In his book Glass House, Brian Alexander recounts the struggles and eventual disappearance of the century-old glassware maker, Anchor Hocking. He also documents the decline of Lancaster, Ohio, hometown to both Alexander and Anchor Hocking.

It takes Alexander nearly 300 pages to tell the story. The short version is this: for a hundred years, the glassware maker was a major part of the city’s core. Its executives served on community boards, it was a big contributor to Lancaster’s civic drives, and the children of the men who worked beside the 1200-degree machines went to school and church with the children of the men and women who sat in the offices.

Lancaster wasn’t a company town, but the company was a large presence.

Generations of people there had worked for Anchor Hocking and had retired comfortably on the pensions they earned.

Then came the private equity firms and the M&A wave. Anchor Hocking was caught up in the cycle: buy, strip out the assets, sell or push into bankruptcy. (Even as the third private equity firm, Monomoy, was putting the company into bankruptcy they were sucking out millions in fees and charges. They were also paying a herd of lawyers, the most of expensive them billing more than $1,000 an hour. Interestingly, the bankruptcy plan included a clause that said that the people involved would be shielded from any claim arising from their actions, even if the actions included “fraudulent or preferential transfer or conveyance, tort, contract, breach of fiduciary duty, violation of state and federal laws, including securities laws negligence, gross negligence.”   In other words, even if what we did was illegal, dumb or evil, you can’t blame us for it.)

The death of the company was not quick; it took nearly 30 years, and for all of those years, the private equity firms sucked money from Anchor Hocking, cut expenses such as maintenance, reduced the number of employees, and the compensation for the employees who were working. They eliminated the pensions. Lancaster, according to Alexander, went from a prosperous, optimistic town with a proud population to a depressed blot full of payday lenders, dollar stores, and an amazing variety of drugs.

According to one of the people who worked at Anchor Hocking before the PE buyout and after it, the end began when the company quit concentrating on making product and began concentrating on creating the appearance of money.  (The word appearance is important because it was part of the change in the concept of value: not what was real, but what appeared to be. We saw more of that in the 2008 meltdown.)

The employees of the company on the banks of the Hocking River were not unique; the number of manufacturing job was in freefall from 1980 to 2010, dropping by nearly half. Some were victims of globalization (another kind of greed), some were just not a part of the changing world, and some jobs were lost because the people who ran the companies just couldn’t keep up. None of that was necessarily true about Anchor Hocking. They were protected from imports by the fact that their glassware was inexpensive and heavy, making shipping it from Asia a losing proposition. And the demand hadn’t gone away; women still used oven-proof casserole dishes and restaurants still used plates and glasses. Anchor Hocking held its share of the market until employee discontent, poor maintenance, and managerial discord caused it to miss orders, produce poor product, and generally lose its hard-earned reputation.

Just as the people in Lancaster tried to find a convenient “don’t-blame-us” excuse for the prevalence of drugs in the city, people talking about the economy have talked about cheap labor and less regulation.

But I think the truth of the matter is simple. I agree with the Anchor Hocking employee: we quit making things and made the appearance of value. Plants were no longer places where people went to work and made products that they were proud of. They were balance sheets, accounting tricks, and people sitting hundreds or thousands of miles away wondering how to squeeze more money out them.

They weren’t manufacturing plants, anymore. They were financial instruments, and they were bludgeoned to death by greed.

The same thing was true with mortgages. When we bought our first home, we went to the Savings and Loan, sweated over whether we met their financial requirements, and paid them every month after they gave us the loan. It was a simple, reasonably personal transaction.

Then, along came mortgage-backed securities, collections of mortgages sliced and diced and sold to investors. The MBS’s didn’t represent a couple working to own a home, but a financial instrument that was separated from any bungalow, cottage, or mansion. And it precipitated the greatest economic disaster of the 21^st century.

Then everybody acted surprised. They shouldn’t have. You had one group of people paid to originate loans and a second group of people paid to sell the bundles to investors. Nobody was being paid to do what the S&L did when we bought our home: determine that the borrower could repay the loan. And that’s where it fell down. More greed.

The death of a proud old company is a bad thing. The sinking of an economy is worse. But neither is as bad as what we’re facing now. M&A and MBS greed being applied to government. We gave up on maintenance years ago; it’s estimated that we need to spend $123 billion on maintenance for bridges alone. That doesn’t include water, sewer, roads, and other infrastructure elements. Instead of maintaining, we worry about reducing taxes.

And we’re squeezing the people who can most easily be squeezed—the poor. This, despite the fact that dollars put into the economy at the bottom circulate most quickly. But the people whose hands are on the steering wheel aren’t at or don’t come from the bottom and worrying about the economy as a whole isn’t a part of their world view.

And where does the money go. We have a proposed “healthcare plan” whose basic premise is not healthcare, but tax reductions, mostly for the wealthiest in the land. We have an incarceration system that’s based on profitability for private prison operators. We have an EPA secretary who meets with the head of Dow Chemical one day and reverses a ban on its pesticide the next. And we have Betsy Devos, who seems to favor companies running charter schools over the children who will have to attend those schools.

But there’s one part of this comparison that doesn’t work at all. When those whose greed is sucking money out of the economy finally drive the economy down, they can’t just get a clause in the bankruptcy agreement that says, “Excuse us for being dishonest, dumb, or completely without vision.” They can’t do that, because we’re all in this together.

One of the bitterest ironies of the whole Anchor Hocking story is that when the company was put into bankruptcy, one of the investors who brought suit was a union pension fund. These people, who collected their salaries by managing workers’ pensions, had invested in a company that had systematically reduced hourly rates and benefits for its workers.  So far as I was concerned, the pension fund folks deserved what they got.

In his first letter to Timothy, Paul writes that the “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Boy, if he could just see it now.