Remember Republic Windows and Doors? The company that kicked off Depression 2.0 by staging the last successful labor sit-in that will ever happen? Yet more good news: they found a buyer!

Grandly coiffed activist Al Sharpton spoke today at the offices of 5WPR, the agency led by that other noted civil rights activist, Ronn [sic] Torossian. Ronn's keeping busy, but we hear his firm has issues...

Bob Yari, the development baron-turned-indie mogul who co-produced Crash before losing a lawsuit to share the film's 2005 Best Picture Oscar, announced late Friday that he'd seek bankruptcy protection for his distribution company.

The accursed, Troyer-felling labors of Dr. Parnassus behind him, Terry Gilliam has wheedled his way into Dubai, where he hopes all those oil riches make for better door-to-door panhandling in advance of his next film.

Fancy business school degrees—who has time for them? Instead of an MBA, wouldn't you rather have some sort of laser-printed homemade certificate stating that you spent six months hanging out with a dude who writes books about "Purple Cows" and "Small is the New Big" and "Meatball Sundae" and other made-up marketing terms? Well Seth Godin's game-changing new "Alternative MBA" is just the program for you! "This sounds as good as summer camp, MBA school, and a spot on 'The Apprentice' mixed together," says one of Seth's enthusiastic minions. Yea, that sounds about right!

In Japan, CEOs take shame seriously. They're expected to work late, dedicate their entire lives to the good of a company, and try to ensure that they don't work their employees to the point of suicide. And when Japanese CEOs make mistakes, they're expected to make a big show of tearily flogging themselves in public (figuratively). But here in America? CEOs get to screw up as bad as they want and walk away with millions, with nary a tear nor a nice tip to the bellhop on the way out the door. Stan O'Neal! Bob Nardelli! Dennis Kozlowski! CEOS in the USA need to STFU and get way better at public humiliation. They problem is that in this country, CEOs are only too happy to trade the scorn of the public for a pile of money. Most Americans would do the same! (Unless the revolution comes, in which case it's up against the wall with all of you). So you can bitch all you want about golden parachutes that can top $100 million for executives who didn't do shit except lose shareholder money the entire time they were employed, but that CEO will chuckle to himself, have his flack issue a statement, and then go enjoy his millions and millions of free dollars on a private island somewhere, full of untold numbers of prostitutes. So America has worked out its own ways to humiliate these CEOs without their consent. The media trumpets their salaries all over the place, hollering louder about them the worse their company does. Their kids are shunned and forced to go to special, expensive schools. Actually, nobody sympathizes with CEOs except for other CEOs, and politicians. Now, however, every company is doing poorly. So our system for determining what executives to focus our class rage upon is broken. The American public is spread too thin. That's why we need to import some sort of Japanese-style public shaming ceremony here. CEOs can apologize for their sins and wallow in misery, we can all enjoy the schadenfreude, and then we can all focus our allotment of hatred where it belongs: on Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. And the CEOs will join us. America is unity!

Former MSNBC guy Dan Abrams seems to have noticed that his plan to start a PR firm made up of actively employed members of the media who will sell their consulting services to corporate clients is causing some uproar among people who believe that it would be a blatant conflict of interest for any journalist to be part of it. Which should include you, and anyone else who doesn't think members of the media should take outside pay for PR work. Abrams and his cohort in the project, former HuffPo media critic Rachel Sklar, offered long defenses of the idea to Daily Intel. Let's do some critical analysis, shall we?

Obama's plan to have a cabinet full of politico-celebrity superstars is turning out to be the least successful Obama plan ever. Already, Al Gore and Colin Powell have taken themselves out of consideration. That was a major emotional blow, because they are both known to get the party started right. And now former Time Warner chief Dick Parsons, one of the most successful black men in corporate America (by some standards), has taken himself out of consideration too. And he wasn't even asked!

Neel Kashkari, where has your steely-eyed charm gone? When the Ferrari-loving young Republican banker took on the post as our nation's new Head of All Money, we had such high hopes for him. His eagle-like visage commanded respect; his brash overconfidence meant he was destined for greatness. But yesterday the markets tanked after his first big speech, and now the media is grumbling about his performance. Neel, what's wrong? Allow us to help, my rich bald friend. The Post says reporters and finance people alike were pissed yesterday because he only answered two or three questions, and those with "a tone of impatience." And how do you expect to excite the markets with a speech like this?:

Every year "brand consultancy" (the fake industry to get into, btw) Interbrand puts out a numerical ranking of the world's "best" brands. They have a long bit in the press release about their methodology, but I always assume they just count up the Google hits for "(Brand) sucks." The new list is out, and it seems to follow the "sucks" method to perfection: For the eighth year in a row Coke is the world's best brand, (drug joke). The biggest gainers this year were Google, Apple, and Amazon; the group of biggest losers included financial brands like Merrill Lynch (#1 loser with a bullet!), Morgan Stanley, and Citi. As you would expect. Also plunging into massive suckdom: Ford and The Gap. The lesson here is that in order to have a strong band, be massive yet innocuous-to-boring. I am now a brand consultant. Here's the top 20:

Fashion tragedy! Halston, the glamorous 70s brand that mogul Harvey Weinstein was planning to revive with relentless sexiness, is not lighting the world on fire just yet. Harvey paid $25 million for Halston last year, but its latest collection got "largely unenthusiastic reviews"—a problem the company decided to solve by reining in its creative director and moving towards design-by-committee. Which always works well in creative endeavors, yes! For Weinstein, Halston so far is just another disappointing investment, along with his "Myspace for Millionaires" and his DVD business. Free solution, Harvey: get them to wear Halston on Project Runway. You can send a check to our office. [WSJ]

Ruh-roh, Kim Jong-Il is sick, what happens when he dies? Hell if we know!! And will we truly know tomorrow or whenever this guy gets back to the executive assistant charged with Explainer-ing it for Slate? Not really! As literary Tumblrer Keith Gessen pointed out while trying to make sense of the whole Ossetia mess, you know there's a redundant "inadequacy" to the international news in our dying newspapers when even bloggers with the attention spans of Piper Palin feel it. But isn't that because our dying newspapers have mostly killed their foreign bureaus because there's no money in it?Yes! Which is why, as readers, we are happy these guys from Boston have founded the Politico of international news. (It is already poaching people from Politico.) And those newsroom cutbacks may enable Global News Enterprises LLC.* to put together a pretty strong team. From an announcement in March:

The New York Times announced today that it's (finally?) starting a dedicated Media desk. The beat has been split between the Business and Culture sections, but now the paper is pulling a dozen reporters together and moving them to the third floor—the floor between the other two sections, and where the top Times editors now sit. Symbolic! It's all about "convergence," they say. But why now? And, look who's not going to be assigned to the Media desk: The Times' most visible media writer and newly minted authorial rock star, David Carr! We've emailed NYT Culture editor Sam Sifton for an explanation. Regardless, this has to be interpreted as a move that assigns more importance to the media beat. The Times currently gives over the bulk of its Monday business page to media stories, and there's no indication that that will change. The selection of that page's editor, Bruce Headlam, to head the new desk is a major promotion for him. A united media beat, though, will presumably be better able to coordinate its coverage so that it's competing every day of the week—which will become ever more important as the Wall Street Journal continues its own transition into a general-interest, business-friendly paper. The WSJ's media coverage is heavy on marketing, but it is naturally the Times' biggest competitor for the most important media stories. The full memo from the Times:

Have you seen any of those dozens of YouTube videos where a dude in a lab coat puts random things in a blender and proves that, yes, they will blend? It's a successful viral advertising project! So successful that the company claims that "sales have risen 600% since the videos started." The Times points out that most of the company's customer base is commercial, so it's highly unlikely the videos themselves are the reason for the increase. Still, this god damn blender company, of all things, is savvy enough to team up with AT&T to blend an iPhone, and to get itself into the top search results for "Chuck Norris" by blending an action figure, so you have to give them some props, ridiculous though their strategy is. After the jump, watch pop culture things blend for murky reasons:

Times chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. looks increasingly backed into a corner. Bloomberg yesterday marshaled a wide array of evidence, including quotes from analysts and the mounting cost to hedge against a Times Co. bond default, to establish that the company's bonds are close to falling to junk status. The already-bludgeoned stock quickly fell another 6 percent. Implicated in the credit deterioration: The company's decision last year to hike its dividend payout 23 percent, a move no doubt popular with Sulzberger's stockholdling relatives but one that is gobbling up nearly all the company's free cash flow. The family has already conceded board seats to the corporate marauders from Harbinger Capital Partners and an affiliated partnership, and Harbinger now controls nearly 20 percent of the company. Sulzberger faces some unsavory choices — cut the dividend, slash costs (probably via layoffs) or flirt with selling junk bonds — all of which carry the whiff of defeat. He is running out of room to maneuver.

Tucker Max: blogger of beer and sluts, writer and producer of one of the least funny comedy movie scripts since Illegally Yours, and asshole in a dozen different ways. The most ridiculous of which is as the boss of his own mini-empire of blogs! And since last week, we've heard from several of his former Rudius Media employees, who expound on the gentle pleasures of working for one of America's foremost purveyors of racist poop jokes: He's a cheapskate. Last week we noted how Tucker scoffed at a former blogger who wondered why he only made $82 for six months of work. Other employees tell us the standard pay for Rudius bloggers is somewhere in the $80/ quarter range, with one noting "I got just a tiny bit more than that when my site was doing really well." Sweet. So Rudius must be making a lot of money. You work hard for the money. One Rudius employee was ordered by Tucker to move to a different, more expensive city because Tucker thought that they could better do their job elsewhere. Once the employee had gone to the trouble of packing up and moving and finding a new, more costly apartment, we hear, their pay was reduced to almost nothing. Which seems like the standard Rudius pay rate, now that we think of it. He's not popular with publishers. We hear that at least one book agent quit working with Tucker because he flaked out on book proposal deadlines. (Not true? Email us!) He's not popular with the bloggers that work for him at Rudius. The emails we've received from disgruntled bloggers alone are ample evidence of this. He attracts bloggers he's interested in with the promise of writing for a wider audience-though, as you can tell by their pay, not necessarily more money. But when bloggers tire of Rudius and leave the fold, we hear, they are bizarrely wiped from existence in Tucker Max's world:

When we're feeling masochistic, we like to peruse the blog of incompetent superflack Ronn [sic] Torossian. It's his own forum for speaking to you, the consumer, without having to go through the filter of a biased media outlet like this one. So in the spirit of fairness and education, we're bringing you five of the 5WPR CEO's thoughts on how to become a successful entrepreneur-all in that inimitable Ronn style. At the end, we submit a bonus tip of our own! Read and learn from a self-made success story:

The economy these days is terrible and scary! Uh, notwithstanding yesterday's biggest gain in financial stocks in two decades. The important thing is, business figures must look terrified for the future of us all. So the WSJ had to redo some of its overly happy portraits (like Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit's, pictured). Below, a larger version of Pandit, and before and after shots of Hank Paulson, courtesy of CJR. Their furrowed brows will solve the credit crisis:

Here's what you've been waiting for, if you're an eccentric millionaire looking to invest a fortune in off-the-wall, possibly crack-inspired schemes: 40 business ideas from actor Gary Busey! These come in the form of 40 different ads for some obscure business phone company (whatever). The point is, Gary Busey really appears to just be riffing all of these off the top of his head so he can leave and get a drink. Bear hair dye? Oh Gary, you are an incorrigible national treasure! Two clips of his wacky wisdom, below:

The business of selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door is surprisingly shady. It consists largely of crews of young people-some under 18-recruited by (often) criminal characters who haul them around the country in vans, releasing them only to make their way through neighborhoods, using any lies necessary to tug the heartstrings of people enough to get them to buy something. Then all the kids are rounded up again, given their meager cut of the profits, and they all go do drugs. Sometimes they rape people, or drive off cliffs. The Houston Press just put out a monster investigation of the industry, and it shows a long but clear path from the offices of Conde Nast out to the wild kids hustling in the hinterlands. And there are some true horror stories: