The Great Liquidation: Picking at the Carcass of America

The storefronts are empty, the pension funds are hollow, and the ticker tape continues to roll. To the casual observer, the American economy is a marvel of modern resilience. To the autopsy surgeon, however, it is a body being systematically harvested for its parts. We are no longer living in a period of growth; we are witnessing a global fire sale of the remaining assets of a once-prosperous civilization.

The tragedy of Sears—once the heartbeat of American retail—is not merely a story of bad management. It is a microcosm of the national condition. A venerable institution was stripped of its real estate, its brands were sold off, and its workforce was discarded, all while a few financial engineers extracted billions. This isn't "creative destruction"; it is the liquidation of the American foundation.

The Great Uncoupling (1971–Present)

The dismantling began in earnest a generation after 1972. When we severed the link between the dollar and gold, we didn’t just change a monetary policy; we abandoned a moral constraint. By shifting to a pure fiat system, we enabled a debt-fueled hallucination that masked the systematic destruction of our productive capacity.

Since then, the playbook has been consistent:

• Export Production: We traded our factories for "service economy" promises, sending our middle-class lifeblood to cheaper shores.

• Import Labor: We suppressed domestic wages by importing a cheap workforce, fracturing the social contract that once guaranteed a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

• Deregulate & Strip: Under the guise of "efficiency," we stripped away the guardrails that prevented systemic looting.

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Sovereignty for Sale

The political apparatus in Washington is no longer a check on this decline; it is a facilitator. Both major parties have been effectively overtaken by global profiteers. We maintain the "slight of hand" of a functioning democracy—the debates, the elections, the pageantry—but the policy output remains remarkably consistent: the protection of the financier at the expense of the citizen.

When production is exported, sovereignty follows. A nation that cannot feed, clothe, and arm itself through its own industry is not a sovereign power; it is a client state. We have traded the hard power of industrial surplus for the soft illusion of cheap consumer goods.

The Debt as an Autopsy Report

If you want to see the truth of our national failure, look at the National Debt. It is not just a number on a screen; it is a looking glass revealing the melting away of American sovereignty.

$$TotalDebt\approx \text{Future Taxation}+\text{Currency Debasement}$$

The soaring debt is the final stage of the fire sale. We are borrowing against the labor of unborn generations to pay for the "liquidation dividends" of the present. Every trillion added to that tally represents a further erosion of our ability to dictate our own destiny.

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The Final Assessment

The global private equity movement is the clean-up crew of history. They are not builders; they are the specialists who arrive when a firm—or a nation—is worth more dead than alive. By picking at the carcass of the United States, they are merely fulfilling the logic of the system we allowed to take root.

The appearance of a functioning government is the last thing to go. But as the debt climbs and the last of the productive assets are shipped out or sold off, the "looking glass" becomes impossible to ignore. We are watching the sunset of a superpower, one leveraged buyout at a time.

Sam Harris on The Daily Show in 2010

 

Sam Harris on his book, The Moral Landscape; How Science Can Determine Human Values.

Appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

October 4, 2010

The challenge we’re faced with is to create a global civilization based on shared values, economic, political and social goals. We have to begin giving similar answers to the most important questions in human life. We have to talk about morality and human values in the context of our growing scientific understanding of ourselves in the world.

There is an intellectual and moral emergency. The only people in the world who think they have the right answers to moral questions are religious demagogues who think the universe is 6,000 years old. Everyone else thinks there’s something suspect about the concept of their moral truth.

Morality and values clearly relate to human and animal well-being. Our well-being emerges out of the laws of nature. It’s fantastically complex. Genetics, neurobiology, psychology, sociology and economics and everything that can influence the states of the human brain. All of these domains fall within the purview of science.

There’s a gulf between religious-based morality and the facts we’ve learned. In the best case, religion gives us bad reasons to be good where good reasons are actually available. In the worst case, it separates moral thinking from the actual details of human and animal suffering.

You have an institution like the Catholic church, which, based on its doctrine and actions in the world, is more concerned about preventing contraception than preventing child rape. It’s more concerned about preventing gay marriage than genocide.

Scripture is a real mixed bag. If you want to talk about getting wisdom from scripture, the God of Abraham gets slavery wrong. Slavery is probably the easiest moral questions we’ve ever had to face. If this book was written by an omniscient deity, the true source of moral wisdom in the universe, it should at least get the question of whether it’s right to own people and treat them like farm equipment right. The God of Abraham clearly expects us to keep slaves.

Anyone in this room could improve on the ten commandments in five seconds.

Most people in science believe there’s no place in science to say it’s wrong to oppress women. There’s an intuition that something has happened in the last 200 years of intellectual progress which has made it difficult to say that the Taliban is really wrong in their treatment of women. The moment you realize that the only way to ask whether it’s good for women to be forced to wear burkas is to wonder whether it’s good for human flourishing on any level. Does it make more compassionate men or confident women; does it improve relationships between men and women. We know at this moment in human history that the answer to that question is no. To doubt this scientifically is to pretend that we know nothing about human well-being.

There are so many ways to bring order that are objectively terrible, that make people suffer needlessly. We can understand this at the level of the brain, at the level of society. This is not a no-go area for science. Science of the human mind will understand how to make communities flourish and it’s a myth that we can’t get there through science.