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The financialization of America.

Companies aren’t really there for generating profit through producing actual goods and services, but to be stripped down to their cores for quick bucks to be made.

In the context of the Streaming Wars, this process was accelerated by the takeover of Hollywood by Silicon Valley tech management culture:

It became clear in Hollywood boardrooms that Silicon Valley was making a play for its business. Having disrupted the music industry, books, travel, banking, taxis — you know the list by now — the Valley came for Tinseltown. Netflix was deploying the tech-sector playbook of high debt, rapid growth and cheap acquisition of existing commodities that can then be repurposed and traded at a higher margin. Plus lots of algorithms. This didn’t worry legacy Hollywood as long as Netflix was just showing its old movies. But House of Cards . . .  this felt like an ambush.

Then, as these streaming/media companies are drown in debt, the private equity firms (aka the “corporate raiders”) like Bain Capital, Apollo, Blackstone, KKR, etc. are the barbarians waiting at the gates on the other side, using leveraged buyout to acquire their assets to be further stripped off (known as “restructuring”) and for employees to be further laid off for cost-cutting measures. After hollowing out as much as they could, the private equity firms will then “exit” successfully and making huge profits off it, while the media companies built up over the past decades will be left saddled with debt that are impossible to be paid off.

This is not just happening in Hollywood, obviously, but across every sector in America. This is the future that awaits America, and it is far too late to reverse course at this point. Check out this article for a brief overview of how “private equity billionaires are looting the country, leaving everyday Americans to clean up the mess—and fight for the scraps.”

This aversion to stricter regulation of private equity means its dominance will only grow, says Appelbaum, and so will cutting costs and corners and jobs to extract financial gain. The evidence can be seen in small inconveniences: the decision by a PE-owned hospital, for instance, to buy the cheapest, roughest paper towels for nurses who wash their hands dozens of times a day. Or in broader indignities: a PE-owned ­hospice care company that provides fewer visits to dying patients by medical assistants who are cheaper to employ, but for whom the company can bill Medicare the same amount as for a visit by a nurse. And then there is life-altering damage: medical bills that gut family finances all because private equity firms have bought up so much of the health care sector that they can charge virtually anything.

“Right now, they can do whatever they want,” Appelbaum says. “And that means quality of life deteriorates for everybody.”

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I thought the one thing these ghouls were supposed to be good at was making money

Well, yes, someone somewhere out there are walking away from this with a lot of money.