Yesterday's winner in Florida, Moneybags Mitt, calls himself a venture capitialist. During the Republican primaries his opponents Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich have alternated between calling him a vulture and a vampire capitialist. Now the Vulture and Vampire Anti-Defamation League is up in arms. In an attempt to understand the angst of our distant cousins a couple of definations might be a good starting point.
Vultures are a type of scavenger. Scavengers aren't killers, they spend their days searching and wait patiently for their next meal to drop dead then they swoop in for lunch. There are countless species who live by scavenging from tiny bacteria to jackels and vultures. They serve a noble purpose in the circle of life in that they recycle the carbon and energy content of the carrion they eat making it available over a wide area through their feces, urine and ultimately their carcass to others like the grasses upon whom, for instance, the original herbivore that the scanenger scavenged in the first place, fed.
Vulture capitialists also wait for their targets to die before swooping in and scooping up their remaining assets at very low cost then attempting to resell those assets at a 'profit'. So far the analogy seems apt enough. But that's not the part of the story that has the scavenger class indignant. If these capitialists were simply making a living by recycling the energy of the business carrion who'd complain? But vulture capitialists make far more hay out of inflating stocks prices by misinforming naive investors through sweetheart deals with brokers who issue 'buy' recommdations on these balooning stocks. The vulture capitialits selling the stocks who's price has been manipulated and then selling bonds based on the bogus value of these over blown stocks are the reason why the real vultures-turkey vultures and the like-feel defamed. Real vultures maintain that they make an honest living doing their bit in the circle while the misanthropes make theirs lying.
Vampires, excluding perhaps the Twilight type, feel similiarly maligned by any association with capitialists. They have an even stronger arguement in this writers opinion. Vampires, mosquitoes-viruses-lottsa stuff, make their living by sucking a portion of the energy from the host, but only a small portion because if they take too much the host kicks the bucket and the parasite loses too. Parsites that often kill their hosts, like the ebola virus, have a very hard time spreading their genes far and wide because those now dead hosts don't move around much.
Vampires specifically and parasites in general then are feeling defamed by association with creatures like Millionaire Mitt and his ilk because the capitialists don't just try to live off a small portion of the lifeblood of the living-breathing companies they take over they suck them dry then transmogrify themselves into vultures once they've killed their hosts and begin to play the same game of over-inflating stocks-selling bogus bonds explained above. These guys are way more accurately described as predators, but that less than perfect analogy would just start pissing off the real predators so its probably best not to go there eh.Keep your eye on the news for more of this breaking story from the the Vulture and Vampire Anti-Defamation League. Be aware and keep your eyes on the skies above 'cause your distant cousins are aware of you and patiently waiting...
