On the positive side, Klein has paid valuable lip service to the ridiculous notion that he doesn't want to give our kids cancer:
"I believe the company must continue to play a critical role in reducing the devastating harm caused by smoking," Klein said in a statement emailed to Insider. "To accomplish that paramount goal, Juul Labs must, first and foremost, continue preventing underage use of its products."
So if you take him at his word (I do not), he's merely interested in poisoning adults. There's a role model for us all. I will give no one cancer until they're 18 years of age. What a prince. The problem with this line of thinking is consistent with the rest of reformy thinking. What actually happens to kids if we take good care of them and have a modicum of reasonable luck? Give up? Well, they become adults, and thus subject to people like Joel Klein, who are in the business of selling them cancer.
I don't smoke, and I don't vape. However, I've had cancer. I can tell you it's not precisely a walk in the park, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, even Joel Klein. However, given his birdlike features, I'm not entirely sure he's human. So there's that. Nonetheless, how this man musters the audacity to lecture anyone on right and wrong is beyond me.
Klein was a terrible chancellor, beholden to billionaire Mike Bloomberg. Despite his constant righteous lectures, he was clearly in the pocket of Eva Moskowitz, at her beck and call even as he ignored all those of us who bothered to speak to him at PEP. He sat on his Blackberry doing Very Important Stuff. Screw the public, and figure out how to please the gazillionaires who fund the Moskowitz Academies. It seems to have paid off for Klein as he collects big bucks for his loathsome activities,
Elsewhere, former chancellor Richard Carranza is also trading on his reputation, such as it is, to score a cool corporate give. Carranza is moving to Silicon Valley and jumping on the e-learning bandwagon. Now that there's finally a fair chance our children might be able to come to some reasonable facsimile of learning, perhaps even with smaller classes, Carranza wants to cash in on the clearly inferior practice of having kids learn on line.
After all, who can forget the support Carranza gave us when we turned to online learning last year? That was, of course, after he and de Blasio resisted closing the schools during the most frightening period of the most frightening event of our lifetimes. What did they do? They asked all staff to come back a few extra days for training in online education. Who trained us? That was a bunch of administrators, none of whom had any experience whatsoever with it at all.
But I guess if you're Carranza, you can sit there like Jean-Luc Picard, wave your hand, say, "Make it so," and hope for the best. And even though the system is a mess and you've lost the faith of people who once believed in you, you can score a cushy gig lending your name to some dubious product.
Jeff Bezos isn't the only dude getting rich on the pandemic.
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