Newkirknomics: Respect the Technique of The Local Capital Flight Club

Where the wealthy check in, and wealth checks out!

The Local Capital Flight Club is a tongue-in-cheek but dead-serious critique of how capital leaves neighborhoods faster than a chicken on a junebug. In the world of Newkirknomics, this phrase captures the systemic problem of local wealth being siphoned away by multinational interests, extractive global financial institutions, and absentee ownership—leaving communities depleted, disempowered, and dependent. It forces the neighborhoods and Main Street USA to sell the cow in order to buy milk.

If you remember Tyler Durden in Fight Club, he laid it out plain:

"The people you're trying to step on—we're everyone you depend on. We cook your food, drive your cabs, clean your sheets, and keep the whole machine running." In the world of Newkirknomics, that same rebellious spirit is alive and well—except this time, the punch isn’t to the face... it’s straight to your neighborhood’s wallet.

What’s the problem we're facing?

Neighborhoods and communities are losing billions through:

• Absentee landlords who take rent but never reinvest. For example, during Detroit’s Tax Foreclosure crisis, out-of-state investors bought tax-foreclosed homes for pennies on the dollar. Many homes bought at auction were left abandoned or flipped for fast profit without rehab. Some owners didn’t even inform residents that ownership had changed, leading to confusion and illegal evictions. These absentee landlords undermined efforts to stabilize neighborhoods already devastated by disinvestment.
• National chains that extract profits without local ownership. According to research by the Institute for Local Self Reliance, Dollar Store chains are extracting significant sales from local businesses. With dollar stores averaging around 10,000 square feet in size and sales of around $260/square foot, a typical Dollar General captures over $2 million in sales every year — and those sales are likely coming out of the cash registers of businesses already there.
• Digital platforms that take a cut of every transaction. The “sharing economy” once promised wealth-building for everyday people by monetizing idle assets like cars (Uber) and spare rooms (Airbnb). But instead of empowering local entrepreneurs, these platforms became billion-dollar gatekeepers—replacing community-driven opportunities with unaccountable corporate control charging excessive fees and consistently taking more of the profits from their platform users. 
• Private equity buying up homes, hospitals, and even daycare centers. I was a resident of Raleigh, North Carolina from 2011-13 and the Triangle area is consistently viewed as one of the best places to live in the country.  Nearly 35% of apartments in the Raleigh-Cary metro area are owned by private equity companies, the highest percentage in the country, per the report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, a nonprofit that tracks the industry. This is another example of wealth consolidation that opens the door to collusion, inflation of already surging housing prices and negative impact on local communities.

So, what does all of this mean for your community?

Think of it like Harlem Nights, but with less brass knuckles and more briefcases. Sugar Ray and Quick were running a smooth, profitable operation—a vibrant, community-rooted economy. But then along comes Bugsy Calhoune and his crew, looking to wet their beaks in someone else’s hustle. Their plan? Create what looked like a “no way out” scenario—one designed to pressure Ray and his crew into handing over the goods.

Now, to be fair, Harlem Nights is filled with questionable morals, flying fists, and a “pinky toe” being shot off. But the core lesson holds up: when wealth pools in a community, someone powerful often shows up, not to build, but to extract.

We call this modern-day crew the Local Capital Flight Club—less cigar smoke, more corporate jargon. They’re not extorting at gunpoint, but the tactics are still slick: siphoning off prosperity that locals worked hard to build, leaving behind a thinner, weaker version of what once thrived.

The Local Capital Flight Club is the polished, suit-wearing cousin of Fight Club—only instead of throwing punches, it quietly extracts wealth from communities while pretending it’s "just business." It's a metaphor for what has become of the owners and controllers of the global financial system that treat local economies like vending machines: put nothing in, take everything out. Just like Durden reminded us who really holds the system together, Newkirknomics reminds us: Neighborhoods aren’t just markets—they’re the muscle behind the economy.

Newkirknomics tags and bags the Local Capital Flight Club model and replaces it with neighborhood-centered financial infrastructure, a modern capital deployment system:

• Local Ownership Models: Businesses and real estate owned by the people who live there. This reflects Jeffersonian ideals of a "nation of landowners" where widespread property ownership was seen as essential to maintaining freedom and resisting tyranny.
• Main Street Tickers: Metrics that measure how much capital stays in the community. We need new data, insights and understanding of what drives prosperity in communities so that our performance indicators can match authentically. 
• Decentralized Finance via CryptoRoad: Digital tools and infrastructure that route investment through, not around, local economies. Apolitical, peer to peer and trusted financial systems that unlock the capital local communities need to thrive. Currently the scores is $170 Billion VC Squad to $27 Billion Local Businesses. We got work to do!
• Genesis Bridge: A platform to connect grassroots entrepreneurs with the resources and relationships they need to scale without selling out. Genesis Bridge is uniting the builders block by block to ignite the local economy. Local entrepreneurs are the freedom fighters of the 21st century.

We believe in capital that arrives with a suitcase full of commitment—not a parachute ready to escape as soon as the profits start flowing.  And it’s time we stopped letting our wealth check out every time the rent's due, groceries are scanned, or a ride-share app takes its cut. The awakening is here, the lines have been drawn and it’s for the future of Main Street.

In Other Words…

It’s time to confront the failure of global capital holders to act as responsible stewards of community wealth, and to challenge their detachment from the local lives their investments should empower. We must stop allowing them to continue counting chickens in somebody else’s coop. That somebody else representing the neighborhoods, communities and places that we all live in. Capital should visit, invest, and maybe even move in—not just steal your Netflix password and ghost. The future Newkirknomics envision is one where communities own the runway, not just watch jets take off with their wealth on board.