PART III: THE SELLOFF (1986-2001)

Fifteen years of liquidation.

Factories crossed oceans while their former executives collected bonuses for the crossing. Regulators who had spent careers preventing speculation were replaced by regulators who could not distinguish speculation from innovation. A bipartisan consensus emerged that production was obsolete, that America’s future lay in services, that anyone who disagreed simply did not understand how modern economies functioned.

This section documents who sold, who bought, who profited, and who paid.