Private equity work has been sweet for Marc Leder, the numero uno at Sun Capital Partners. He’s parlayed his takeovers of troubled firms into a fortune big enough to make him a co-owner of the Philadelphia 76ers in basketball and the New Jersey Devils in hockey. New York’s tabloids, meanwhile, have come to dub the hard-partying Leder “the Hugh Hefner of the Hamptons.” The secret to his success is to plunder assets from the companies he buys. then send them into bankruptcy to sidestep their obligations to workers. Over the past decade alone, Sun Capital has bankrupted five firms and left their pension funds $280 million short. Leder, for his part, claims that the “vast majority” of Sun Capital deals have been successful. And he only parties, the private-equity kingpin adds, 25 nights a year. (Inequality.org).

This man typifies what is wrong with modern capitalism, with the full support of the bloodless, empathy-deprived politicians of the extreme Right. He, and other people like him, should cooling his heels in jail as he reflects on the fact that we are all human beings together and that partying while former employees, deprived of their pensions by legalised theft, is tactless, cruel and inhuman. If the system cannot discover a moral foundation then the system has to change. Let us hope that change does not involve violence. The frightening thing is that hordes of voters and their representatives laud the super-rich and want to emulate them, apparently anyway they can. We need Jesus back to overturn the tables of the moneymen in the Temple. Remember that?