MICHAEL WALSH: What’s Good For General Bullmoose. “Gerald M. Levin, who died last week at the age of 84, will be little noted nor long remembered by the American public, yet his name should live in corporate infamy. As the man who destroyed Time Inc. via a unique combination of ambition, pomposity, luck, greed, unctuousness, and stupidity, Levin is one of the great villains of 20th-century American and journalistic history and a now-deceased exemplar for everything that’s wrong with big business, Wall Street, and the grubby managerial class that controls the lives of millions of people. Look on his Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Don’t mince words, Michael. Say what you really mean here.

Plus: “As John Cassidy wrote in his 2013 post-mortem of the ongoing wreckage in The New Yorker: ‘About the only ones who consistently benefitted from Time Inc.’s transformation into part of a multimedia conglomerate were the bankers and lawyers who put the deals together.’ Not to mention the execs who profited from it. If you’re looking for a point when it all went wrong with the American economy, the murder of Time Inc. at the hands of Levin & Co. is a good place to start.”

Our nation is run by people who live by Rhett Butler’s observation that there’s as much money to be made in tearing down a civilization as in building one up.