Photos: NYT, Getty, D, etc.
Beth Ford – pro-business and pro-mother, pro-equality and pro-guns – is doing what happens to CEOs when they find themselves in impossible situations. She has been appointed head of a new company, Land O’ Lakes, with the stated purpose of diversifying the workforce to 50% female and 14% minority by 2022.
One of the company’s divisions will cover “pet care, landscaping, lawn care, and recreation for young children.” This does not exactly seem like the sort of business that works from inner-city parks, factories and incinerators to help impoverished youngsters. In Ford’s scheme, these children play in fields and forests as they have always done, but are paid wages like those of a country lawyer.
And it doesn’t help that the oil price is on the rise again and money concerns are just bad in general these days.
Ford has been a known womanfraudster. For a while, she was running a network of businesses in which people claimed they were consulting for “hill-top meditation workshops,” when really they were making money on cleaning rooms in hotels.
She was arrested in 2006, and pled guilty to her role in a fraud scheme in which her company paid buyers of $876,000 worth of lipstick for fake products ranging from lemons to baths. The actual products were manufactured and sold by other companies at a profit.
Last year, she was sentenced to five years in prison for the fraud scheme.
Ford has a background in working with teenagers, although one has to wonder how a billion-dollar corporation would regard work with children at risk of gang membership.