… dark covid days (altering a Joni Mitchell phrase here), the Economist promises many corporate scandals once they’re over.

As with their private jet–aided appeals to lower emissions, the 1 percent’s virtue signaling about social distancing during this outbreak obscures the fact that they’ve helped make the crisis worse. Even starved of their chefs and personal shoppers, the rich might be able to weather Covid-19 in their summer homes. Their worldview, on the other hand, may not be so lucky—and could face an angrier, more organized public on the other side.

… this cause does. Help the guys loosen the grip of the feds! It’s up to us to pay their fine.

Jean Girard reads Camus while driving.

The Before and After; the Hi Di High and the Hi Di Low; the Mother-Teresa-to-Maserati in Ten Seconds Flat… You gotta get a kick out of this recent article about CEO of the Month Larry Gerrans, who

considers Mother Teresa as the person whose life contribution is the most inspirational, because of how selfless and pure of intention she was.

Larry — now, er, formalized in court papers to Lawrence —

has been convicted of wire fraud and money laundering for “siphoning millions of dollars” from his company to buy a $2.6 million home, a diamond ring and a Maserati, federal prosecutors said.

LOL. ME LIKE!

When one of your most ruthless traders turns out to steal pretty much everything he encounters in his daily life, he is displaying exactly the grasping arrogant psychopathology you’re after. Despite his millions in compensation, he finds nothing too small to steal – bike parts, commuter train tickets… and now, cafeteria food. The boy can’t help it.

The response to this compulsion is not oooh you’re immoral and we’re a saintly hedge fund so satan get thee hence. The proper response is a nice fat bonus.

... (scroll down; read the whole page) you’d be SO not surprised at the Jeffrey Epstein story! Boys’ clubs will be boys’ clubs – they’ll ignore bad boys forever cuz they kinda like them.

… I love the photo of the amphorae.

 Once upon a time there was a business
Where we used to raise a price or two
Remember how we settled suits for peanuts
And dreamed up all the dirty deals we'd do

Those were the days my friend
We thought they'd never end

Inflation schemes, price fixing, bribery
We'd gut the lives we'd choose
We'd fight and never lose
For we were rich and sure to have our way

 Now generic prices are in tatters
For distribution too we'll have to pay 
Our current debt load's twenty seven billion
Ruefully we smile and weep and say  

Yes I remember well

We were corrupt as hell

And now our smiles have all turned into frowns.

But then you take my hand and tell me Here's the plan

We're gonna take our cash and double-down

A blog like this one, which features a much-used category titled Beware the B-School Boys, welcomes a bunch of new books with titles like Nothing Succeeds like Failure: The Sad History of American Business Schools and Leadership BS. Also a bunch of new opinion pieces with titles like We Should Bulldoze the Business School. Very nice.

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

UPDATE: Right on cue. A perfectly timed news item on the subject just broke, and it’s being widely covered for all the wrong reasons. Everyone’s hyperventilating about a photogenic go-getter abundantly and shamelessly lying her way into a high-profile job in the current… troubled federal government. Said she went to schools she didn’t go to. Bought her degree from a diploma mill. (Read this page while you can.)

But as you know if you read this blog in its infant days, diploma mills (see that UD category) are a permanent structural reality of all countries. It’s a quirk of the United States that when people here find out you bought your college or graduate degree they actually get upset and do something about it. Most countries don’t care. This is why you want to wait til you get back to the States for that surgery.

So the fact that Mina Chang is a diploma mill grad who claims on her cv to have graduated from Harvard is a ho-hum revelation. Generous chunks of the military, fire departments, and public education are all milled up. Why those locations in particular? Because if you demand an advanced degree for job advancement, people will, er, advance them.

No: The real story lies here:

According to her educational history on LinkedIn, Chang writes that she took part in an “Executive Nonprofit Leadership” program at Southern Methodist University in Texas.

The Non Profit Leadership Certificate Program is a six-day program with a $900 fee.

That’s right, kiddies: Leadership BS at nine hundred (with travel, etc. let’s make it an even thousand) for SIX DAYS. Can you imagine the amazing leadership bs you’re getting for that moolah? Reminds ol’ UD of this 2011 six day New Zealand bs leadership seminar (run by a diploma mill grad – beginning to see the synergy?) that cost around $13,000 dollars in American currency. Or, closer to home, there’s this (quoting meself in a 2010 post about leadership bs seminars paid for by the federal government):

The Center for Creative Leadership doesn’t just have a great name.  It’s located on ONE LEADERSHIP PLACE, Greensboro, North Carolina.  Its street is a leader. This alone perhaps warrants a certain premium for leadership trainees who, even as their rented cars pull up to CCL headquarters, can sense that the very ground upon which they motor is imbued with leadership.

A five-day leadership course at the CCL will cost you between $6200 and $10,600.

And that’s not all, folks! Here’s another example of your tax dollars at work, again from a 2010 post:

[Let’s see what] the Kennedy School is charging these days for their Senior Executive whatever — all of it paid by the government.  The school has just raised the tuition.  It now costs almost $20,000 for four weeks… The costs for this and similar four-week courses offered by other outfits the Office of Personnel Management uses are 460% higher than all costs for one month at an average private American university.

As Michael Kinsley once wrote, the scandal isn’t what’s illegal; the scandal is what’s legal. That a hyper-ambitious young person would survey Trump University World and come to certain conclusions is no scandal. That the federal government enables, and schools like Harvard exploit, the leadership racket is, if you ask UD, scandalous.

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

Oh, whoops. Forgot the big shocking news item about Chang and that leadership program. Shockingly, she didn’t really attend it. Shockingly, she listed it on her resume but actually did not attend.

UD finds this admirable. I ain’t saying I’d hire the woman! But she definitely shows good sense here.

… as the old saying goes – cuz you always need a bottom… If you’re Alabam, you thank God that at least you’re always one step up from Mississippi in all the state rankings cuz for sure Mississippi will always be dead last…

And ah say ah say this here Mississippi politician won’t let women interview him lessn they have a male chaperone which is soooooo Saudi it gets me all excited like.

… and everyone sort of maneuvers a life around being corrupt… So that if you, say, get arrested for corruption, and even if you go to jail for a year or eight for corruption, okay. Occupational hazard, and maybe you’ve even anticipated and mentally adjusted to the possibility. You have a terrific attorney; you’ve acquainted yourself with the nicest lockups in your country, etc. You’re a man, after all, and men man up and face the music if they have to. UD has always, along these lines, been very fond of Enron’s Andrew Fastow, who, you know, did his time, and came out sardonic and stoical about it. He gives amusing lectures to business ethics classes.

But every now and then you encounter a figure of pathos, like Alan Garcia.Clearly not willing to play the game.

A song about cathedrals and Paris.

You know her voice from We’ll Meet Again at the end of Strangelove.

And listen: The life-force in that powerful voice ain’t chopped liver — she’s still alive, at 102.

Which is fitting, because he might be getting arrestoed.

UD‘s only on the second paragraph, and already she’s cheering. Thanks, dmf, for the link.

For my own modest contribution to the Leadership thing, go here, here, and here.

Oh, and here.