Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream

Local newspapers, retail chains like Toys R Us, rural hospitals, affordable housing: all things that are being driven from our landscape by impersonal but inevitable market forces, right? The winds may already be against these institutions, but Greenwell—who saw her own publication, Deadspin, similarly dismantled—argues that their true destroyer has been private equity, a giant loophole in American capitalism that has created a class of billionaires through a nearly risk-free system that allows takeover specialists to borrow against the companies they hoover up and book massive profits even when the companies fail. It's an infuriating story, given a sliver of hope through her portraits of four workers who have found meaning in activism against their predators.