PRIVATE EQUITY IS DESTROYING THE FABRIC OF AMERICA

As I sit here at 69 and look back over my life, I keep asking myself the same question: When did America begin changing so quickly against the middle class?

For much of the past 100 years, American companies understood that making a profit was important, but it was not their only responsibility. A successful company depended upon its employees, customers, reputation, and community.

Companies trained people, promoted from within, rewarded loyalty, and tried to retain experienced employees. Many workers stayed with the same employer for decades because they believed that if they worked hard and remained loyal, the company would show some loyalty to them in return.

This was the America I grew up in—the country where I built my career, raised my family, and created my own wealth. It rewarded hard work, loyalty, personal responsibility, and the willingness to take risks. I am not talking about some imaginary perfect time. I lived it, and I know how much opportunity it gave ordinary people who were willing to work for it.

That system was never perfect, but at least there was a relationship between the company and its people.

Employee stock ownership and stock options were also more common. Regular working people were given an opportunity to own part of the company they were helping to build. Many employees became millionaires—not because they were executives or Wall Street investors, but because they worked for a successful company, stayed with it, and shared in its growth.

When employees owned stock in their company, they had a personal interest in its future. If the company did well, everyone had the opportunity to benefit.

Today, meaningful employee ownership is becoming a thing of the past. The executives and investors receive the stock, options, and financial rewards, while the employees doing the actual work receive a paycheck and are expected to be grateful that they still have a job.

Then private equity arrives, and the relationship becomes even colder.

Private equity firms do not necessarily buy companies because they believe in their employees, products, customers, or communities. They buy them because they see an opportunity to extract more money from them.

A company that may have taken generations to build becomes another asset in an investment portfolio.

The private equity firm looks for “efficiencies.” That sounds harmless enough, but we all know what it often means: fewer employees, reduced benefits, lower staffing levels, higher prices, cheaper materials, more debt, less customer service, and greater pressure on everyone who remains.

The goal is frequently not to build a company that will still be healthy and respected 50 years from now. The goal is to increase its financial value, produce returns for investors, and eventually sell it.

What happens to the employees, customers, and community afterward becomes someone else’s problem.

That is the difference between stewardship and extraction.

Stewardship means taking responsibility for what has been placed in your hands. It means making a profit while also protecting the employees, customers, reputation, culture, and future of the organization.

Extraction means taking as much value as possible while you control it and leaving the consequences behind for someone else.

Private equity will argue that it makes businesses more efficient. In some cases, that may be true. Some companies need better management, modernization, and financial discipline. But when efficiency becomes the only measurement of success, people are reduced to numbers and communities become disposable.

The company culture that took decades to build can disappear in a few months.

We see it happening in small and medium-sized businesses across the country. A locally owned company may have spent generations building its reputation. The owners knew their employees, customers, suppliers, and community. Their names were attached to the business, so its reputation meant something personal to them.

After it is purchased by a large investment group, decisions may be made from an office hundreds or thousands of miles away by people who have never visited the town, met the employees, or spoken with a customer.

In a global economy, the problem becomes even greater when the ultimate owners are located outside the United States. Profits created by American workers and supported by American customers can be transferred to investors in another country.

Those owners do not live beside the factory they close. They do not send their children to the local schools. They do not depend upon the local economy, and they will never have to look an employee in the eye after eliminating the job that supported that person’s family.

When ownership becomes that distant, responsibility can disappear along with it.

We also see it in healthcare. Hospitals, medical practices, emergency departments, nursing homes, dental offices, and other healthcare services are increasingly viewed as investment opportunities.

When the people controlling healthcare are financially removed from the patients receiving it, care can become a numbers game: fewer employees, shorter appointments, more tests, higher charges, and constant pressure to generate more revenue.

The patient is no longer simply a person who needs care. The patient becomes a source of income.

That may help explain why some medical practices seem so eager to order one screening test after another—not always because the patient falls into a high-risk group, but because every additional service produces another bill for the insurance company to pay.

When a healthcare organization is measured primarily by how much revenue it produces, the financial incentive can shift from providing the care a patient truly needs to providing every service the system can profitably bill.

Doctors themselves may not be the problem. Many entered medicine because they genuinely wanted to help people. But they are increasingly working inside systems controlled by executives, investors, insurance companies, and financial targets.

The person sitting in the examination room may no longer be the doctor’s only concern. Somewhere in the background, there is also a corporation watching the numbers.

We see the same attitude entering education and job training. Students become customers. Tuition and fees rise, debt follows young people for decades, and schools become more focused on enrollment and revenue than on whether students receive an education worth what they paid for it.

We see it in housing. Homeownership was once considered one of the foundations of American independence. Government policy encouraged people to marry, raise families, buy homes, and put down roots in their communities.

A family that owned its home had a stake in the neighborhood, the schools, and the future of the community. Homeownership created stability, independence, and generational wealth. It helped ordinary working people enter and remain in the middle class.

Today, working families may find themselves competing for houses against billion-dollar investment firms that can buy homes quickly, pay cash, and purchase entire groups of properties.

When institutional investors control more housing, families remain renters longer. Instead of building equity for themselves and their children, they send monthly payments to distant corporations and investors.

A house is no longer viewed primarily as a place for a family to build a life. It becomes another investment class.

How is a young couple trying to save a down payment supposed to compete against that?

We also see growing corporate control over energy, communications, entertainment, banking, and technology. These services have become almost impossible to avoid, yet control over them continues to become concentrated among fewer and more powerful companies.

Can you live without a smartphone today? Technically, yes. Practically, it is becoming almost impossible.

Banking, shopping, employment, healthcare, travel, entertainment, and even grocery-store discounts are being pushed onto corporate-controlled apps and platforms.

Convenience has slowly become dependence.

Every subscription, service fee, digital coupon, automatic payment, and financing charge takes another small piece of our income. One charge may not seem important, but put all of them together and they represent a massive transfer of money from ordinary families to corporations and investors.

Then there is debt.

Young people are offered credit cards carrying interest rates of 20%, 25%, and even 30%, along with late charges, penalties, and hidden fees. Banks and lenders have discovered how profitable dependency and financial inexperience can be.

The rates and fees charged legally today would have once been associated with loan sharks. Mafia members must be rolling over in their graves after seeing what banks and lenders are now allowed to charge with a straight face.

Meanwhile, inflation steadily weakens our savings. Corporate fees consume more of our income. Housing becomes less affordable. Healthcare becomes more expensive. Wages struggle to keep pace.

Working people are then told that the answer is simply to work harder, save more, and invest their way out of a system designed to take a piece of their money at nearly every turn.

This is how the wealth gap continues to grow.

Ordinary people do the work, pay the rent, buy the products, carry the debt, pay the insurance premiums, and support the businesses. Meanwhile, a smaller group of investors continues accumulating an ever-larger share of the homes, companies, land, healthcare systems, and wealth of the country.

The future is frightening because this is about far more than private equity making large profits. It is about what happens when nearly every part of American life is managed according to the same philosophy.

What happens when our employers, hospitals, nursing homes, schools, utilities, apartment buildings, local businesses, and houses are all treated primarily as financial assets?

Who is thinking about what these institutions will look like 20 or 50 years from now?

Who is protecting the employees who spent their lives building them?

Who is protecting the communities that depend upon them?

Who is protecting the next generation’s opportunity to own something, build something, and live independently?

Private equity did not create every problem in America, and not every private equity investment ends badly. But its growing influence represents a dangerous change in our values.

We are replacing stewardship with extraction, long-term stability with short-term profit, employee ownership with investor control, and local responsibility with distant financial management.

At 69, I raise these questions not because I am defeated. I raise them because I want younger generations to recognize what is happening before it is too late.

We need an economy that rewards companies for investing in their employees and communities—not just for cutting jobs and reducing costs. We need to encourage employee stock ownership again so that regular working people can share in the wealth they help create.

We need to protect homeownership from institutional domination, restore real competition, enforce reasonable consumer protections, and stop allowing essential services such as healthcare and education to become machines built primarily to extract profit.

Individuals should also do everything possible to maintain control over their own lives: own a home if they can, avoid high-interest debt, reduce unnecessary subscriptions, protect their health, save aggressively, and support responsible local businesses.

But individual responsibility alone cannot solve a problem this large.

A working family cannot compete fairly against a billion-dollar investment fund without laws and policies that recognize the importance of families, workers, homeownership, competition, and strong communities.

America became prosperous because people built things they expected to last: companies, careers, homes, families, neighborhoods, and institutions.

If we allow every one of those things to be purchased, stripped down, monetized, and resold, we may eventually discover that we sold off the very foundation of our country.

The question is no longer whether big money and private equity are gaining control over more areas of our lives. They clearly are.

The real question is: How much more will we allow them to take before we finally decide that our country, our communities, our families, and our independence are not for sale?