text: Privatizing profits and socializing costs is one of the core concepts behind crony capitalism.  And it's why this nation is headed to the ash heap of history* without serious reforms to break the back of the oligarchy that has seized control quietly since the Reagan-Clinton years.  (*There will surely be something calling itself the United States of America, but it will be rather like Rome pretended to be a Republic long after that premise became sickly laughable.  "That government of the oligarchs by the oligarchs for the oligarchs shall not perish from this earth . . .")