Charles Hugh Smith discusses how the Air Force cannibalizes to keep the illusion of a fully functional Flightline. He also shows what’s being done to the American healthcare system through this hollowing out. You’ll undoubtedly learn something from the article. This general definition is offered. (Bold in the original.)

Cannibalize is an interesting word. It is a remarkably graphic way to describe the self-inflicted destruction of a system by stripping previously functional subsystems to sustain the illusion of system functionality.

Wall street does this all the time. Investors don’t care if a company does it because the stock price keeps rising for a time. More often, they sell the lower profit-producing business units first. But sometimes, in an act of cannibalistic suicide, they will sell the money makers and bankrupt the company. This point is well taken.

An enterprise maintains a substantial cash position even as it loses money every quarter by quietly selling off its most valuable assets. This maintains the illusion of financial strength even as the enterprise is being hollowed out.

With some tactical variation, this is more or less what Cerberus Capital Management did to Remington. The Cerberus web page touts: ” Your partner to improve performance and drive value. Learn how Cerberus creates an edge for our investors and business partners worldwide.” Uh-huh?

Turning small-scale, localized finance into centralized / globalized hyper-financialization cannibalizes finance to benefit the few with unlimited access to credit, leverage and monopoly. First you borrow vast sums at low rates of interest that are inaccessible to mere mortals, take a corporation private, indebt the company and use the funds to accumulate mountains of derivatives that leverage the debt 10-fold or even 100-fold, then take the corporation public again, goose the stock and then cash out all the leveraged gains.

The newly public company has been stripmined of core assets and burdened by debt. The financiers cannibalized the corporation to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else with a stake in the business and the future viability of the enterprise.

Food is also discussed.

Highly processed products are simulacra of food that hijack our hardwired pleasure responses to heavy concentrations of salt, sweets, fat and spice and crunchy/chewy mouthfeel. The nutritional content of these products is so low and the fat-salt-sugar content so high that they are severely damaging to health on multiple levels.

The unwary consumer who stuffs themselves with these simulacra of food (shall we call it “fud”?) feels full even as their body and brain are starved for real nutritional content and real-food fiber.

A high sugar intake means gaining weight in fat. But few understand that anything that tastes like food but delivers minimal nutrition makes people fat. The reason is that your body releases enzymes and other chemical reactions to process the food; your digestive system then looks for particular nutrients found in the food based on that taste. But, with processed food, the nutrients aren’t there, so your body ‘thinks’ that something is wrong with its ability to absorb nutrients, so it starts packing on fat. Before processed foods, this is an excellent function for the body to have. In lean years and drought, this functionality ensures the body can make it through seasons, or a year, of low-quality foodstuffs until a better harvest. Lean times may well be approaching. Understanding how your digestive system is supposed to work may come in handy.

The linked article also appeared at WRSA.

New York Times:

By choosing to place Remington in a Southern state, Press was acknowledging how much the gun business had transformed. Historically, gun makers operated in the North, in New England’s “Gun Valley” or, like Remington, in upstate New York. Smith & Wesson and Colt were established in the 1850s by businessmen in Massachusetts and Connecticut, respectively. During the Civil War, arsenals in Massachusetts furnished huge quantities of firearms to the Union Army. But social mores had changed.  The year that Michael Press sent his letters, New York passed the SAFE Act, one of the nation’s most stringent gun-control measures. Battle summarized to me the message the law sent to gunmakers: “If you like guns,” he said, “then you need to go somewhere else.”

There was a secondary benefit. Composed entirely of “right to work” states, the South allowed employees in unionized shops to opt out of paying dues, effectively guaranteeing that any union encountered by Remington would be worse-funded, and therefore less powerful, than a counterpart in the North. At Remington’s factory in Ilion, N.Y., employees had health care and long-term contracts thanks to the United Mine Workers of America. They were difficult to fire, and they stuck together. In some cases, multiple generations of men in the same family had worked on the line. “That union,” a former Remington executive told me disdainfully, “had them by the balls.”

[ … ]

In exchange for tens of millions in incentives, Remington had only to commit to a few terms, laid out in a fat document called a development agreement. First, it had to hire enough employees every year so that, in 2021, it would have a local work force of 1,868. Second, starting immediately, it had to pay those employees a minimum average hourly wage of $19.50, rising to $20.19 in 2017. All parties signed.

[ … ]

The dream was lofty and ambitious, and Huntsville was only a piece of it. Cerberus had been trying for years to assemble a dominant American gun company. First, in 2006, it purchased Bushmaster, known for its AR-15-style rifles. Then it paid $118 million in cash for Remington and assumed the company’s debt. Other acquisitions followed, until by 2013, 18 businesses were rolled up together under Cerberus’s roof. One of Kollitides’s jobs was to oversee the necessary layoffs. In Ilion, where Remington has operated for 191 years on the same site — unfinished weapons had to travel from one brick building to the next — 231 people lost their jobs.  There were 160 layoffs at Montana Rifleman in Kalispell, Mont. The Advanced Armament Corporation, a manufacturer of suppressors and silencers, closed its plant in Georgia, and 68 people were let go from D.P.M.S. Panther Arms in St. Cloud, Minn.; 65 from Para USA in Pineville, N.C. What remained was to increase profit margins by combining all these scattered production lines into a single megafactory.

[ … ]

There was, however, a hidden, vaguely mysterious quirk of the company’s finances. In 2012, more or less in the middle of the best climate for gun makers in a generation, America’s oldest continually operating manufacturer abruptly, and for no easily discernible reason, borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars. When the company came to Alabama, it owed $828 million to its creditors. While this number, compared with the company’s earnings, represented a comfortable ratio on the balance sheet, it was nonetheless curious. The debt could conceivably have been explained by the cost of opening a new factory were it not for the fact that Remington got its factory free.

[ … ]

He was hired, the executive explained, as the plant was coming online, and he was tasked with wrangling together some scattered acquisitions. The business was, according to him, “in shambles.” It seemed that the companies Cerberus had moved to Alabama had been “bought and forgot.” He explained that he was “a realist” about business, a game in which not everyone gets “a shiny rose at the end,” but even so he sensed that something had gone deeply wrong. Executives were fired at a fast clip. Line employees came and went. Parts piled up on the factory floor. Most worrying, Cerberus, which was trying to integrate disparate brands — the father-son pastoralism of Remington with the urban-militia aesthetic of AAC, for instance — seemed to him miserly when it came to marketing. “The decisions were all about: Where can I save another dime?” he told me.

Despite all this frenzy, he was certain that Cerberus had somehow made a great deal of money on Remington even before opening the Huntsville factory. According to him, Cerberus had made “hundreds of millions of dollars” almost immediately. “They pulled out all that money up front, took as much cash as they could.”

“How?” I said.

He squinted cryptically. “They get their money.”

I realized he didn’t know. I went back and reread Remington’s public filings. It was obvious when the debt appeared, in 2012. What wasn’t clear was where the money went. I showed the filings to a professor of finance. He said it looked as if Cerberus had wound up in debt to itself. “Seems like they did something stupid,” he said. “But that can’t be right, because they’re not stupid.”

I asked Gustavo Schwed, a professor of private equity at New York University who spent 24 years in the industry, to help me review the documents. Schwed pored over the many years of financial data and located two separate debt transactions, one of which was so esoteric I would never even have known to look for it. Together, these transactions explained not just the mysterious 2012 loan but, indirectly, the way the deal finally unraveled.

In order to buy Remington, Cerberus, as most private-equity firms would, created a new entity, a holding company. Instead of Cerberus buying a gun company, Cerberus put money into the holding company, and the holding company bought Remington. The entities were related but — and this was crucial — each could borrow money independently. In 2010, Cerberus had the holding company borrow $225 million from an undisclosed group of lenders, most likely hedge funds. Because this loan was risky — the lenders would be paid only if Remington made a lot of money or was sold — the holding company offered a generous interest rate of around 11 percent, much higher than a typical corporate loan.  When the interest payments were due, the holding company paid them not in cash but with paid-in-kind notes, that is, with more debt. These are known as PIK notes.

The holding company now had $225 million in borrowed cash. Cerberus, meanwhile, owned most of the shares of the holding company’s stock, basically slips of paper they acquired when they created the holding company. The handoff happened next: The holding company spent most of the $225 million buying back its own stock, effectively transferring all the borrowed cash to Cerberus. Cerberus would keep that money no matter what. Meanwhile Remington continued rolling along as though nothing had happened, because Remington itself was not responsible for the holding company’s debt.  Remington was just an “operating company” that the holding company owned, something that allowed the holding company to borrow money, the way you would take a necklace to a pawnshop. These were garden-variety maneuvers in a private-equity buyout. In the trade, this is called “financial engineering.” People get degrees in it.

In April 2012, Cerberus did something fateful, which probably seemed smart at the time. It had Remington borrow hundreds of millions of dollars and use it to buy the holding company’s debt, effectively transferring responsibility for the principal and the interest payments onto Remington. America’s oldest gun company now owed the money that Cerberus had used to pay itself back for having bought the company in the first place. There were plenty of sensible reasons to do this. Gun sales were high, and the debt that Remington took out was cheaper to service than the paid-in-kind debt.

But there was a catch. Because the operating company borrowed the money with a normal loan — and not with PIK notes — interest payments were required in cash. Suddenly Remington was carrying hundreds of millions of dollars in debt that, if it could not be paid, would cause the business to go bankrupt.

By the time the factory opened in Huntsville, the various players stood in vastly different positions. The private-equity firm had made back its initial investment and was playing with house money. Remington owed hundreds of millions that it hadn’t borrowed. And its workers, urgently, had to make a lot of guns.

[ … ]

For Cerberus’s executives, the predicament was like being bitten by a trusted pet. Cerberus has a habit of hiring power brokers from the United States government, many of them prominent Republicans. The former vice president Dan Quayle became chairman of Cerberus Global Investments in 1999; the former Treasury secretary John W. Snow joined Cerberus seven years later. The Republican donor William Richter is a founder. Since May 2018, Feinberg has been a member of Trump’s Intelligence Advisory Board, an independent entity created to advise the president on national-security matters. But if Obama was the best, Trump was proving to be the worst gun salesman of all time. Magnifying his negative impact, gun makers had already ramped up production ahead of Hillary Clinton’s expected victory: In 2017 the market was choked with surplus product, and Trump’s Second Amendment enthusiasm was dousing any hope of a panic buy.

Remington executives arranged a meeting with their creditors. They calmly explained the situation. Remington had been loaded with debt; now it couldn’t pay the interest. After listening politely, the banks made a proposal: They would exchange the money they were owed for an ownership stake in Remington, a so-called Chapter 11 bankruptcy or “debt-for-equity swap.” This arrangement would allow Remington to stay running, albeit under distant ownership, until a plan could be drawn up for its future, such as a sale or a liquidation of assets.

And that, folks, is how it’s done.  You hire the connected suits and elitists to the BOD, make shady deals, hide the debt, gamble on what’s going to happen in the future, and hope for the best.  When the best doesn’t happen, you shaft the working man, who has already shafted you by forming unions and making it too expensive to do business to begin with.

Because American has lost its soul.  It has exchanged the Puritan work ethic, the pride of working hard, making a good product or providing a needful service to others, and supporting your family through these means, for high stakes gambling where people get hurt and lives get ruined.

Gambling is a Luciferian project.  It’s wicked, because only God knows the future because He has decreed it.  He has ordered us not to engage in divination, prophesies, witchcraft, crystal balls, palm reading, tea leaves, astrology and other manner of superstition and paganism.  The Wall Street suits are just dressed up heathens with bones sticking through body parts, dancing around fires and bowing to totem poles.

It serves Ceberus right.  I’m sorry for the folks in Huntsville, Alabama.  They didn’t deserve this.

The deep state is putting its players in place and defenestrating the threats.  Regular readers know what we’re talking about when we say the “deep state.”  We don’t mean whatever idiot Bill Kristol thinks it means.  Nor does it mean what this Breitbart author thinks it means.

Those “deep state” officials include the intelligence, law-enforcement and national security officials who worked in President Barack Obama’s administration but who are still working in permanent or temporary positions in the White House and in surrounding agencies. Many of those officials are believed to be leaking information from within the White House to allies in the anti-Trump media, including Kristol.

That’s a children’s bedtime book version of the deep state.  Regular readers know that the deep state means DynCorp, the CIA, portions of the FBI and DHS, much of the State Department, some local LEOs who have previously worked for DynCorp, former generals, The Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative, and some others, involved in money laundering, nation toppling, child and organ trafficking, oil trafficking, weapons trafficking, assassinations, and other wicked things to enrich the already wealthy and bring them more power.

Donald Trump was clearly in a war with the deep state and their mouthpiece, the MSM, during most or all of his presidential campaign.  He has lost the war.

Donald Trump has asked a New York billionaire to conduct a review of U.S. intelligence agencies and other aspects of the federal government, current and former officials told NBC News.

Trump’s expected appointment of Steve Feinberg, co-founder and chief executive of Cerberus Capital Management, is causing consternation inside the intelligence agencies, former senior intelligence officials say.

A senior administration official says Feinberg still needs to be cleared by the Office of Government Ethics, which is complicated because Cerberus owns many different companies, some of which have financial relationships with the U.S. government.

But there were indications Thursday that Trump’s plans could be changing.

Current and former intelligence officials told NBC News that Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence, Sen. Dan Coats of Indiana, was annoyed that the news of Feinberg’s role was breaking before Coats’s Senate confirmation, expected next week.

Asked at a White House news conference if Feinberg would conduct an intelligence review, Trump said, “I think that we are going to be able to straighten it out very easily on its own.”

Trump called Feinberg “a very talented man, very successful man,” and said, “he’s offered his services and you know, it’s something we may take advantage of.”

One former official, who speaks regularly to current senior officials, called Feinberg’s expected role an “extra-constitutional process,” and said Trump believes the intelligence community “needs to be threshed and cleaned and bent to the will of the executive.”

It does, and I’ll bet Feinberg “offered his services.”  But this won’t bend the intelligence community to the will of anyone but the deep state.

Folks, Feinberg is DynCorp, DynCorp is the CIA, the State Department is the political wing of the CIA, and through the JTTF and Fusion Centers, the CIA has infiltrated the DHS, FBI and local law enforcement.  DynCorp has been the hinge pin neck deep in nation toppling in North Africa and grabbing of the resources that became available after the nations of Libya and Syria degenerated into chaos.

Trump will be coopted or molded, or intelligence will be completely hidden from him.  Either way, he will be neutered.  The deep state has won.  We always knew that Trump only gave us more time, not a real change.  Make use of that time.  Regular readers know what to do with that time.

As for Cerberus Capital – which Feinberg owns, my previous articles on Cerberus pointed to a bit of puzzlement on why this conglomerate wanted to buy up firearms manufacturers.  At the time I thought it was a bad idea for small firearms companies to sell to conglomerates like Cerberus, and I said so.  But I hadn’t mentally connected the dots between Feinberg and firearms manufacturers.  Well, I have now.

As best as I can tell, Cerberus still owns Remington, Bushmaster, DPMS, Marlin, Para USA and other companies.  At one time, since Para is located near me, I offered to drive to their offices and interview workers, management, or whomever, take some pictures of guns, discuss their gunsmithing and write a post to promote their work.  I was considering buying a Para USA 1911.

The reaction from Para USA was nothing short of creepy and weird.  “No.  We don’t do that.  Please see our web site.”  It was like no communication I’ve ever had with a firearms manufacturer, and I’ve had more than I can count.  Now that I understand Feinberg and his secrecy, it makes better sense.

Readers can make up their own minds about Cerberus, but I won’t be buying any firearms from them (Freedom Group).  It’s my little way of starving the beast since I will be accountable for all of my actions before a sovereign God, but it won’t be enough.  What?  You didn’t think that those hundreds of millions of dollars that supposedly went to train “freedom fighters” in Syria actually went to train “freedom fighters in Syria,” did you?  And you didn’t really think that any of this war against Michael Flynn was accidental, did you?

Keeping up with George Webb is difficult, but a couple of his latest are embedded below.  They touch on some of these things.

NYT:

Cerberus Capital Management dodged a bullet with its recent decision to let investors sell out of one of the world’s biggest gunmakers, Remington Outdoor. It’s the company that made the assault rifle used to kill 20 children and six of their teachers in a Connecticut elementary school in December 2012.

Cerberus’s chief executive, Stephen A. Feinberg, has a clear motivation to offer the likes of gigantic pension funds like the California State Teachers’ Retirement System, or Calstrs, the choice to dump their Remington shares. He hopes it will allow his private equity firm to put this bloody chapter behind it and get to work raising a new $3.5 billion buyout fund.

There’s no question this was a victory for the social activists who led a push for public pension funds to shed their holdings in the arms business after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre two and a half years ago in Newtown — my hometown. Even the rapper and former gun-toter Snoop Dogg made pleas for divestment.

But what if there was a better way to effect change by persuading investors to behave more like shareholder activists than social ones?

Calstrs and the other limited partners in the Cerberus funds that own Remington, formerly known as Freedom Group, have a month to decide whether to sell their shares to Remington or remain as investors. Most of them will probably just unload. The better, albeit more difficult, route would be to hang on and make some noise at Remington.

[ … ]

They could, for instance, insist that Remington ensure all its guns are sold through distributors who conduct more rigorous background checks, or that the company ramps up investments in developing weapons that won’t go off when a child finds them in a negligent parent’s night stand. They might even demand Remington stop supporting the National Rifle Association.

Oh this is just rich.  Mr. social action is recommending that investors crash Remington.  He knows it.  We all know it.  We all know that the job Remington started with commitment to labor unions, staying ensconced in New York, focusing on military contracts, and ignoring the Remington 700 trigger issues, the job of almost destroying Remington, would be finished with social action agitation by investors.

So let’s queue it up.  I dare you.  Hold on to your shares, agitate social action, and watch the value of your stocks evaporate before your eyes.  I don’t believe the gun grabbers have the balls to do something like this.  But if there is any putting your money where your big mouth is, this is the chance.

Do it.  I dare you.  Any takers?