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DEI-Bashing and the Battle for the Soul of Big Law

  T here was a time, not long ago, when a major corporate law firm would look to burnish its “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” credentials in the marketplace. At which point that firm might hire a writer like, say, me. It was a given that Big Law firms needed to become more diverse, at least if they wanted to stay relevant in a work environment that was no longer male, white, straight, and old. Firms everywhere invested real money in the recruitment, training, and promotion of lawyers from widely varied backgrounds, and they paid people like me to brag about it to the world. Every firm needed a DEI page on its website. Some wanted printed brochures. Some wanted advertising. Most wanted the legal community, especially law schools, to know about their diversity efforts. Law schools were by then rating firms by their DEI “scores,” and the firms with the best scores were getting the pick of the litter from the graduating classes. What I liked about the work was...
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If You Were Putin, What Would You Do?

  S o let’s say you’re Vladimir Putin. Scary, I know. But let’s just say you’d been trained by the old KGB to hate the United States with a white-hot passion that you’ve had on simmer since long before you became dictator. It’s a hate you were taught in the Brezhnev years, which were almost as bad as Stalin’s but with mass death ruled out, more or less. You nursed the hate through the convulsions of the early nineties, when your beloved Soviet Union was scrapped and replaced with economic chaos and widespread privation, which the Russian people somehow endured, as usual. Then finally, in 2000, you got your shot. You took over the whole country, and your hate was given room to breathe. Still you took your time. Fourteen years till you “annexed” Crimea and moved on the Donbass. Two more years before you engineered Brexit and the self-destruction of the UK, the same year you stole a U.S. presidential election for a pliable con man you’ve owned for three decades...

Chuck Schumer Isn’t Quite the Villain He’s Being Cast As

  E verybody’s pissed off at Chuck Schumer. His handling of last Friday’s continuing resolution (CR) vote has been widely excoriated, and calls for his head have been loud and rude, as befits the times. But even before the actual vote, I was thinking that his very public decision to not filibuster the CR — thereby allowing it to pass — was, in fact, the right one. To be sure, it meant allowing a deeply atrocious bill to become law. The consequences of that bill will need to be addressed, first in court, then in any strategy we can devise to save the country from these repulsive people, but I’ll get back to you on that. In the meantime, Schumer made his decision with eyes wide open. He expected to take heat for it, and he wasn’t disappointed. His reasoning is on the record. He says, I think accurately, that if the government were to be shut down, only “essential personnel” could be called in to work, but that it would be up to the executive branch to decid...

On What Planet is This Good for Business?

  W here’s the upside of all this wanton destruction? Once you intentionally tear down a flawed but quite-workable system, once you reduce it to smoking ruins, once you’ve thrown much of your population into high-stress survival mode, what’s the benefit? And whose benefit is it? As I said last week , the biggest benefit always goes to Putin. But he’s not the only one looking to make the most of the chaos. Closer to home, there are any number of billionaires aspiring to oligarch status, plainly looking for opportunity in this new world order. I’ll use the word ‘oligarch’ as a catch-all for the extravagantly rich and powerful, as well as for the corporate interests they control and the negative influence they exert. Some are household names, but most stay well under the radar. Think of them as today’s Robber Barons. And they will indeed find ways to increase their wealth under the Trump regime. Which apparently, for some profoundly misguided reason, is ...

The Putin Agenda is Doing Just Fine

  A s I’m sure you’ve noticed, the rhetoric coming from the vandals is utterly bonkers. As usual, it’s all lies, but it’s also a sideshow. It’s there to distract us. None of what’s really happening is about DEI, though the rhetoric about it is hot and thick. Nor is it about woke, trans women playing sports, or anything about efficiency, waste, fraud, or abuse. Yes, the vandals value the degradation of non-whites, non-Christians, non-citizens, and non-men. And yes, the deep well of cruelty we see bubbling to the surface wouldn’t surprise anyone living in, say, the thirteenth century. Nonetheless, that’s all a sideshow. The main event, what this is really about — and the lens through which we all need to see it — is exactly as Nancy Pelosi once put it: “All roads lead to Putin.” If the atrocious actions we’ve seen from the vandals in the last month have one thing in common, it’s that they all, without exception, harm America and benefit Putin. There can ...

A Few F-Bombs, Which Seem Appropriate to the Current Situation

  I try not to write the word ‘fuck’ too often. This is not from any prudishness or discomfort — I use it regularly in everyday speech — but seeing it in writing quickly gets old and tired. I do use it occasionally for effect, but the effect is usually minimal. In this post, however, I can’t get around it. This one is about the ironic, unintended meanings of the redneck t-shirt slogan “Fuck Around and Find Out.” A masterpiece of trashy thought, trashily expressed, I can’t talk about it without throwing a few F-bombs of my own. And while I suspect most of my readers are familiar with the word, they might not be familiar with the slogan. “Fuck Around and Find Out” is a macho challenge to you wussy liberals whose woke nanny-state ideas don’t comport with the second-amendment values of real Americans. It’s another way of saying, “Don’t fuck with me, I’m white, Christian, straight, and toxically masculine. And if you look at me sideways, I’ll shoot you.” Equal pa...

The Bullies are Coming for Our Lunch Money

I was in physical therapy the other day (hamstring, no big deal), when I realized that the vibrant facility I was in, part of a large orthopedic surgery practice, is one of those thousands of healthcare-related businesses that were made possible by the Affordable Care Act. It brought to mind the ongoing fragility — the sheer precariousness — of these businesses, as the bullies ride into town. Obamacare is surely in their sights. We’ve always assumed Trump and his rubber-stamp Congress were still determined to repeal the ACA, but it occurred to me that with Elon Musk and his cyber-vandals screwing around with government computers, repeal is hardly necessary. All they need to do is cut off the funding, which, they would have you believe, is a matter of a few lines of code. If Musk can actually pull that off — and make it stick — it would quickly kill off PT centers like the one now stretching my hamstring, and wreak havoc on the ecosystem of surgery centers, spe...