In Service of the Donarchy

A veteran was fired from his federal job and Business Insider shared his story.  A few elements are germane to PEUReport:

"...I found myself deciding between two competing job offers:  A Washington, D.C. based government job with the Department of Veterans Affairs and a remote six-figure job with private equity."

It's ironic that this veteran was terminated by Elon Musk's team using the private equity underwriter (PEU) playbook.  The veteran had been fired before.  His VA firing came with no severance and no benefit extension.  

"It seems the government's only job is to serve the best interests of our leaders and if you are not making that happen, you are expendable."

Dng! Ding! Ding!  Johnny, we have a winner!  

What's that, sir?  Yes sir! May I have another personal insult, a dig on my work ethic/competence, possibly more financial harm leading to total ruin?  I'm sorry sir.  Next time I'll say please....

This veteran is being charitable in his assessment:

"...these terminations will eventually slow down the VA's ability to execute services and veterans will suffer."

My experience with a healthcare PEU affiliate showed the takeover/remake impact to be immediate and severe.   Shattered processes with mandatory metrics served executives' incentive compensation and their equity financial interests.  Corporate chiefs cared not one iota about the precipitous fall in patient/caregiver survey scores.  The scores sat there on a wall for all to see, yet no manager said a flipping word.  

Kings and TechGods like smashing things.  

In service of the Donarchy...i.e., best interest of our leaders!

Update 4-2-25:  As courts discern what DOUGEBAG actually is, it appears Musk soon may be leaving Trump's inner sanctum.  

Town Hall Reactions' PEU Roots

Consider these facts in light of citizen anger expressed at town hall meetings over job cuts and the state of the economy:

Around 1 in 15 Americans have a relative who works for the government (federal, state & local).

A 2019 study by Harvard Business School and the University of Chicago found that private equity takeovers resulted in significant job losses, with an average of 4.4% job losses in the two years after a company was bought by private equity.

A report by six progressive nonprofit organizations and workers' advocacy groups stated that more than 1.3 million Americans have lost their jobs in the past decade as a result of private equity ownership in retail.

Flashback to 2011 when a business reporter wrote:

I have seen so many people -- particularly those in their 50s - 70s -- taken apart by what has happened in their industry as greed has hollowed out the economy. These are people took pride in their jobs and held themselves to this invisible standard that we all just took for granted, but is being wiped out. The Carlyle Group scares me more than anything I've ever seen on Wall Street. It seems to exist to corrupt politicians and it's hard to know who they even represent.

Politicians Red and Blue love PEU (private equity underwriters) and increasingly more are one.  

Of course elected officials (sponsored) are surprised by the public resonance with DOGE victims.  The resonance is rooted in prior PEU crap sandwich force-feeding to employees after "new ownership" took over and needed to finance that levered debt mountain.  

Trump II, the digital Caligula, was coronated.  His will be done ....to "harm nearly everyone simultaneously" (with the usual family/friends exception for even more enrichment). 

Update 3-19-25:  Peter Atwater wrote on X:

Forget post-capitalism. We've arrived at what might best be called "Caligulan Capitalism." The grotesqueness is in plain sight.

Chumchilla Sky

Here's the elevator pitch for the first act of the proposed movie Chumchilla Sky:

Donald Trump becomes President of the United States for the second time and being the brash, arrogant, bold, young man drives the economy too hard, swerving from one steep bank of tariffs to another, enriching friends and family by flinging out cash and stock at every turn.  The car's lug nuts begin to loosen under the strain.  His mechanics radio Donald that his raising tariffs even higher will flip the car.  Trump offers the finger and floors the gas.  His model shows the car and economy can take even more.  More he will give it.  

Trump's mechanics radio that his gas tank is nearly empty.  Trump expresses surprise as the tariff banks were supposed to increase gas efficiency, not cost it.  "Who lied to me?"  The mechanics suggested Donald was responsible for his own delusions.  Trump offered a double finger and shifted into the highest gear.  The sportscar (not a Tesla) went airborne eventually crashing abruptly into a bridge abutment.  Donald has severe injuries.  

Trump enters a dreamlike state and wakes to find a representative from Tech Support. 

Sir, there is a contract to sign, that is if you want your optimal image extended.  That really was a hard knock you took back there when the economy crashed.  

His fiction, many others' nightmare. 

Update 3-14-25:  Tech Support has a "God View" capability.  How will Chumchilla Sky star Donald Trump utilize that capability?  How many God's can be in the same room at the same time?

Update 3-17-25:  Keeping Young Donald's life on track takes a lot of Tech Support manhours.

Update 11-25-25:  DOGE is no more.  It did not even fulfill the length of its charter.

Update 4-5-26:  Gas may be more difficult to find for the car in Chumchilla Sky.  DOGE slashed staff at the Energy Department that would have helped the U.S. navigate tricky energy markets in the midst of Trump's/Netanayhu's war of opportunity on Iran.

Sandberg's Law of Aspiration

Bloomberg Law reported Joseph Sanberg has been charged with conspiracy to defraud two investors of $145 million. Sanberg co-founded Aspiration Partners, a climate finance startup, as well as Pt Capital, an Arctic focused private equity underwriter (PEU).  

Sandberg worked with Ibrahim AlHusseini to defraud several investor funds, referred to as A and B in the Justice Department press release.  The pair:

...created fake brokerage account and bank account statements that falsely inflated AlHusseini’s financial assets by between approximately $80 million and $200 million.

That fraudulent documentation was used to assure lenders of a payout if Aspiration defaulted on the loans, which it did.  Investors received no payout after the Spring 2023 default.  

Sanberg is also a team member for the Economic Innovation Group, a bipartisan public policy organization dedicated to forming a more dynamic and inclusive American economy.  Remarkably, the Economic Innovation Group still has his name and bio on their website.

Bipartisan, as in politicians Red and Blue love PEU and increasingly, more are one.  Pt Capital had two Rubensteins as founders.  Alice Rogoff Rubenstein, the former wife of Carlyle Group co-founder David Rubenstein started Pt Capital alongside their daughter Elle, then 25 years old.  

Craig Medred reported:

A one-time best bud of Alaskan Gabrielle “Ellie” Rubenstein, a member of the Permanent Fund Corporation’s board of directors up until last summer, now has a $145 million problem. 

Sanberg is a hard guy to forget if you met him back in the early 2010s when he was selling do-good capitalism, which is what he was doing when I encountered him at the Campbell Lake home of Alice Rogoff, then majority owner of the Alaska Dispatch, an online news operation. 

Sanberg was at Rogoff’s lakeside home with Elle Rubenstein with whom he shared a connection to Harvard University, which both had attended. Rogoff was at the time the estranged wife of David Rubenstein.

That's enough interesting PEU history.  Sandberg's trial will have an outcome, which remains to be seen.

Fabricating fictional documents in the manner Sandberg and AlHusseini is brash and ballsy.  It would be hard to believe that something this extreme could be widespread, but is it?

My wise friend wrote:

How many of these pyramid frauds are out there? Meanwhile, all the key players are running similar books. 

People want to go after the weakest as an excuse to rid the system of the fat, but they don't wanna take a look at what's going on behind the curtain with the Masters of the PEUniverse. All these private companies with sky high valuations and private documentation regarding their debts and investors involved with private marks. Same playbook, one team, two uniforms, threaded with corruption and fraud. Cookie Cutter Operation, difference is scale. 

If you don't think Tesla is playing similar games you have to be out of your mind. Will the domino's fall?  And isn't it funny how all the money and all the high financiers end up near Saudi Arabia? 

Trump and Musk hollowed out the IRS, FBI, SEC and stacked the "Just Us" Department.  Add the push for private markets and private credit, how will any of these misallocations ever be revealed?

What really gets my GOAD is how people view these scenarios as victimless crimes, where a narrative change like the one with SBF currently fomenting which allows his malicious intent and malfeasance to be recreated as the regulator's fault. 

It seems all the people on top are willing to watch people on the bottom suffer with a shrug of their shoulders. The indifference to other peoples problems says a lot about our society.. I think this is what Warren was referring to in his annual meeting with his sentiments on kindness.

Filthy rich is mostly filthy, even when promoted as clean.  It's Sandberg's law of Aspiration....

Real Life: Untrustworthy Implementer of Trusted Tech

The Bipartisan Policy Council is sponsoring an event on "redefining retirement" as Trump's TechGods remake Social Security from the inside.  TechGod Elon Musk heads the Department of Ungodly Greedy Executives Biased Against Government (DOUGEBAG).  

DOUGEBAG Chief/non-Chief Elon Musk told Larry Kudlow.  

...that’s the big one to eliminate.

Musk is talking about the amount of fraud in Social Security but experts call his numbers fictional and grossly overstated.  So massive cuts will lop off critical portions of the program, risking its very survival.  Ooops, killed it!

Elon calls himself "Tech Support" while experimenting with critical government programs using the latest and greatest tech tools.

The Global Tech Security Commission has that as its very mission.

Devise a blueprint for how companies, countries, civil society organizations, and individuals must collaborate in new and necessary ways on an imperative with ever-increasing geopolitical significance: advancing freedom through trusted tech.

The Commission is clearly bipartisan, like the one serving up our predictable retirement to private equity underwriters (PEU).   What happens if our retirement is turned over to a greedy PEU?

What happens if a country is being reinvented by an untrustworthy TechGod?  The freedoms are stacking up, freedom to fund your retirement, pay for your healthcare and take orders from machines operated by machines.  

We find ourselves inside some TechGod billionaire's video-game government simulation, birthed to life by Trump II, the digital Caligula.  Social Security is being rewritten.  Who will survive the "Redefinded Retirement" Coliseum cage match?  Very few.....

Redefining Retirement: It's All Theirs

Corporate chiefs, elected officials and political insiders will gather Wednesday in Washington, D.C. to talk about people saving for their own retirement.  And who wants in on your retirement money?  Private equity underwriters (PEU).

How do the sponsors of the retirement summit feel about private equity?  BlackRock considers it a core holding.

For the Bipartisan Policy Center I started with their board of directors.  

The first person I picked was Karen Dunn Kelley.  She is currently a director for JP Morgan Private Markets Fund, which focuses on private equity.

The man to Ms. Kelley's left is former MetLife Chair Robert Henrickson.  Consider his 2006 testimony to a special Senate Committee on Aging:

In the case of Social Security, longevity risk is transferred to the social system. In traditional pension plans, longevity risk is transferred to the plan. On his or her own, an individual can pool the risk by turning to an insurance company. 

Today, most Americans realize their employer will not be providing them with a guaranteed monthly paycheck for life. Forced by competitive realities, many employers are discontinuing defined benefit pensions, sometimes exchanging them for 401(k)s. The reality is that the defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s have become the primary retirement vehicle, and that is just for people who have employment-based retirement plans. 

But 401(k)s, while popular, have not yet proved to be successful if success is measured by their ability to generate adequate income for a generation of retirees. As the burden of retirement has increasingly shifted to the individual, we now are asking individuals to do something that they have never done before--fund and finance the rest of their lives.

That was 2006 when PEUs were just ramping up affiliate buyouts, sending jobs to China and dismantling pensions.  

A 2023 study showed private equity ownership results in pension plan changes, including:

Following a private equity buyout, defined benefit pension plans are more likely to be frozen or terminated. Regarding the actuarial assumption the pension characteristics, the study author found an increase in the pension liability discount rate and decreases in the projected benefit obligations (PBO), pension assets, and contributions, but did not find significant effects on funding ratio. Additionally, the author found that investment strategies for these plans become riskier, with a higher allocation to equities and lower allocations to cash, government securities, insurance accounts, and mutual funds.

Irony?  PEU boys bathe themselves in "first responder" pension funds as a defense to releasing the slightest bit of information about their offerings and methods of operation.  Yet, they frequently cut the retirement benefit after they take over companies.

A 2024 interview showed a portion of the dance between insurance companies and private equity:

...we see life insurance companies investing in private equity for different reasons. As I mentioned earlier, investment in private equity has been growing significantly over the past 10 years, and one of the main drivers for this would be the low interest rate environment.

A different angle of that same dance shows PEUs considering life and annuities as permanent capital and acquiring books of policies or reinsuring them.

The bipartisan push to open up retirement accounts to private equity and its inbred cousin, private credit, can be seen in various new products, which are coming forward as the SEC has fewer financial cops on the beat:

State Street partnered with Apollo to offer a private credit ETF.  I'm not sure how you fairly price a long term debt obligation on a daily basis.  But the good news?  Democratization!

It's hard to see democracy being furthered in this picture, unless Goldie the dog is getting the right to vote. 

Redefining Retirement is two days away.  We'll see how it turns out, especially as politicians Red and Blue love PEU and increasingly, more are one.  

Update 3-11-25:  Reports suggest the PEU boys were at Social Security alongside the DOUGEBAG team (Department of Ungodly Greedy Executives Biased Against Government):  Jesse offered:

The character of the American political scene is eerily reminiscent of 20th century of authoritarianism, as the purveyors of oligarchy become increasingly audacious.

It appears the Insane Red Team wishes to break Social Security, privatize it and put citizens at risk for their own retirement.  Musk said of Social Security fraud:

"That's the big one to eliminate."

His big one is based on fictional fraud, so major cuts will endanger the program.  I better register my dog to vote so they can never vote for a Republican.

And by the way, the SEC approved a Blackstone Private Credit Fund for retail investors.  

Update 4-6-25:  "Is the flow of toxic waste pouring from busted private equity portfolios into credit trades a threat to insurance companies? Yup."

PEU Family Dynasties

Private Equity Insights reported former British Prime Minister David Cameron joined Jeb Bush's family at Finback Investment Partners, a private equity underwriter (PEU) focused on insurance brokerage, data centers and software.  

The Bush Presidential dynasty, father George H. W. Bush and son George W. Bush, held positions with The Carlyle Group, a politically connected PEU.  Jeb Bush is a serial PEU founder.  His last two firms included his son as co-founder.

British Prime Ministers also found PEU employment post public service.

Politicians Red and Blue love PEU and increasingly, more are one.  TechGods copied the PEU playbook by sponsoring politicians for access to Uncle Sam's wallet.  That this "greed/politics marriage" has gone on so long should be a disturbing sign to common folk.

TechGods are more direct, not as secretive and far less patient than their PEU brethren.  There is cross pollination between the two groups.  Jeb's Finbeck Investment Partners has a high tech focus with data centers and software.  Also, Finbeck founder Jack Oliver advises TechGod Joe Lonsdale's 8vc and TechGod Alex Karp's Palantir.   

Greed and leverage is as greed and leverage does....  Unfortunately, it's far more pervasive and invasive than it once was.  For that, we suffer.

Update 12-6-25:  TechGod Joe Lonsdale said he wants to invest in Iran.  Joe must be studying under the mullahs given his desire for public executions done by masculine leadership.  

It's imperative to use all that information obtained from spying on U.S. citizens.  Otherwise Uncle Sam may quit paying the TechGods billions.