"For example, almost every mainstream story I’ve read or heard about the financial struggles of Sears, Toys R Us, and other brick-and-mortar retailers leaves out the role of private equity, debt..."

I hate it when a story spends 2 paragraphs getting to a point, and then the very first point that's made is wrong.

Am I the carry on reading or what?

I think the truth of the quoted statement hinges on the value of "mainstream". Yes, I've read articles that say the death of Toys R Us, et al. was due to a variety of factors including financial manipulations, but certainly a lot of articles and TV news went with the "Well, Amazon killed another store" simplification.

Love the guy pushing the semantic republic =/= democracy argument in the comments with real conviction, as if the solution to American political problems lies there.

Seems like the vast majority of those who make the 'we are a republic not a democracy' type have misunderstood both terms and conflate republic as representative democracy and democracy as only direct democracy.

I happened to look at some previous articles on the blog with this article and on most of them the same commenter makes a similar comment regardless of the topic of the article. That's his thing, I guess.

That was a totally off-base comment. I had to stop; scroll up again to convince myself I wasn't reading another article.