Wall Street Cashed Out; Main Street Got the Tab
The investor ledger can call a mill closure a clean exit. It can put a tidy green check beside the cash-out and move on to its next very important spreadsheet. But in the mill-town story, workers who helped build the place and families still living there inherit the consequences. A successful exit for the people taking the money is not the whole account.
Wall Street gets to close the books; Main Street gets appointed unpaid administrator of the ruins. The workers are handed the boarded storefronts, the squeezed family budget, and a town trying to keep its feet under it. That is a remarkable accounting trick: the people who leave with the cash get the word “success,” while the people who stayed get the cleanup shift. If the ledger doesn’t count them, it isn’t finished.