 Just in case you're still wondering if our system is rigged, oh yeah it is. If you've spent any time driving around America recently, you may have noticed that an awful lot of the country seems to have shriveled up and died. Take a trip on Route 2 in Maine sometime and count the boarded up paper mills and abandoned houses you see. Or head down Route 23 in Michigan or Ohio and consider the empty factories ringed with barbed wire. You'll see a lot of them. Outside the coastal cities, scenes like this are everywhere. This is your country now. Shuttered car dealerships next to defunct restaurants across street from thrift stores and methadone clinics. That's America. Community after community. Desiccated. So what happened? Well a lot of things happened. Some of them are complicated and hard to change. But one of the big factors in this slow moving disaster is the utter transformation of the way our leaders think about the American economy. Your average finance mogul looks at workers merely as cost to be reduced or eliminated entirely. Private equity isn't building a lot of public libraries these days. Instead, the model is ruthless economic efficiency. By a distressed company, outsorts the jobs, liquidate the valuable assets, fire middle management. And once the smoke is cleared, dump what remains to the highest bidder often in Asia. It's happened around the country. It has made a small number of people phenomenally rich. One of them is a New York based hedge fund manager called Paul Singer. According to Forbes, has amassed a personal fortune of more than three billion dollars. How a singer made that money? The practice is called vulture capitalism, feeding off the carcass of a dying nation. In some ways, it's not so different from what Singer and his firm, Elliott Management, have done in this country and to this country. Over the past couple of decades, Elliott Management has made billions by buying large stakes in American companies than firing workers, driving up short term share prices. And in some cases, taking government bailouts insult to injury. Tonight, we want to tell you a little more about how Paul Singer does business. The story begins in a small town called Sydney, Nebraska, population 6,282. Two hours outside Denver, Sydney is the long time home of the sporting goods retailer Cabela's, which sells fishing and hunting gear. In October of 2015, Singer's hedge fund disclosed an 11% stake in Cabela's and set about pushing the board to sell the company. Now at the time, Cabela's was a relatively healthy company. It was posting nearly two billion dollars a year in gross profits off four billion dollars in revenue. There didn't seem to be any immediate need to sell, but Cabela's sold anyway after being pushed. Within a week, literally a week, Paul Singer cashed out. His hedge fund made at least 90 million dollars upfront and likely more over time. But in Sydney, Nebraska, it was a very different story. The residents of Sydney did not get rich. Oh no, just the opposite. Their community was devastated, destroyed. The town lost nearly 2,000 jobs. A heartbreakingly familiar cascade began. People left, property values collapsed, and then people couldn't leave. They were trapped there. One of the last thriving small towns in this country went under. Well, some countries, including the United Kingdom, have banned this kind of behavior. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to the capitalism we were promised in school. It creates nothing. It destroys entire cities. It couldn't be uglier or more destructive. So why is it still allowed in the United States? The short answer? Because people like Paul Singer have tremendous influence over our political process. Ben Sasse is the U.S. senator who represents the state of Nebraska. Sydney, of course, isn't that large. But you might think the death of a town in his state would be of concern to Ben Sasse. Again, U.S. senator from Nebraska. But so far it doesn't seem like he's ever commented on what's happened to Sydney. We looked hard. Then we called Sasse's office to see if they could point to a time where he commented on the destruction of Sydney or simply supply a statement to us about what happened there. But Ben Sasse's office didn't even respond to our producers. That's odd. But then here's one possible explanation for that. During his Senate run, Ben Sasse received the largest possible donation from Paul Singer. Singer himself was the second largest donor to the Republican Party in 2016. He's given millions to a super PAC that supports Republican senators. You may never have heard of Paul Singer, which tells you a lot in itself, but in Washington, he is rock star famous. And that may be why he's almost certainly paying a lower effective tax rate than your average fireman. Just in case you're still wondering if our system is rigged. Oh yeah it is.