Sometimes attributed to British psychologist Oliver James, a variety of psychological and physical maladies found only in prosperous societies has been given a quasi-clinical appellation, "affluenza".

One of the manifestations of affluenza is called "restless leg syndrome", a painful nighttime disorder of the lower extremities, generally suffered by those who do not do much physical activity or exertion during the day - such as the typical office worker who drives to work, parks in his assigned parking space near the building door, does eight hours of sedentary physical inactivity

The American pharmacological industry, always quick to develop and market remedies for previously unknown health disorders to people who have generous prescription drug coverage, has come up with a medication for restless leg syndrome. This drug is advertised aggressively on TV shows and networks programmed for women, since the industry knows that the fairer sex is more likely than those strong and silent "suck up your gut" American men, with any medical condition seemingly less serious than multiple bullet wounds, to seek medical help from doctors.

As this is a medication only available by a doctor's prescription in the US, government regulations mandate that any advertisements for it also notify the prospective user of any possible side effects. For this medication, these are "an unusual urge to gamble or increased sexual urges and/or behaviors".

A medication that has increased urges to gamble as a side effect? So that's who has been buying the stock of Sears these past few years.

As the United States spread west to the Pacific coast on its manifest destiny after the Civil War, it may have been the Colt six-shooter pistol and Winchester rifle that conquered the frontier, but it was the general store that civilized it. It was there where one could purchase some of the artifacts of the civilized East Coast, such as perhaps fancy linens and housewares, that Mrs Frontiersman could use to soften the edges of their rugged pioneer lifestyle, that would make their rough and ready log cabins their homes.

Even the smallest of Western towns eventually got their own general store. However, with so many small Western towns popping into existence in the late 19th century, prospective general store entrepreneurs knew they didn't have to open a store in a town that already had one, where they would be forced to compete with already established businesses. All they had to do is travel down the trail or rail line a ways to find a new town without an already existent general store. Thus, after a while, until the small frontier outposts grew into larger towns, the general stores were able to act as local monopolies, charging monopoly prices, surely, a deformation of the intended proper workings of free markets.

In 1888, Richard W Sears, who up to that time had been in the business of using railway station agents as wholesale distributors for his pocket watches and timepieces, came upon the idea of selling his wares directly to the public through printed mailers; this concept proved so successful that he followed it up with a catalog of general merchandise. By 1894, this Sears Catalog had grown to 322 pages. Sears used the new technology of the railroads to circumvent the established distribution networks of the general stores, in much the same way that, 100 years later, e-retailers such as Amazon.com and others used the Internet to bypass the dominant retail distribution networks of the past few years.

Sears, along with his partner Alvah Roebuck, soon developed a reputation for quality merchandise at reasonable prices, so, as the frontier closed early in the 20th century and previously small isolated outposts grew into real population centers, it was natural for Sears, Roebuck to shift its focus from mail order to actual retail stores. In 1925, Sears opened its first retail outlet, on the first floor of its Chicago mail order distribution center. The concept was an instant success; by the end of the Roaring Twenties the company was opening a new retail outlet in an American city every two days, a pace that barely slowed with the onset of the Great Depression in the 1930s.

It would be after World War II that the Golden Age of Sears would be seen. Looking ahead and projecting the tremendous outpouring of American population from the cities to the still nascent suburbs, the company started an ambitious expansion plan that placed hundreds of new Sears stores right alongside the new Interstate highways that would become the transit conduit of urban America to its new frontiers out on the golden suburban periphery. It also branched out beyond America's borders, bringing its vision of American prosperity and the good life to Canada, Mexico, Central and South America, and even opened a few stores in Western Europe.

These were the halcyon days of homogenized American suburban middle-class conformity, when most of the country lived in the same type of Levittown housing development, watched the same TV programs, ate the same TV dinners, drove the same cars, wore the same drip dry grey flannel clothes, and did much of its shopping at Sears. For decades, Sears was the number one retailer in the United States, and in 1974, when the Sears Tower in Chicago was completed and began its 22-year reign as the world's tallest building (a status that in 1996 fell to Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers), it reflected the power of the company's hubris as bestriding the immense American retail market like a colossus.

But, as the children of the baby boom grew and moved out of their, in Malvina Reynolds' phrase, "ticky tacky little boxes" (all with Sears' Kenmore line of appliances) into homes with families of their own, Sears seemed to lose its step. The single great homogenized middle class of the first decades of the postwar era was atomizing into smaller subsets that demanded more personalized consumer choices.

The "me" generation of the 1970s, a population group that once expressed its individuality through Eastern religions and recreational drug use, had conformed its conduct to traditional American social norms to such an extent that it would now do so mainly through its consumer products choices.

Instead of a nation that clothed itself in the manner that Sears' buyers thought appropriate, the middle-class component that shopped according to price put their money first at Kmart, later at Wal-Mart; those that were willing to pay up for more trendy fashions did so at more upscale clothiers Macy's and Nordstrom's. Similar market segmentations occurred with the company's once-lucrative appliance businesses, with price-conscious shoppers flocking to the new "category killers" of Home Depot and Best Buy, while those willing to pay up for a more upscale cachet than what Sears was offering with its Kenmore line found their own outlets.

By 1991 Wal-Mart replaced Sears as America's leading retailer and has never looked back since. Sears, its stores consistently seen as stodgy and old fashioned, its "all for one and one for all" marketing philosophy seen as out of step with the times, lacking in that now all-important amorphous marketing quality known as "pop", settled into a graceful, steady decline.

That was the condition of the company in 2004, when it had the misfortune to catch the attention of modern turbo-finance capitalism.

Some people, when they see some poor unfortunate lying on the ground, help the person to their feet. Not modern turbo-finance; it saw Sears lying in the gutter, decided like a vampire that there was no reason why the very lifeblood should not be drained from it.

That year, 2004, was when one Edward S "Eddie" Lampert, a 42-year-old former Goldman Sachs bond trader, showed stodgy old Sears the way the world now really works. Through his ESL hedge fund, Lampert had established a 53% majority controlling interest in Kmart, which, in the futile attempt of trying to compete with the larger and more efficient Wal-Mart to offer the lowest prices in town, had bankrupted itself. Lampert closed stores and slashed jobs, restoring the company to operating profitability.

By 2004, Kmart's regular stream of income, generated by people making their regular purchases of cat food and deodorant, had accumulated itself into a $3 billion war chest. Lampert had no intention of plowing this sum back into the company, to modernize its dowdy stores, or, more importantly, its creaky supply and distribution system, in order for it to compete more effectively with Wal-Mart. He had far bigger and grander ideas. He was going to use Kmart's cash stream to finance his rise to become the capitalist world's next super billionaire, a younger, and richer version of Warren Buffett.

By early 2005, Lampert was ready for his next big step towards the stars. An $11 billion buyout deal for Sears by Lampert's Kmart was how the media interpreted a complex deal that was announced on November 17 of the previous year. What was really going on here was that Lampert's ESL hedge fund was folding both Sears and Kmart into a single corporate entity, to be called Sears Holdings.

Overnight, Lampert became one of the titans of American retailing, ironic, for then and since, he has demonstrated little or no interest in the successful retail operations of his enterprise.

Unlike many of the other mammoths of American merchandising, you never would find him down on the sales floor, making sure the restrooms were clean or that the salesclerks on the return desks were courteous. No, in running perhaps the most fabled, trusted name in American commerce, Lampert gave every indication that he cared very little about the enterprise that others before him had labored over a century to build.

Although both Sears and Kmart both maintained their separate store identities, (which did not stop Nike, not wanting to be tainted from any downmarket reek possibly wafting over from declasse K-Mart, from pulling its wares from Sears) in reality, a strange form of symbiosis between Sears, Kmart and ESL developed that essentially blurred the demarcation lines between all three.

In essence, during his now more than three-year term as the chief executive of Sears Holdings, Lampert has conclusively proven that he has very little interest in the actual retail operation of Sears. Same-store, year-over-year sales, the key metric for retail success, have spiraled down month after month, quarter after quarter, even though the first years of Lampert's reign were a time of significant US economic growth-with attendant free spending by US consumers.

Retail advertising budgets have been slashed. Funding for maintenance, upkeep and renovation for the stores have been cut way back; at many shopping centers, the Sears store is becoming more the mall eyesore than its anchor. As for investing the capital to maintain healthy levels of inventory in both stores, so that customers don't find empty shelves when coming in to look for a product and then turn around and never come back, well, that's not all that important anymore, either.

You might think that any retailer acting in such cavalier contravention to time-honored retail principles might have received the highest possible measure of approbation and sanction from Wall Street.

Not true. During the first two years of the Lampert reign, the stock market adored Sears Holdings. The stock was up 15% in 2005, 47% in 2006, as opposed to much more modest rises of 2.5% and 7% for those years in the general RTH retail stock index.

What could be the cause of this seeming contradiction? Had the stock market, or at least the specialist station where Sears Holdings was traded, entered a bizarre sort of Fantastic Four reversed dimension, where bad corporate practices were now good, and incompetent management now adored?

If only the explanation were this innocent. In reality, what has been happening with both Kmart and Sears during the Lampert era was that the operating expenses for both entities have been cut to the bone, in order to free up the billions that Lampert would use for hedge fund speculation at ESL. The point was no longer to manage these respected entities in such a manner that they would flourish and thrive for the benefit of the stockholders, the employees and the communities in which they and the customers lived; now, it was to generate large returns for the shareholders alone (of which Lampert was, of course, the largest one) and keep Sears and Kmart alive long enough to bleed them dry.

Looked at in this light, the stock's superior returns in 2005 and 2006 are easy to understand. Those two years were very good vintages for the hedge fund industry. As I explained in Hedge Funds: Playing dice with the universe (Asia Times Online, July 6, 2006), those were the days when the funds had discovered a very simple way to make absolute scads of money. If everybody took massive similar positions in the same investment, these positions, simply through the weight of the amount of money being directed at them, could not help but appreciate. Reading the financial media from that time, I half expected to see a picture of Lampert water-skiing on Long Island Sound, with an accompanying caption announcing that "Eddie Lampert Now Walks on Water".

But as all readers of this site well know, things sure changed in 2007. Many of the hedge fund strategies that paid off like slot machine jackpots in the previous two years, such as huge heavily leveraged bets on subprime mortgage paper, came up lemons last year. Sears Holdings' profits fell 99% from the third quarter of 2006 to the same period of 2007. The stock is down 50% from its high in April of 2007, as opposed to a less than 5% decline by the RTH retail index.

Also,the news that Lampert's ESL bought an $800 million stake last year in Citigroup, just before the subprime storm made landfall, when the stock was trading at $51 (as opposed to its current price of under $24) has not helped him further his burning desire to be known as the Dauphin to King Buffett of Omaha, either.

Herb Greenberg of the Moneywatch web site named Lampert as the worst chief executive officer of 2007; considering last year's competition, quite the distinction.

Sears stockholders, who two years ago toasted young prince Eddie as their risen savior, are now an ornery, ill-tempered, mean-spirited crew. Last February, Lampert tried to convince them to stand firm and true; he actually compared himself to Eli Manning, the American football quarterback who led his underdog New York Giants to an improbable win over the heavily favored New England Patriots in last February's Super Bowl. In response, I'm sure that many of his stockholders would have reacted favorably to the sight of Lampert being briskly "sacked" by a whole side of 150 kilogram American football linebackers.

To this observer, the sorry saga of Sears illustrates just how far distorted American ethics and values have become from exposure to the great credit and money carnival of the past few years. "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned," Karl Marx wrote in 1848. In this case, nobody thought twice, nobody blinked an eye, when Wall Street took a truly unique American institution, Sears, and turned it from a fine, respected American society matron into a common streetwalker reduced to pimping through the night for Eddie Lampert.

Last year, the New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson noted that more American national income was produced by financial engineers, people like Lampert who manipulate the amorphous abstraction called money, than by the mechanical engineers who manipulate actual physical realities such as steel, concrete, mortar and oil. In his new book Bad Money (reviewed May 10 by Joe Costello), Kevin Phillips notes that "By 2004-6, financial services represented 20 to 21 percent of gross domestic product, manufacturing just 12 to 13 percent."

Somewhere along the line, America got the idea that the buck generated from financial services, from manipulating money, from passing it from hand to hand, was equivalent, or even superior to (after all, you come home with a lot better smelling clothes after a day on the trading floor compared to a day at the steel mill) the same buck made actually making and sustaining something - such as the great brand Sears once was.

Here is the actual core of the current crisis of American overconsumption. The music has stopped, the dance is over, the great credit and money creation machine of the past few years has shut down. As the dust settles, we see that, for all the money, and supposed wealth, created over the past few years, very little of actual value, of real worth remains. As does now Lampert's, as does now America's, and its dream of endless wealth created through little or no actual work, phantasms still dance into and out of our world with the pages of a calendar, and only the very foolish mistake their ever-vertiginous presence with reality.

Somewhere in all the packing boxes my wife and I are yet to unpack almost two years after our house move are the pictures she had taken every year of our son, in the 1970s and 1980s, at the Sears Portrait Studio. Millions of other 20- to 50-year-old Americans have similar pictures, from the same source.

Very few observers think that Sears can survive much longer, still under withering competitive pressure from Wal-Mart and being bled to death by the likes of Lampert. In a few years, our granddaughter will see the pictures of her daddy at her age, wonder what the "Sears" means on the back of the picture.

If my son asks me what to tell her (and, come on, how likely is that?), this is what I will say. "Honey, sometimes grownups act very silly."

Julian Delasantellis is a management consultant, private investor and educator in international business in the US state of Washington. He can be reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.

www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/JE14Dj03.html