I’ve talked a lot on this blog about the corrupting effect of big pharma money in the American university, especially in the hard to define and hard to diagnose area of depression. I’ve talked about the mindless defensiveness on the part of some academics to growing evidence of the largely placebo effect of anti-depressant pills for millions of people who take them.

But I’ve never seen anything like what some Israeli academics are doing with these pills when a rabbi brings to their office a haredi Jew who does not conform to haredi culture.

[Professor Omer Bonne sanctions] prescribing antidepressant pills from the SSRI family (most commonly used for the treatment of depression, anxiety disorders and some personality disorders ) for yeshiva students who masturbate excessively, or have sexual relations with other men, yet do not suffer from depression.

Bonne justified the use of these pills by pointing out that their side effects reduce sexual urges; he argued that such medication preempts possible destructive conflicts between the men and their surroundings, and the pills might also preempt conditions of depression.

A prominent psychiatrist cited in the report justified the use of lithium – medication ordinarily used for bipolar disorders – in certain cases where a man or woman suddenly decides to stop observing religious commandments, or to break up the family unit. The psychiatrist said that in some cases, such behavior derives from conditions such as mania.

Bonne and other psychiatrists confirmed that some of the patients come to clinics accompanied by rabbis or various “supervisors” associated with yeshivas. Sometimes, the religious pupils’ families are not notified of these visits. The psychiatrists confirmed that the rabbis or supervisors are on hand when patients are examined.

This article, in Haaretz, is difficult to read. It evokes the world of 1984, and Brave New World, in which closed and repressive cultures enforce conformity with chemicals. A senior psychiatrist interviewed for the article says: “I am stunned that people do that.”

.. slavishly imitates the Ivy League.

Harvard University professor Bill George boasts of his seat on the board of directors of Goldman Sachs, and lectures the world on “character-based leadership.” What has he done at GS?

One wonders how much louder the alarm must ring before the drowsy Goldman board stirs. Last week, a judge’s description of Blankfein’s apparent role in persuading its client El Paso Corporation to work with Goldman in a conflicted situation was top news. The week before, Goldman reported that the SEC is looking into client disclosure issues, an alleged continuing problem at the firm…

Others much further from Goldman’s epicenter have heard the alarm, so where is the bank’s board in all of this? …

Is the SEC at all relevant to Blankfein and Goldman’s board? Blankfein and Cohn did not mention the recent headlines or scrapes with the SEC in the memo to employees. Last month, SEC Chair Mary Schapiro described the need to continuously police these kinds of firms — and yesterday, Propublica traced Goldman’s troubled regulatory history over the last 12 years. With all of these troubling instances, the current board has had several opportunities to awaken and act.

The board failed to seize a big opportunity last year when it oversaw the bank’s Business Practice Review amid the fallout surrounding the company’s role in the financial crisis. That inadequate 67-page document was big on platitudes but small on substance in addressing the ethical conundrums employees face. Goldman told the Times yesterday that client success mattered to the firm. But in the instance in which you are selling what you call junk, does only the seller’s success matter and not the buyer’s?

… The board missed another opportunity yesterday. Instead of brushing off Smith’s comments, the board should have ensured that the CEO took the allegations seriously. It should have used this opportunity to communicate to employees and others that it would move to understand what actions would make all employees and stakeholders comfortable that Goldman’s deeds match their words.

Instead, the board allowed Blankfein and Cohn to take the tact most likely to shut down future whistleblowers: reject Smith’s comments as out of hand. If they are willing to do this in public, what goes on behind closed doors?

The board itself should be taking action. It’s serious when your CEO has been publicly called out by both a judge and an employee in a two-week timeframe.

And shouldn’t it be a wake-up call when stakeholders mock the employee whistleblower for being naïve, implying that everyone should know that Goldman is as bad as Smith made it sound?

… Blankfein has been on the Goldman board for nine years and some Goldman directors have served terms ranging from seven to 13 years. Are some too embedded? Where have their hearts and minds been? Hello, Goldman board. Are you awake?

To be fair, Bill has done some things on behalf of Goldman Sachs. Here he is defending tens of millions in personal compensation for GS executives:

Goldman Sachs board member and Harvard professor Bill George defended the firm’s massive bonuses and compared employees’ compensation to that of professional athletes and movie stars during a recent interview.

In an interview posted Dec. 23, 2009, George told the ideas web site Big Think “I think that one feels like the shareholder value is made up in people and you need the people there to do the job and if you don’t pay them for their performance you’ll lose them and it’s much like professional athletes and movie stars I think.”

Well, they’re sure movie stars now. Spotlight couldn’t be any more intense right now.

… sits on the Board of Directors of Goldman Sachs. Bill’s job at Goldman: Doing nothing. He has recently been joined by Barnard president Debora Spar on the Goldman board. Her job: Doing nothing. Ruth Simmons, president of Brown University, has just left the Goldman Board of Directors. Her job: Doing nothing.

[S]ix of …seven [former GS managing directors and partners] said they agreed with [Greg] Smith’s [NYT op/ed] criticism of how the firm has treated clients under Blankfein and Cohn’s management and that current members of the management committee would, too. Even so, they said they don’t expect the board of directors to take action or that anything will change because the firm has made money and outperformed most rivals.

Harvard, Barnard, Brown: Some of our best universities are Goldman-infested. In exchange for hundreds of thousands of GS dollars, some of our highest profile academics sit on their asses there, rousing themselves to approve – as Simmons did – a $68 million dollar bonus for Lloyd Blankfein. “There’s no indication … that Simmons takes her fiduciary responsibilities to Goldman’s shareholders particularly seriously,” wrote Felix Salmon of Simmon’s time at Goldman. He noted she knows virtually nothing about finance, making it absurdly easy for her to be “snowed” by Blankfein.

[GS] should get to work on the board, appointing people who will look hard at managerial business decisions, and won’t allow themselves to be snowed by Lloyd.

Or, as Salmon put it yesterday:

The real muppets, in this story, are Goldman’s board members, who have never had any real control over how the company is run. And, frankly, never will. The most remunerative skill, at Goldman, is the ability to flatter someone into believing that they’re incredibly important and clever and sophisticated, even as you’re getting that person to do exactly what’s in your own best interest. No one rises to lead Goldman Sachs who doesn’t have that skill. And you can be sure that Lloyd Blankfein uses it on the board every time he meets with them.

Everyone commenting on Muppetgate agrees that the board remains useless at best and an enabler of sick personal greed and toxic corporate culture at worst. (You’d think Harvard would be embarrassed that Incurious George promotes Me Heap Big Leader shit like this under Harvard’s name.) How disgusting that the names of some of our best universities are dragged into this mud.

Presiding over thug-ridden sports teams.

Picking up other universities’ conflict of interest discards.

Sucking up to people currently in prison.

Taking big bucks to be on boards of trustees that compromise your position and your university.

Put it all together, it spells Donna Shalala’s University of Miami. After the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, America’s most corrupt university.

… Florida A&M has in the last two weeks. After a hazing death, a hazing injury, attendant lawsuits, and now employee fraud, you’d think the university could do better than reprimand its hapless president.

Ah, now we’re getting to it. Now we’re getting to the bottom of the scum bucket.

The head of an organization representing the online for-profit schools, pissed that a congressman is opening hearings on their executives’ compensation, asks why the government isn’t going after six million dollar a year coaches.

Why should the feds harass zillionaires who pocket government money while destroying the lives of poor people, when the feds don’t harass zillionaires who pocket the same public money (through non-profit tax breaks, etc.) while destroying the country’s universities?

After all, both zillionaires take the noble cause of higher education and grind it down, down, down, down until it’s so dirty decent people avert their eyes. Why single out our whores and not theirs?

Yet the reason is simple. University football coaches give their students money and sex and great cars. For-profit school presidents give their students nothing.

[With each revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], the number of diagnosable conditions increases. With each increase, psychiatry is criticized for ‘creating’ diagnoses to: 1) increase revenue to clinicians; 2) partner with big pharma to expand the mental health market; or 3) simply raise money for the DSM publishers. Consequently, in the absence of research demonstrating that new definitions meaningfully advance the utility of our diagnoses, our credibility with the public and our medical colleagues is challenged with each DSM revision.

Psychiatric Times

… the eruption of unregulated capitalism into the university — billion-dollar tv contracts that make already filthy university athletics unspeakably filthier; massive, Goldman Sachs-run online for-profit tax siphons; university presidents who presided over obscene corporate bonuses; professors with outrageous corporate conflicts of interest, and so on.

Peter Beinart, in a post about Occupy Wall Street, considers the larger culture of destructive greed in America, and the growing outrage over “financial elites responsible for the global economic meltdown [who have] have almost entirely escaped justice.”

The Occupy Wall Street movement … represents a direct reckoning with the most powerful forces in American life, forces that are not voted in and out of office every two or four years. And it represents a belief that young Americans must force that reckoning by themselves. No politician will do it for them. Those instincts are exactly right, and we’ve never needed them more.

*******************************

UPDATE: Legal scholar Jack Balkin writes that if the American government has become so oligarchic as to violate the Constitution’s Guarantee Clause, citizens – like the Occupy Wall Street crowd – have a right – even a responsibility – to protest this violation vociferously.

The Guarantee Clause says that the United States shall guarantee to the states a republican form of government. It says that we are guaranteed a responsive government, a government that cares about the 99 percent, not a government that is of the 1 percent, by the 1 percent and for the 1 percent.

The ideals (and the fears) of the framers are still relevant today; the wisdom of the Guarantee Clause still applies. If government no longer pays attention to the vast majority of its citizens; if the government has been hijacked by the most wealthy and powerful in the country to perpetuate and expand their wealth and power; if the agencies of government have been derailed from their constitutional obligation to “promote the General Welfare,” then we no longer live under a republican form of government, and the government we have is no longer consistent with the United States Constitution.

A broken government, unresponsive to the public, is more than a misfortune. It is a violation of our basic charter– our Constitution.

William Black investigated the savings and loan scandals in the ‘eighties. You remember those. They cost American taxpayers around $500 billion and made the Milken brothers – responsible, according to many insider accounts, for much of the fraud – incredibly rich.

Decades later, noting UCLA law school’s recent enthusiastic acceptance of millions of dollars from Lowell Milken as long as UCLA names a school after him, Black reminds us what Bernie Madoff (benefactor and high-ranking Yeshiva University trustee) and so many other criminals and accomplices know: Prestige universities are reputation colonics. They are there to clean your tushy. They are Quackser Fortunes making their fortunes in the Quackser way.

This is why Black goes on to say

“The UCLA thing … is a great demonstration of one of my family sayings: ‘It’s impossible to compete with unintentional parody.'”

… but it’s uglier when the funds are meant to help minority students; and it’s even uglier than that when the embezzlers are the leadership of a university.

… will get you.

And the university promptly responded to his request: Fork over $40,000 – no – make that $100,000 – and they’re yours.

It’s hard for us to access our records! And since you’ve been so indecorous as to appeal to Hawaii state open records laws in response to our initial outright refusal of your request (“[T]he agency that oversees Hawaii’s open records law issued an advisory opinion saying the invoices must be released.”), it’s only right that we punish you.

Bad boy. Bother us again and we’ll charge you fourteen million and shoot off your kneecaps.

Gordon Gee tries to take your mind off of it.

This is an old story, and a most repellent one.

Cynical universities are in on the scam too, since it has the effect of pushing down their “admitted” percentages, making the schools look that much more attractive.