Company Chairman, and Candidate for the Couch

· "Chainsaw" Al Dunlop: "His divorce was granted on grounds of 'extreme cruelty.' That's the characteristic that endeared him to Wall Street, which applauded when he fired 11,000 workers at Scott Paper, then another 6,000 (half the labor force) at Sunbeam."

· Andrew Fastow: "so hot-headed that he once got into a punch-out with a taxi driver over 70 cents. Pocket change indeed compared to the $24 million of illicit gains the Enron CFO agreed to give back when he pleaded guilty to securities fraud."

Whew!

No wonder Hare has created a test to screen potential CEOs for psychopathic behavior before they're hired. "We screen police officers, teachers," he says. "Why not people who are going to handle billions of dollars?"

Well, Alan Deutschman, who wrote the Fast Company story, suggests one good reason why not: Companies would use the test not to weed out psychopaths but to hire them.

"It's easier for them to act callously and remorselessly," Deutschman writes, "which is exactly what their backers want."

Oink-Oink!

If "Is Your Boss a Psychopath?" doesn't make you cynical enough, then maybe you should read "The Great American Pork Barrel" in the July Harper's.

Deftly written by Los Angeles Times reporter Ken Silverman, it's an intriguing -- and maddening -- exposé of how Congress uses "earmarks" to pick the pockets of the American taxpayer.

As careful readers of this newspaper already know, "earmarks" are allocations for specific pork barrel projects that are inserted into appropriations bills, usually anonymously and usually at last-minute closed-door sessions. Earmarks are as old as Congress itself, but the numbers keep getting bigger.

"Last year," Silverstein writes, "15,584 separate earmarks worth a combined $32.7 billion were attached to appropriations bills -- more than twice the dollar amounts in 2001, when 7,803 earmarks accounted for $15 billion."

Earmarks are now so lucrative that they've spawned a Washington industry of lobbyists who make big bucks by steering the folks who want to get earmark money (and who doesn't?) to the appropriate Appropriations Committee member who can give it to them, usually in return for a generous campaign contribution.

Some of these lobbyists just happen to be related to powerful pols -- Sen. Ted Stevens's brother-in-law, Rep. John Murtha's brother, Rep. David Obey's son.

The results would be funny if they weren't so expensive -- a $443,000 grant for the "development of baby food containing salmon" ( yum! yum!) and $2.4 million for Mississippi State University's "Thad Cochran Research, Technology and Economic Development Park," which just happens to be named after the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

On and on the story goes. Along the way, Silverstein reveals a brilliant Catch-22 that enables our pols to insert earmarks without ever being identified:

"When requesting an earmark, lawmakers must make their request in writing to the relevant appropriations committee. But" -- and this has to be one of the great "buts" in American politics -- "all congressional correspondence is exempt from the Freedom of Information Act."