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Just a couple of eye-roll-worthy lunchtime links today: Chicago police union head John Catanzara, who I referred to on Facebook yesterday as a "whiny, belligerent infant," has quit the CPD and announced a run for mayor. My previous comments stand. Sears closed its last remaining store in its home state of Illinois on Sunday. I still hate Eddie Lampert for it. Michelle Goldberg takes the "social justice industry" to task for policing words instead of accomplishing real change. Ordinarily-idyllic coastal...

So many things this morning, including a report not yet up on WBEZ's website about the last Sears store in Chicago. (I'll find it tomorrow.) Jennifer Rubin advises XPOTUS "critics and democracy lovers" to leave the Republican Party. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) completely caved against a unified Democratic Party and will vote to extend the (probably-unconstitutional) debt limit another three months. An abolitionist's house from 1869 may get landmark approval today from the Commission on...

Eddie Lampert, corporate murderer, has managed to drive his once-great company out if its home state: Sears' last Illinois location, at Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg, is set to close in November. The Hoffman Estates-based retailer’s parent company, Transformco, announced the decision today. "This is part of the company's strategy to unlock the value of the real estate and pursue the highest and best use for the benefit of the local community," the company said in a statement. Ah, yes, because under the...

Eddie Lampert continues to destroy the once-great retailer Sears piece by piece. Yesterday, the company revealed that it has sold the DieHard battery brand to Advance Auto Parts for $200m in cash: The move follows news in October that Sears had hired investment bankers to advise it on potential asset sales, including the DieHard brand, according to the Wall Street Journal at the time. Sears has spent the last several years selling key brands to receive cash infusions and survive. In 2017, it sold the...

As the House Judiciary Committee goes through the unfortunately necessary step of having expert witnesses state the obvious, other things caught my attention over the course of the morning: The Trump Administration has changed the rules for receiving food stamps, which will drop 3 million needy people from food assistance. The Atlantic's Franklin Foer outlines the betrayal of Volodymyr Zelensky. Somehow, local Chicago microbrewery Kings and Convicts has bought the much-larger Ballast Point Brewery. To...

Two made the news this week. First, Lampert has sued Sears (which he owns) for not conveying property that his investment firm bought from the doomed retailer: Lampert's Transform is accusing the Sears estate, a bankrupt shell entity that is winding down under court supervision, of multiple wrongs including breaking the agreement by holding on to the chain's headquarters in Illinois. The estate is also intentionally delaying payments to vendors and trying to shift $166 million in accounts payable costs...

While waiting for the Mueller Report to download (spare a moment to pity the Justice Department's servers), an alert came in from Crain's: The bankrupt estate of Sears Holdings Corp. sued Eddie Lampert and his hedge fund ESL Investments Inc., claiming they wrongly transferred $2 billion of company assets beyond the reach of creditors in the years leading up to the retailer’s bankruptcy. “Had defendants not taken these improper and illegal actions, Sears would have had billions of dollars more to pay its...

On Thursday, a court accepted Eddie Lampert's $5.2 bn bid to keep Sears running and himself as its head: Lampert’s purchase, made through his hedge fund, ESL Investments, is intended to keep 425 Sears and Kmart stores open, preserving some 45,000 jobs. It was the only bid submitted in an auction that would have kept the once-mighty department store giant in business and avoid liquidation. Lampert’s plan was opposed by a committee of unsecured creditors skeptical that Hoffman Estates-based Sears will be...

In descending order of pissed-off-making: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called making Election Day a holiday "a power grab," because more people voting does in fact take power away from the Republican Party. (We used to call this sort of thing a gaffe.) US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) criticized adolescent Sears Holdings CEO Eddie Lampert for exactly the things The Daily Parker has criticized him for all along. "It appears that you have enriched yourself while driving the company into...

The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation—read: the government—read: us, as we live in a frickin' REPUBLIC—has taken over the Sears Holdings pension fund because, basically, Eddie Lampert has driven it into the ground: The agency covers individuals’ pensions, up to certain limits, if an insured pension plan shuts down without enough money to pay all benefits. It estimates Sears’ two pension plans are underfunded by about $1.4 billion. As a creditor, the agency could attempt to recover some of that money...

Over the weekend, Sears Holdings Corp. started making preparations for winding down the business, after chairman and company killer Eddie Lampert's bid fell apart: The iconic retailer started laying the groundwork for a liquidation after meetings Friday in which its advisers weighed the merits of a $4.4 billion bid by Lampert’s hedge fund to buy Sears as a going concern, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the discussions are private. If the 125-year-old retailer does die in...

Two good stories and a bad one. First, a good story: Chicago now has more breweries than any other city in the US: The metro region has surged past several longtime stalwarts to become home to more breweries than any other city in the nation — 167 — according to statistics published this week by the Brewers Association. Behind it are the metro areas that for years Chicago beer drinkers could only envy: Denver (158), Seattle (153) and San Diego (150). In fifth and sixth places are two other large cities...

Eddie Lampert's hedge fund proposes to buy Sears for $4.6 bn: The bid from Lampert’s ESL Investments includes about 500 Sears and Kmart stores, headquarters and distribution centers, and Sears brands and businesses including Kenmore, DieHard and Sears Home Services. “ESL believes that a future for Sears as a going concern is the only way to preserve tens of thousands of jobs and bring continued economic benefits to the many communities across the United States that are touched by Sears and Kmart...

The Chicago Tribune points out that Sears' $5 bn in losses could actually help the guy who killed it, Eddie Lampert: As of the retailer's bankruptcy on Oct. 15, Sears estimated it had net operating losses it could use to offset $5 billion of future taxable income, and separate tax credits of around $900 million. These are the most valuable assets Sears has, and under U.S. tax law, they could disappear in bankruptcy if another company or investor takes the company over. When a company has accumulated net...

We have a deployment at work tonight at 5pm (because in financial firms, you always deploy at 5pm on Friday). Fortunately, we've already done a full test, so we're looking forward to a pretty boring deployment tonight. Fortunately, we have the Internet, which has provided me with all of these things to read: It turns out, men are responsible for 100% of all unwanted pregnancies. Real, live diplomats explain how to respond to something like Jamal Khashoggi's apparent murder, and how we're not actually...

As predicted, Eddie Lampert has succeeded in driving Sears into the ground: In announcing the news, Sears said Edward Lampert stepped down as CEO effective immediately and remains chairman. Sears and Kmart stores and online platforms will remain open, though the company also said it would close 142 unprofitable stores near yearend, with liquidation sales at those locations "expected to begin shortly." The company said it has commitments for $300 million of debtor-in-possession financing from its senior...

Oh, Sears. You've come to represent much that is wrong with American corporate culture, especially a CEO who embodies the Dunning-Krueger Effect with every syllable he utters. Crain's Joe Cahill argues that Eddie Lampert, while Sears' proximate cause of death, didn't act alone in its murder: There's no denying the hedge fund mogul who thought he knew more about retailing than the retailers made critical errors that turned Sears' struggles into an inexorable decline. But Sears started down the wrong path...

Crains is reporting this morning that Sears has hired bankruptcy advisors and could file in the next couple of days: [S]taffers of the advisory firm, New York-based M-III Partners, have been observed at the troubled retailer's Hoffman Estates headquarters in recent days. Sears, meanwhile, continues to evaluate other options that could still avert a trip to Bankruptcy Court. Separately, Sears added restructuring expert Alan Carr to its board of directors as the company faces critical debt repayments and...

After Eddie Lampert refused to advance any more cash to his failing retail chain, Crain's editorial board concluded Sears may be about to file for bankruptcy protection: Tracking the slow-motion collapse of what used to be Sears Roebuck has been sort of like watching a glacier melt: You know it's happening, but it's tough to detect it with the naked eye. That is, until a Delaware-size chunk breaks off, which is what happened when the once-giant retailer recently unveiled a "liability management" plan...

Long-time readers know how much I hate what Eddie Lampert has done to Sears (recent example here). Now, apparently, even he thinks the company is done for: Edward Lampert's proposed debt reduction plan for Sears Holdings is noteworthy for what it doesn't include: any commitment of new funds from the hedge fund mogul/CEO himself for the floundering retailer he has controlled since 2005. That may be why the plan landed with such a thud on Wall Street. Sears stock tumbled 7 percent after Sears disclosed...

Of course I'm going to blog about these three articles. First, former George W. Bush speechwriter and lifelong Republican Michael Gerson looks at the culture of celebrity that surrounds the President and says "our republic will never be the same:" The founders generally believed that the survival and success of a republic required leaders and citizens with certain virtues: moderation, self-restraint and concern for the common good. They were convinced that respect for a moral order made ordered liberty...

Eddie Lampert's hedge fund, ESL, is making a bid to buy the only remaining viable piece of Sears from, well, ESL: ESL’s proposal valued Kenmore at $400 million, excluding the impact of cash or debt, according to a letter from ESL to a Sears board committee that was filed Tuesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission. A separate proposal valued the Sears Home Services division’s home improvement business at $70 million, with a potential extra $10 million if the company met certain financial...

I despise Eddie Lampert. The harm he has caused Sears and the people who work for the company should be criminal. But he's going to continue to get rich driving it into the ground selling the real estate from its carcass. Tomorrow, the last store in the company's home town will close, just shy of its 80th anniversary: The Six Corners store, on the edge of Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood, will shut its doors for the last time Sunday, two months shy of its 80th anniversary. The closure is part of...

I've had a lot of things going on at work the past couple of weeks, and not many free evenings, leading to these link round-up posts that add nothing to the conversation. But there should be a conversation, and here are some topics: President Trump and Jeff Sessions have shifted US immigration enforcement policy such that cruel, unfair, and harmful treatment of immigrants is no longer an unintended consequence—it's now the point. Let's not forget that Dinesh D'Souza, who Trump just pardoned, didn't just...

Longtime readers know how much I loathe Eddie Lampert for what he did to Sears and for how perfectly he demonstrates the dangers of slavishly following a philosophy that owes a lot to the thought processes of adolescent boys. Well, my longtime predictions seem to be coming true. Lampert has offered to buy the best bits of Sears (i.e., its real estate and Kenmore brand), which would quickly kill the company. Crain's Joe Cahill outlines some of the offal in this awful person's proposal: It's not clear...

Longtime readers know how much I loathe Eddie Lampert, who represents to me everything that is wrong with the adolescent philosophy emitted years ago by Ayn Rand. Well, in next month's Vanity Fair, William Cohan sits down with the child king of hedge funds and hears him out: [Lampert's] triumphs are largely obscured by his worst mistake: the 2005 merging of Sears, the iconic retailer whose doorstop mail-order catalogue was once a fixture in nearly every American home, with the downmarket Kmart chain...

The Tribune has two sad stories this evening. First, the FCC has taken steps to end the main-studio rule—apparently to allow the Sinclair/Tribune deal to go through: The regulation, which was first adopted almost 80 years ago, requires broadcasters to have a physical studio in or near the areas where they have a license to transmit TV or radio signals. Known as the "main studio rule," the regulation ensured that residents of a community could have a say in their local broadcast station's operations. "At...

I'm about to fly to San Antonio for another round of researching how the military tracks recruits from the time they get to the processing center to the time they leave for boot camp (officially "Military Basic Training" or MBT). I have some stuff to read on the plane: WPA, which is probably securing your WiFi, has been hacked after 14 years. Great. At least SSL is still secure. The New Republic claims that Republicans are ignoring the will of the people by tossing out ballot initiatives. (This is not...

The Sears death watch continues. Eddie Lampert's combination of incompetence and narcissism has now officially destroyed Sears Canada: Sears Canada plans to liquidate its remaining stores with the loss of about 12,000 jobs, unable to fend off the march to online shopping after operating in malls and towns across the country for 65 years. The Toronto-based chain will seek court approval for the filing on Friday and begin liquidation sales at its remaining 150 stores on Oct. 19 at the earliest, according...

This past Sunday's New York Times magazine summed up the decline and imminent death of Sears. It's worth a read, though long-time readers of this blog know it's an old story.