Arrrrrrr

Thirty years ago, President Bush was my student at Harvard Business School. In my class, he called former president Franklin D. Roosevelt, Class of 1904, a “socialist” and spoke against Social Security, unemployment insurance, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other New Deal innovations. He refused to understand that capitalism becomes corrupt without democratic civic values and ethical restraints.

In those days, Bush belonged to a minority of MBA students who were seriously disconnected from taking the moral and social responsibility for their actions. Today, he would fit in comfortably with an overwhelming majority of business students and teachers whose role models are celebrated captains of piracy. Since the 1980s, as neo-conservatives have captured the Republican Party, America’s business education has also increasingly become contaminated by the robber baron culture of the pre-Great Depression era.

Bush is the first president of the United States with a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA). Yet, he epitomizes the worst aspects of America’s business education.

[...]

Under the Bush Administration, comparable CEOs have come to give themselves 600 to 1,000 times larger annual compensations than their rank-and-file employees whose pay has stagnated. To pay for such self-dealt compensations, corporate aristocrats layoff their workers, cut ordinary employees’ health benefits, and outsource jobs abroad. Under the Bush Administration, over five million Americans have lost their health benefits, and the U.S. has lost over 2.7 million quality manufacturing jobs. President Bush and his rapacious “captains of piracy” of corporate America are destroying America’s democracy

  Yoshi Tsurumi at Information Clearinghouse

Centuries of lording it over slaves, butchering Indians, and pushing aside Mexicans have ill-prepared white America to live in civilized company, much less to act as maestro for the globe. As Johnny Cochran could tell them, those gloves don't fit. Easy victories over weak, captive or Stone Age adversaries served to teach all the wrong lessons, creating a perverse set of American family values. Unlimited resources, right there for the stealing; fertile fields, awaiting unpaid labor; fragile southern neighbors available to be mauled for sport and profit - a heady brew swilled sloppily, on a mean drunken binge of four hundred years.

Entitlement is a word the Bush men abhor. Nevertheless, it is the essence of their distilled, white American sense of themselves as entitled to each bloody slab of meat they can gouge from the baggage or body of the unwary.

  The Black Commentator article

The Black Commentator