I'm old enough to remember when people like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens were famous for doing the same sort of thing. It's actually not bad in itself. The b

I'm old enough to remember when people like Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens were famous for doing the same sort of thing. It's actually not bad in itself. The bottom feeders do play a valuable role in business, just as literal bottom feeders do in ecology. When animals or plants die, the process of converting its remains into a rich substrate for new life is facilitated by various organisms specialized for that task. So it is with dying businesses, and Sears really was in a precarious position already. The travesty is that the business equivalent of beetles and worms and fungi reap such disproportionate benefit from the process. They consume the entire husk themselves, leaving a metaphorical desert instead of rich loam. The leverage of having enough money to buy one company translates into personal profit and thus even greater leverage for the next buyout. That's how you end up with an economy dominated by termites, hollowing it out instead of helping it grow.