My fellow Corinthians, I implore you to shake your clappers with convincing enthusiasm to the beat of a way-too-overplayed Black Eyed Peas song as I energetically jog-walk to center stage to present a message that I paid someone six figures to pay someone else six figures to pay someone else mid-five figures to write for me! (Plastic clacky applause)
My fellow Corinthians, I am here to tell you that the state of our Balloonion is stronger than ever! (Clappers go wild).
Now, pay you no mind to the news headlines, to our stock price, to your ghost town campuses, or to the lawsuits filed against us by the DOJ, DOE, CFPB, and the Attorneys General of more states than I can count. It's all just smoke and mirrors, folks! Just a completely unjustified political witch hunt! Can you believe it?!
I mean, the government has paid us only over a billion dollars a year, year after year, and now the ingrates are actually coming after us for getting thousands of our graduates those one-day jobs we paid the temp agencies to give them so we could count them as placements! What a blatant abuse of prosecutorial discretion!
My fellow Corinthians, that brings us to why I have mandated your presence here today. I have some good news and some bad news to share with you.
I'm a real "aw shucks", down to earth, Joe Everyman, so I want to get down to brass tacks and cut straight to the point. You know, this morning as I was on my private jet flying in from my 11 million-dollar ranch in Park City, Utah to be with y'all today, I was thinking about all you little people who work so darned hard day in and day out for our students. Without you, there truly would be no Corinthian Colleges, which means there would be no salary, no stock options, no bonuses, and no secret double bonuses, for me or any other members of the Executive Leadership Team.
Which is why it pains me almost to the point of being able to do a halfway convincing job of pretending like I actually care when I tell you that economic realities beyond our control due to our colossal mismanagement and ethical lapses require us once again to keep the S.S. Parthenon afloat at your expense. You've carried the company on your backs this far, but we need you to carry it one last fatal step.
As you're all too aware, over the past year we've cut your pay, mandated furloughs, cut your benefits, cut and prohibited you from using your vacation pay and sick pay, and fired your former longtime colleagues without giving them a penny of severance pay--leaving y'all to do twice the work for half the pay.
And as you've all painfully discovered these past nine months as you've unsuccessfully tried to land a new job, your resume now bears a stain blacker than an executive's heart.
And now, my fellow Corinthians, finally, as the final hour approaches, the bell tolling ominously as the sun permanently sets on the Corinthian empire, I must now ceremoniously lay off each and every one of you within the sound of my voice.
I'm all broken up inside to have to do this--no really I am--but there really were, honestly this time, literally no other options left on the table. Over the past year, we've taken from you everything we can legally (and illegally) take from you. And frankly, there's just nothing left to take from you but your jobs.
There, now that we've taken care of that uncomfortable bad news, let's all try to see the bright side of all this. Thanks to these unavoidable, absolutely-necessary mass layoffs we're conducting, which won't cost us a dime because none of y'all are getting a severance despite your decades of service in many cases, there will fortunately be just barely enough money left over to allow us members of the Executive clique to give ourselves our golden parachute severances, along with our regular bonus, as well as that hush-hush additional bonus we've been giving ourselves for years. As that sign in Beth's former office used to say: "It is good to be queen."
Now, before we all say buh-bye for the last time, I want to get real with you.
You know, over the past year as we've watched thousands of people we've worked so hard to pretend to care about lose their jobs, and all because of the Executive Leadership Team's ruthless mismanagement, I've often been asked how I can look myself in the mirror or sleep at night, knowing that I have more than enough money of my own to help alleviate the suffering of all you little people, but that I've chosen instead to keep my fist clenched tightly around my . . . now, what is it those rap singers call them . . . oh, that's right, Benjamins! Thank you for reminding me, anonymous person in the production booth speaking into my earpiece!
Well folks, this is the first and last time I'm gonna be completely forthright and honest with y'all, so I'll just come out and say it: I really don't have a good answer to that question.
But to end this all on a positive note, I can tell you something I do know for certain: that my jet on standby at John Wayne as we speak, engines all fired up, ready at a moment's notice to fly me straight back to the powdery slopes of Park City, where I have a 4 pm appointment to get an 80-minute Swedish massage from one of our competitors' graduates.
So if y'all will excuse me for rushing off, I have a limo to catch. (Rapid exit stage left as the styrofoam columns crumble down to their socles).