The Tea Party was perfectly hijacked and destroyed months ago....

....Both economic and regulatory factors combined to spur the explosion in large takeovers and, in turn, large LBOs. The three regulatory factors were the Reagan administration's relatively laissez-faire policies on antitrust and securities laws, which allowed mergers the government would have challenged in earlier years; the 1982 Supreme Court decision striking down state antitakeover laws (which were resurrected with great effectiveness in the late eighties); and deregulation of many industries, which prompted restructurings and mergers. The main economic factor was the development of the original-issue high-yield debt instrument. The so-called "junk bond" innovation, pioneered by Michael Milken of Drexel Burnham, provided many hostile bidders and LBO firms with the enormous amounts of capital needed to finance multi-billion-dollar deals.... www.econlib.org...

Leveraged buyouts involve an investor, financial sponsors or private equity firms making large acquisitions without committing all the capital required for the acquisition. To do this, a financial sponsor will raise acquisition debt which is ultimately secured upon the acquisition target... en.wikipedia.org...

In other words the investor is placing a mortgage on property he does not OWN!!!

...In January 1982, former US Secretary of the Treasury William Simon and a group of investors acquired Gibson Greetings, a producer of greeting cards, for $80 million, of which only $1 million was rumored to have been contributed by the investors. By mid-1983, just sixteen months after the original deal, Gibson completed a $290 million IPO and Simon made approximately $66 million. The success of the Gibson Greetings investment attracted the attention of the wider media to the nascent boom in leveraged buyouts.[10] Between 1979 and 1989, it was estimated that there were over 2,000 leveraged buyouts valued in excess of $250 billion... en.wikipedia.org...

....These days, corporations seem to exist for the investment bankers.... In fact, investment banks are replacing the publicly held industrial corporations as the largest and most powerful economic institutions in America.... THERE ARE SIGNS THAT A VICIOUS spiral has begun, as each corporate player seeks to improve its standard of living at the expense of another's. Corporate raiders transfer to themselves, and other shareholders, part of the income of employees by forcing the latter to agree to lower wages. January 29, 1989 New York Times: LEVER AGED BUYOUTS: AMERICAN PAYS THE PRICE

...In the 1980s during the great takeover boom and hollowing out of the industrial heartland, many states adopted amendments to their corporate codes that codified directors' fiduciary duties, so-called "constituency statutes". In general, these provisions made it clear that a director need not "maximize shareholder value." Rather, in complying with their fiduciary obligations, directors may take all sorts of things into consideration - the impact of their decisions on various constituencies, including employees, the community, the environment, the color of the sky, whatever...

The 1980s LBO boom was a scourge for management. They used whatever tools at their disposal to prevent an acquisition... The Delaware courts stepped in... In short, the message from the courts was that boards did not have a free hand to put off all takeover attempts... [remember many firms are incorporated in delaware because of business friendly laws] lawprofessors.typepad.com...