous.

Then, the fire sale.

Any real estate or physical equipment is sold off. Buildings are usually sold and then rented back by the company.

All of that cash is paid out as dividends. When all is said and done, the raiders walk away with millions and the company is toast. This has been going on since the 80s.

And, now, Donald Trump is doing it to the government.

It seems silly, you want it to be more than that, but it isn’t.

(I know- Putin. This scheme is separate from Trump’s Faustian deal with him, and though Putin has facilitated Trump, who is attacking our allies at Putin’s direction, the domestic vulture scheme is much older, percolating though Russell Vought and the Heritage Foundation as early as 1981.)

(And, we can’t forget Trump’s ‘emperor’ complex, but this extends far beyond just that.)

A raider sees a target company as a pile of cash to be commandeered. What they do, their position in the industry or community, is irrelevant. It’s just a pile of money to take.

That is all that Trump, Elon Musk, Vought, Peter Thiel and the rest of the Trump donors, the practitioners of the ‘Dark Enlightenment’, can see.

(The Dark Enlightenment is the nutso conspiracy theory that espouses a techno-corporate dictatorship. All of the ‘Paypal Mafia’- the original Silicon Valley oligarchs, subscribe to it. It would ban democracy and voting. More on that later.)

The US is a pigeon to be plucked. A pile of cash that they’re not getting and that’s all there f-ing is to it.

As is the world, to Trump and the oligarchs, demonstrated by the stupidest and most inflammatory tariffs in modern history. All of this is designed to cripple the economy and democracy so that the vulture plan can materialize.

We only have trade deficits for two basic reasons- one- we are an insatiable market and we’d gladly buy things from all over the world, and two- the big one- our corporations are more than happy to make things abroad and import them back here.

Now, of course, everything that Trump does is based on control or revenge, even the tariffs. Punishment or submission. He visibly wants to be a tyrant king, and he’s also visibly deluded, deceitful, clinically disturbed and psychotic. But, that’s not a drawback to the ‘Dark E.’ guys.

It is ‘vulture politics’.

It’s gross and revolting, but, yes, the company, the nation, the whole world market, is just seen as a source of carrion.

It’s being expanded into global extortion. They don’t just want all the cash they can grab now, they want control over skimming all of the world’s cash in perpetuity.

Yes, it sounds like organized crime- mobsters, but it’s far more organized than that.

All of the talk of fraud and waste is designed to justify looting and privatizing everything.

Musk is carrying out stage one here at home- cutting expenditures regardless of importance so he can clear more room for tax breaks- dividends. As he empties departments, he’s eyeing the buildings themselves as assets to be sold, again, for tax breaks- dividends. He even tried to sell a secret CIA building because he hadn’t looked into who was in there.

There is no real political message or mantra. That’s why the only issues they use to drive it are DEI, exaggerated immigrant violence and alleging Marxism by Democrats. They might as well be trying to ban ‘cooties’, for Christ’s sake.

But, they are steeped in this bigoted conspiracy talk. Republicans literally have nowhere else to go. They can try to defend Trump and Musk’s actions, but they are all blatantly illegal. They can try to say they’re ‘saving the country’, but every statistic says they’re tanking it.

They can try to say that Democrats are trying to destroy the country, but it doesn’t wash because Dems are not in power. So, they have to concentrate on emotional fear-mongering, using fake Marxism and fabricated evil motivations by Dems as the reasons for all of the insanely criminal actions being taken in full view by Trump.

The harshest action they are taking to justify this fear/ communism/ immigrant gang violence facade is deportations without due process. They have no idea which Latinos are gang members, so they just take anyone they can get their hands on and ship them off to El Salvador, a brutal little nation where the president has been paid off to accept, imprison and torture anyone Trump sends over.

Already, as many as three may be dead, one, Andry José Hernández Romero, is known to have been taken for ‘mom’ and ‘dad’ tattoos, and one with legal status, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, actually granted asylum from El Salvador, being taken over an ‘administrative error’, and the DOJ is actually arguing in court that they can never be retrieved under any circumstances.

Now, you ask, isn’t this all just another left-wing whacko conspiracy theory?

No.

It’s not a conspiracy theory if they’re actually doing it.

Unlike right wing conspiracies about the left, the right is actually doing these things. Several of their tenets are borne of right-wing pundits and conspiracy theories themselves.

For Trump, Musk, the ‘Dark E’ participants and the Republicans, the Constitution is already completely dead. They are not following it, and never will. The fact that Republicans in Congress have remained frighteningly silent while Trump destroys Article I, literally taking powers from Congress and implementing them illegally as Executive Orders, is already far more than disconcerting.

This is what they want- kleptocracy at the top, kakistocracy carrying it out. That’s why every cabinet member is an outright idiot opposed to their department’s purpose. Not one of them would have been nominated for anything by pre-Trump Republicans, let alone by Democrats.

But, that brings us to the evil rhetoric by Republicans, demonizing Democrats, often in the most ridiculous ways. Suffice to say, no Democrats are ‘Marxist baby-eating Satanic Atheists’ (yes, both).

But children have already died abroad because of Musk destroying the USAID.

Women have already died from miscarriages in America because of anti-DEI-based red state abortion bans.

Tens of thousands of people, tens of thousands of veterans, are out of work, looking at homelessness, because of Musk’s illegal cuts. Hundreds of thousands are at risk to damage from the truncated or even outright cancelled services or benefits Musk has unceremoniously cut without even looking at what they do or who they help.

They even want to end Social Security, which would put over 70 million people into abject poverty.

I mean, they cancelled ‘Meals On Wheels’, for crying out loud. Trump’s golf in ten weeks has already cost more than eight years of MOW.

They literally do not care who suffers or how much, as long as they get the goods. (Or ‘own the libs’.)

It is deadly, and it’s going on right now, unabated.

Democrats cannot fight it while people are accosting Democrats for not fighting. Cynicism is the most deadly threat to democracy from the left.

No, not because everybody doesn’t have a right to criticize and voice their opinion. They do.

Because, right now, we need to build them up with ideas, not bury them in criticism.

Why?

Because nobody on the right is cynically slamming Republicans while they undertake the most heinous political betrayal in history. Nobody in the Republican Party is even close to admitting anything Trump has done is wrong, even as they interpreted every action by Biden as a crime. (It wasn’t.)

But, still hundreds of men have been put into prison at hard labor in a foreign country they are not from, without even a look at a judge. At least two female immigrant students, here legally, have been kidnapped off the street and taken thousands of miles away to red states and held without trial or charge for writing critical op-eds or accused of participating in legal, nonviolent protests- all protected free speech.

This is a new, brazen criminality that has possessed the Republican Party, infected by Trump and Musk, who are incapable of acting any other way.

The possible silver lining?

The US is far more diverse than Republicans acknowledge. Eventually, the weight of reality has to set in.

It did so for Bain Capital when they tried to pull their vulture shit on Guitar Center, the biggest national music store chain. Because the entire musical instrument business is largely subject to the amount of disposable income musicians have, and because capitalists view and treat musicians as worthless shit and either underpay them or screw them over at every opportunity, Guitar Center was not a delectable corpse for the vultures. Bain lost $2 million dollars almost immediately, and quickly sold them off.

So, removing the profit path is key. At the government level we’re looking at, nothing does that like criminal charges and arrest.

We, as citizens, have to embolden our politicians, courts and law enforcement to fight the criminal behavior of this administration. US Marshalls should have arrested the DOGE workers taking over the Treasury building. Instead, they protected them and ejected the rightful employees.

That, in itself, is criminal, as is every single ICE officer taking part in these abductions. Every person involved with sending those 200-some men to El Salvador has committed a federal crime- kidnapping.

In other words, just because the president or the AG says to do it doesn’t mean it’s legal. They are not, as Trump decreed from on high, the ‘sole arbiters of the law’.

The Constitution, for all of it’s perceived failings, is still the greatest political document ever written, precisely because it lays out a self-balancing structure and allows for improvement as society sees fit.

All of our politicians, FLE, public service personnel and soldiers take an oath to that Constitution, not Trump.

And, per the 14th Amendment, that Constitution and rule of law applies to everyone here, even non-citizens. (Side note- Jesus also meant the Gospels to apply to everyone, not just Jews, and certainly not just Christians, who didn’t exist yet. But, right-wing Christians also seem lost on this.)

Legally, Constitutionally, from a purist, originalist point of view, by the law, the DOJ and the Secret Service are and have always been required to arrest Trump and Musk and every DOGE worker over the already blatantly illegal actions they have taken. Technically, the Secret Service could have arrested Trump upon the first discovery of an illegally-held NDI file back at his resort in Florida.

AG Bondi and FBI director Patel actually owe it to the Constitution and the law to wave the policy of not indicting sitting presidents. It’s not in there, and the Founders most certainly never envisioned allowing a president to take criminal actions from office with impunity.

The Supreme Court owes it to the Constitution to repeal Trump’s immunity and clarify that criminal actions cannot be ‘official’. That violating the Constitution cannot be an official act.

It’s this deference to the individual out of privilege or protocol that is biting us in the ass. It’s why so many are so afraid to take direct action against objectively criminal acts. It’s why the Secret Service ‘didn’t notice’ dozens of boxes of files and check them out. It’s why Republicans are letting Trump rule by fiat. It’s why the FedSoc6 were placed on the SCOTUS, and why every cabinet member has their post- loyalty to ‘dear leader’. They’re just ‘honoring the office’.

Bullshit. It’s a false fairness. Republicans would have gladly arrested Biden if they knew they could make it stick.

Just now, in his second term, in just two months- from treason, via his corrupt submissions to Putin and his offense to our allies, to bribery for his million-dollar dinners at Mar-A-Lardo, to his hawking Teslas on the White House lawn, to illegally placing Musk in charge of secure data with unConstitutional power to destroy departments, blindly fire employees and withhold payments, Trump is one of the most criminal persons in history, let alone a US president.

Our DAs must prosecute the actual crimes coming from Trump and his cronies, our law enforcement must eject and arrest DOGE and protect our civil staff, and our military must refuse to deploy on illegal orders, such as invading an ally or attacking citizens.

They all have the enumerated rights and responsibility to do so.

Everyone from the cabinet down has the right and the duty to say ‘hell no’ to all of this shit.

It’s not rocket surgery.

This criminal wave of vulture politics must be stopped.

A good starting point here may be Wisconsin arresting and charging Musk for the most public instance of election bribery ever seen - offering two $1million checks lottery style to voters who signed a petition and voted for the Republican State Supreme Court candidate. (He lost.) (Susan Crawford won! Yay!)

If enough of us push them to follow the law, maybe those who serve it may be emboldened enough to actually enforce it.

We can only try and hope.

C.2025 Cousin B