The U.S. Did to Itself what Barbarians at the Gate Did to Corporations
Short-term thinking didn't just starve America, it gutted it like a leveraged buyout.
From Rome to Red Lobster: The Extraction Playbook Devouring America
Bottom Line Up Front:
America is being liquidated by its own elites using the exact same playbook that private equity used to destroy Red Lobster, Toys"R"Us, and Sears. This isn't hyperbole anymore. Rather, it's a documented pattern of asset stripping that historians recognize as the death spiral of empires.
In 33 CE, Roman Emperor Tiberius faced a financial crisis that nearly brought the empire to collapse. Credit froze. Banks failed. Real estate values cratered. What happened next would become a template for imperial decline that we're seeing repeated today.
The Romans had a choice: restructure for long-term stability or pump liquidity for short-term relief. They chose the quick fix and began a 400-year slide into monetary debasement that reduced their silver currency from 95% pure to 0.02% pure by 270 CE.
The wonder wasn't that Rome fell. The incredulousness was that it lasted so long after choosing liquidation over investment.
Today, the U.S. faces the same choice. And just like Rome, we're choosing to devour ourselves.
Last week, when Republicans in the House passed the “Big Ugly Reconciliation Bill,” cutting $300 billion from SNAP food assistance and over $1 trillion from Medicaid (resulting in 17 million losing healthcare), all to fund tax cuts for billionaires that they didn’t even ask for, it confirmed the pattern I’d been observing for a long time. This isn't governance. It's internal colonialism.
Red Lobster Didn't Die. It was Murdered.
Here's how you kill a profitable restaurant chain in 10 years:
Step 1: The Acquisition (2014)
Private equity firm Golden Gate Capital buys Red Lobster for $2.1 billion using a leveraged buyout, borrowing money to buy the company, then forcing the company to pay back the debt.
This playbook was famously documented in the book "Barbarians at the Gate," about the RJR Nabisco raid that shocked America in the 1980s. The phrase "barbarians at the gate" originally referred to the collapse of Rome, when external invaders breached the empire's walls after centuries of internal decay. But in America, the barbarians didn't wait outside. They came from inside the boardroom. Inside the Senate. Inside the private equity playbook.
Step 2: The Real Estate Scam (2014)
Immediately sell Red Lobster's buildings to a "separate" company for $1.5 billion. Now Red Lobster, which used to own its restaurants, pays $119 million annually in rent with 2% yearly increases. Forever.
Golden Gate just pocketed 71% of their investment on Day One.
Step 3: The Management Outsourcing (2016)
Hand operational control to Thai Union, a shrimp supplier, which promptly launches "endless shrimp" promotions that lose millions while offloading Thai Union's excess inventory.
Step 4: The Debt Loading
Pile on additional debt while profiting from management fees, consulting fees, and dividend payments.
Step 5: The Collapse (2024)
Red Lobster files for bankruptcy. 50+ locations close overnight. Workers show up to locked doors and termination letters.
The top executives? They'd already cashed out.
This wasn’t a business failure by natural causes, as it was never about the continuity and well-being of the business. It was a financial engineering success for its owners. Golden Gate pocketed maximum value while transferring all risk to workers, communities, and creditors.
Now zoom out. That's exactly what's happening to America. Corrupt government officials and leadership exploiting power for personal enrichment, dismantling public services (and their funds) to private coffers, and transferring all risk to American taxpayers.
America's Internal Colonialism
The reconciliation bill isn't legislation that makes sense from a good governance perspective for the best interest of the country. Instead, it's a leveraged buyout of the entire United States. This is internal colonialism: America's elites applying imperial extraction logic to their own country.
And what’s worse, the reconciliation bill isn't just financial reverse Robin Hood—it mandates literal extraction by forcing national forests to meet annual aggressive logging quotas for private contractors.
We've gone from strip-mining companies, to plundering the country, to clear-cutting the land itself.
Massive tax breaks for the wealthy = immediate shareholder payouts
Cuts to healthcare, food, and climate programs = stripping assets
Ballooning national debt = financial engineering to benefit the few
Militarized spending and policing = security for when the collapse hits
Defunding education, job training, and housing — while fueling the prison labor pipeline — erases ladders out of poverty. It’s not accidental. It’s how the system manufactures a permanent underclass: by dismantling the very tools of mobility for minority, poor, and rural communities.
The oligarch class didn't just buy our laws. They bought our imaginations.
We’re not in late-stage capitalism anymore. We’re in a liquidation-stage empire. We've replaced governance with arbitrage. We've swapped public service for asset stripping.
Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant. Roman historian Tacitus described the same pattern: "They make a wasteland and call it peace." Today's version: "They make a wasteland and call it prosperity."
The Numbers Don't Lie
Since the 80s, when Gordon Gekko’s “Greed is Good” mantra and Reaganomics prioritized financial engineering over building real things, our actual productive capacity rotted:
Infrastructure grade: C-minus (American Society of Civil Engineers)
Federal R&D spending: Collapsed from 1.86% of GDP in 1964 to 0.61% today
Private equity job destruction: 1.3 million retail jobs lost in the past decade
Social trust: Fallen 23 percentage points since 1972
But here's what grew:
Financial sector: From 3% of GDP in 1970 to 9% by 2010
CEO compensation: 940% increase since 1978 (worker pay: 12%)
Share buybacks: $600 billion annually (money that could fund infrastructure)
Corporate lobbying: $4.1 billion in 2022 alone
This is systematic degradation of the commons masquerading as growth.
When Extraction Thinking Kills
This take-take-take mindset isn't just deadly for corporations as value-driven enterprises; it kills people at the local level too.
Last week, my article examining the systemic failures of the Texas floods struck a nerve. In Kerr County, Texas, over 120 people died in last week’s floods because local officials spent nearly a decade refusing to fund a $1 million flood warning system. The county had received $10.2 million in federal funds that could be allocated for flood prevention, but facing political pressure from residents who called the federal government "criminal treasonous communist," the conservative commissioners chose factional stubbornness over future-building safety.
Instead of investing in life-saving infrastructure, they allocated $8 million to sheriff's department upgrades and employee stipends. No money for flood alerts. Worse—Camp Mystic, where many children died, had deliberately ensured the camp was erased from official flood maps, removing any mandate for early warning or protection.
Selfish politics. Short-term ideological interests over serving the public. Long-term catastrophe.
It's the same pattern: prioritize immediate political expediency over long-term community building, then act surprised when the system fails catastrophically.
The Cognitive Trap
Here's how this subtractive cycle becomes self-perpetuating and becomes entrenched in all levels of society:
Financial stress shrinks people's capacity for long-term thinking. Princeton economists proved this by studying farmers before and after harvest in Tamil Nadu, India. The same people performed significantly better on problem-solving and decision-making tasks when they had money than when they were broke. Scarcity creates cognitive load equivalent to losing a full night's sleep.
The profiteers weaponize this principle systematically:
Keep workers one paycheck from disaster, and they can't organize for better conditions or think past survival.
Create manufactured crises, and people accept terrible short-term "solutions."
Force families to focus on immediate needs, and they can't build long-term resistance to the system taking from them.
Worst of all, financial stress and poverty keep people stuck in fear, unconsciously motivating them to vote for the very politicians who exploit this dynamic, choosing immediate gratification and empty promises over long-term solutions, falling for simple answers to complex problems.
This is induced cognitive scarcity. Those who benefit from this broken system keep their victims too stressed and overwhelmed to see the bigger pattern or organize effective opposition.
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The Red Lobster Economy
What happened to Red Lobster is happening everywhere:
Bed Bath & Beyond (2023): Activist investors pushed $12 billion in share buybacks over store investment. When it collapsed, 80,000 jobs disappeared overnight.
Party City (2023): Still paying for its 2012 leveraged buyout when it finally died. All 800+ stores closed, 16,500 workers laid off with minimal notice.
Regional hospitals (ongoing): Private equity firms like Apollo and KKR are buying hospital chains, cutting nursing staff 20-30%, then charging higher prices. Patient-to-nurse ratios are hitting dangerous levels.
Midwest farmers (2025): The Trump administration pulled USDA funding and canceled key procurement contracts across Kansas and Nebraska, gutting lifelines for family farms already reeling from climate shocks. At the same time, new tariffs on agricultural exports, especially soy, corn, and wheat, triggered retaliatory trade restrictions from China and Mexico, further collapsing market prices.
With no safety net and no viable buyers, family farmers are forced to liquidate. That’s when private equity firms like AcreTrader, backed by JD Vance, Peter Thiel, and other GOP-aligned elites, move in to buy up distressed farmland for pennies on the dollar.
These firms pitch “democratized land access” to wealthy investors while turning generational stewards into tenant farmers—financializing the heartland, and America’s food sources, one acre at a time.
The pattern continues accelerating in 2025, with healthcare systems and local media facing the same predatory playbook. Buy with borrowed money. Cash out maximum cash. Leave the wreckage for everyone else.
The Multiplier Effect of Destruction
Here’s the sobering reality: Every 1,000 retail jobs lost creates 1,221 additional job losses through negative economic multiplier effects.
When Red Lobster closes, the managers and staff lose their jobs. But so do the delivery drivers, the food suppliers, the cleaning services, the maintenance crews. The tax base shrinks. The location loses foot traffic. Other surrounding businesses struggle. The spiral continues.
Independent businesses circulate $45 of every $100 locally. Chains only circulate $13. So every local business replaced by a chain-that-gets-strip-mined represents a 3x economic loss to the community.
Call it what it is: economic predation disguised as market forces.
The Decolonization of Corporate America
But the story isn’t finished yet. Red Lobster's rescue didn’t come from the same old corporate raiders. As I always say, the same old mindsets that got us into trouble can not be the same mindsets that get us out of trouble.
Meet Damola Adamolekun: 36 years old, Nigerian-American, first-generation immigrant. Born in Lagos to a neurologist father and pharmacist mother. Lived in Zimbabwe, Netherlands, Illinois. Won a state debate championship in high school and used the $10,000 prize to make his first investments, sparking a lifelong interest in economics.
He's Red Lobster's new CEO. And he represents everything the old guard fears.
The symbolism is profound: a leader from Nigeria, a country that experienced colonial extraction, now leading a turnaround—the decolonization of an American company also hurt by those same methods. It's a complete inversion of the historical pattern.
Adamolekun didn't inherit wealth or connections. He earned his way up: waiting tables in high school, Goldman Sachs analyst, Harvard MBA, private equity partner. When P.F. Chang's was struggling, he became their first Black CEO at 31 and turned them around—$1 billion in annual revenue, profitable through COVID.
Now he's applying the same regenerative approach to Red Lobster.
His strategy? Everything the old guard weren't doing:
Investing in workers instead of exploiting them
Rebuilding trust instead of financial engineering
Long-term brand building instead of quarterly strip-mining
Community engagement instead of boardroom isolation
Instead of the typical private equity playbook of cutting costs and maximizing fees, Adamolekun is investing Red Lobster's cash flow back into worker training, restaurant improvements, and rebuilding supplier and stakeholder relationships, proving that businesses grow stronger when you build capacity across the entire value chain instead of strip it away piecemeal.
This isn't Republican vs. Democrat. Or old age vs. young. It's short-term plunder vs. long-term stewardship.
Old Mindsets Can't Build New Systems
“A new type of thinking is essential if mankind is to survive and move toward higher levels.”
— Einstein, 1946
The raiders, wreckers and robber barons who broke America can't fix America. You can’t have the arsonist also be the firefighter.
Decades of research show that concentrated power reduces empathy, narrows perspective, and rewards short-term thinking. They’re not just unwilling—they’re neurologically and structurally incapable of long-term thinking for the common good. Power erodes empathy.
Structurally, they’re locked into narrow, self-serving incentives. Their worldview isn’t built to serve the greater good of the commons—it’s built to strip-mine it.
But America is full of people like Adamolekun and all those working towards creating value: fresh, abundance-minded, forward-thinking mindsets, outsiders, creative thinkers, builders, visionaries, and stewards. People from all ages, backgrounds and cultures who share the same regenerative mindset—that prosperity comes from growing the pie, not just grabbing bigger slices of a limited one.
The future after collapse belongs to regenerative leaders.
As Adamolekun puts it: "The most important thing I did was getting the team galvanized around a mission. You can't make a comeback without the team believing in a future."
That philosophy—growth to benefit the many over extraction to benefit the few—is what’s needed to rebuild America to what we CAN be, not who we’ve historically been.
What We're Building While the Old System Fails
Red Lobster is more than a business story. It's a parable of systematic collapse by design, then blames the wreckage on the people left behind.
That same logic is devouring our schools, communities, hospitals, farmlands, and democracy itself. But Adamolekun’s turnaround proves something crucial: regeneration works. Not just in business, but as a blueprint for everything we’re building, while the old system falls. This isn’t just business analysis or political commentary. It’s pattern recognition for the future we’re already building.
But the builders are already here. They’re not waiting for permission but instead rewriting the future in real time:
People choosing repair over extraction.
People protecting others when institutions won’t.
People rebuilding what was hollowed out.
People naming the pattern instead of normalizing the harm.
They come from all walks of life—all professions, vocations, and skill sets.
We need them all. We need YOU.
Because regeneration isn’t a job title. It’s a way of showing up. It’s about how bold we live in this brave new world we’re co-creating. Together.
A final note: I don’t write this as an outsider. I began my career in investment banking in mergers & acquisitions, and worked with PE firms on LBOs from the sell-side. I understand the incentives and the logic because I operated within them. But I also saw their limits and their long-lasting damage. That’s a big factor to why I’m committed to building something entirely different now.
Thanks for reading. Keep going.
The future grows from what we choose to water.
Bian “B” Li
The Regenerative Futurist
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Further Reading
If this sparked something for you, you might also appreciate this Threads post I wrote earlier this year on how short-term thinking is starving America—a thread that went viral for a reason.
This piece is part of my deeper dive into this month’s theme of Resistance as part of my 7R Framework for a Regenerative Future—not just as opposition, but as a design principle. A commitment to seeing clearly, choosing differently, and building what comes next.
Want to explore into the related mindsets at play amongst those fighting for which future will win out? Check out this past article:
Checkers, Chess, Go, and… Hungry Hungry Hippos? The Games We Play with the Future
The future is a game in which we’re all players and the stakes couldn't be higher. Yet a profound disconnect threatens our collective future: we're not all playing the same game. This reality shapes everything from corporate boardrooms to climate policy, from technological innovation to social justice.
Works Cited
Darden Announces Sale of Red Lobster to Golden Gate Capital for $2.1 Billion - PR Newswire, May 16, 2014
American Realty Capital Properties Closes $1.5 Billion Red Lobster® Sale-Leaseback Transaction - PR Newswire, July 15, 2014
How private equity rolled Red Lobster - NBC News, June 4, 2024
Red Lobster: A Slow-Motion Liquidation - Restaurant Finance Across America, July 8, 2024
The Raiding of Red Lobster - The American Prospect, May 22, 2024
Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens - Perspectives on Politics, Cambridge University Press, 2014
Critics argued with our analysis of U.S. political inequality. Here are 5 ways they're wrong. - The Washington Post, May 23, 2016
Federally Funded R&D Declines as a Share of GDP and Total R&D - National Science Foundation, 2023
US Federal R&D spending decline: a breakdown - Nintil blog analysis
US Social Trust Has Fallen 23 Points Since 1964 - Kevin Vallier analysis, November 30, 2020
Americans' Declining Trust in Each Other and Reasons Behind It - Pew Research Center, May 8, 2025
Fifty Years of Declining Confidence & Increasing Polarization in Trust in American Institutions - American Academy of Arts and Sciences, November 15, 2022
Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function - Mani, Mullainathan, Shafir, Zhao, Science, August 30, 2013
Poor concentration: Poverty reduces brainpower needed for navigating other areas of life - Princeton University, August 29, 2013
The Cognitive Burden of Poverty - Behavioral Scientist, May 17, 2017
5 Things to Know About Damola Adamolekun, Red Lobster's Young, Gifted, and Black CEO - TheGrio, June 27, 2025
Red Lobster is a mess. Here's why the new 35-year-old CEO wanted the job anyway - CNN Business, October 4, 2024
Damola Adamolekun - Wikipedia - Wikipedia entry with biographical information
Spot on analysis. 55.7% of Americans are functionally illiterate beyond the fifth grade. That needs to be fixed and private schools getting tax dollars isn’t the answer. It’s more of the same predatory practices you mention.
What fascinates me about this century's extractive capitalism model is that, after stripping as much value as possible from producers, they are taking a similar approach to the consumer side of the equation. There seems to be a movement to examine things people are willing to pay for and find ways to make them pay more - a pizza delivered used to be a couple bucks extra, but now you order through a third-party service and it's 30% more. A subscription streaming service offers subscriptions within the subscription. Bill.com is my favorite: when companies started outsourcing accounts payable, it took a few extra days but you could get it expedited for a 1% fee. Now it takes 30 extra days, or a 3% fee.
When capitalism takes but doesn't give value to customers, how long can the system survive?