Private Equity

In the old days, when men like me ruled the alleys and markets, our sins wore no disguise. We dealt in blood and debt, yes, but it was our blood, our debt. A man borrowed from us, he knew the weight of the coin. He knew the price. And when the reckoning came, we looked him in the eye. We took what was owed, no more, no less. And even in ruin, a man could stand. His family still ate. His neighbors still worked. The street still lived. Our cruelty had limits. Our brutality had purpose.

But these private equity filth? They are cowards in suits, butchers without blades. They don’t need to soil their hands, they let paper do the cutting. They buy a company like a wolf circles a wounded deer: not to strengthen it, not to honor its craft or its people, but to feed. They load it with debt, debt the company never asked for, debt it can never escape. Then they tear it apart, piece by piece, selling the bones, the skin, the marrow, until nothing is left but an empty shell and the echo of what once was.

They slit the throat of pensions, steal the futures of men who gave their lives to the work. They shutter factories, hollow out towns, turn proud workers into beggars. And when the ruin is complete, when there is nothing left to take, they vanish. No accountability. No consequences. Just another trophy on their wall, another fortune wrung from the suffering of strangers.

They are parasites, nothing more. And worse, they are celebrated. Toasted at banquets. Praised in the press. Called genius, innovators, visionaries. Visionaries? I’ll tell you their vision: a world of ash, where nothing is made, nothing is built, only stolen. A world where honor is a punchline, and men like us, the old wolves who lived by a code, are called the criminals.

But at least our sins were honest. These men? They rot the world from within, and they do it with a smile, with a handshake, with a signature. And that, to me, is the most unforgivable crime of all.