Rope-Selling Capitalists

One of the links in today's "Stop the Steal" post takes you to a video about $400M paid to Dominion by China that contained a bit of information that was like a blast from the past for me. 

In bed with the Chicoms is the "private equity firm" The Carlyle Group, "access capitalists" trading on government connections to buy out businesses and strip their carcasses and line their pockets in the process. We're talking guys like co-founder/co-executive chair David Rubenstein, who among other things is chairman of the CFR.

I saw firsthand the effects of their practices when I was working for Magnavox Electronic Systems Company's California holding producing policies, procedures, and operations media for administrative, engineering, production, and quality departments in its defense contracting and commercial business segments. The whole shebang was owned by the Dutch (Philips North American). Carlyle came in and bought the place out and sold it two years later for over twice what they paid for it.

By the time new owner Hughes sold it to Raytheon (for the technology, not the people), I was one of the last 14 people closing the place down -- a location that had consisted of over 3,000 employees and a four-building campus when I first started working there in 1981 (I told the story of my sad task of disposing of the technical library several years back:

I had no choice but to throw much out. And because I did not even understand much of what I was destroying, I felt guilty, deeply ashamed, like a stupid Eloi allowing the knowledge of the ages to crumble into dust, or worse, one of the torchers at Alexandria...

That was nothing compared to the lives disrupted, people who had worked there for decades and who were attached in so many ways besides economic. And in fairness, I also have to mention that management was largely comprised of short-sighted dolts (with a few notable exceptions). These guys were ground floor GPS and they blew it.

This, of course, doesn't mean I'm suddenly going all weepy Luddite and socialist, just that when we're talking insiders with this degree of connection with those in domestic and international politics, we're hardly talking pure capitalism, but something more along the lines of economic fascism. This leads to the heart of The Swamp, and here we find their country be damned as long as the Chicoms make it profitable.

I went looking through some of my old boxes to see if I still had a graphic I manually put together, back in the days before Photoshop, to the amusement of some of my colleagues, that would have certainly gotten me fired had one of the humorless higher-ups seen it.

UPDATE: Figures Glenn Youngkin was leading the Big Club.