McKinsey has just issued, the New York Times says, a “rare apology.” The offense was a bit of cartoon villainy, appalling even by McKinsey’s standards. Late last month, the newspaper reported that partners at the consulting firm had discussed how the Purdue pharmaceutical company could “turbocharge” opioid sales (in the middle of an opioid epidemic). One idea was to pay pharmacies a rebate when customers overdosed. The revelation of this conversation was just too much, even for the global ruling class. McKinsey says it has now severed relations with the opioid business and is cooperating with investigations of the issue.

Just a week before the Times broke Rebate-gate, Joe Biden announced that he’d chosen McKinsey’s deputy general counsel and head of public affairs, Louisa Terrell, as his head of legislative affairs. Now, Axios reports that Biden is considering Pete Buttigieg to be his ambassador to China. Buttigieg, too, spent his profoundly unidealistic youth at McKinsey, as I wrote about in Jacobin a year ago.

McKinsey is one of the worst consultancies on Earth. Business journalist Duff McDonald, author of The Firm, a book about McKinsey, told Time magazine that McKinsey “might be the single greatest legitimizer of mass layoffs in history.” Companies have always laid off workers when times are tight, but McKinsey “disrupted” that convention by pushing companies to do so in prosperous times, too, he said, “simply to juice profits.” (And, no doubt, to keep the surviving workers fearful and compliant.)