The rise of politically connected private equity underwriters (PEU) resulted in policy making billionaires who kept their preferred "carried interest" taxation despite regular challenges over the last fifteen years.
ZeroHedge reported:
... the US is already effectively a banana republic if one defines such a nation as one which has a small but ultra-powerful and unaccountable kleptocracy which gets richer year after year by stealing from the rapidly shrinking middle class.
Yahoo News reported the view of a former Trump NSC analyst:
‘This is not the America I came to. This is not the America we chose to come to,’” she recounted. “Many people fled these kinds of authoritarian or autocratic regimes ... where you have kleptocratic cliques of cronies who are really trying to take charge of policy, and that’s what this [deep polarization] is about.
The College Entry scandal included a private equity underwriter
...defense lawyers argued that the parents were simply playing by the rules of a rigged system as they understood them.
The greed and leverage boys know how to rig a system. The common citizen, like the average college applicant, is not winning.
Update 10-11-21: KKR's remaining founders Henry Kravis and George Roberts have stepped down as co-CEOs of the PEU giant and will serve as co-Chairman of KKR's board.