Juan Cole: "The CEO test for Bush" -- This is GOOD STUFF!

[scarletwoman]

Ya know, it's hard NOT to get emotional about this election. When things look to be in our favor, we feel joyful. When things look to be against us, we feel unhappy or even fearful.

It's simply not possible for ANYONE to predict with certainty how this is all going to come out. So I figure, in the meantime, we can at least keep gathering ammunition and allies, reaffirm our belief in the rightness of what we're fighting for, and just keep on keeping on.

Here's a piece that I hope some will find useful:

http://www.juancole.com/

Friday, September 03, 2004
The CEO Test for Bush

Bush gave a long speech Thursday night, which sounded like a laundry list of promises more than anything else. He pointed to few genuine accomplishments during the past four years, and seemed stuck in fall, 2001.

If you think about George W. Bush as CEO of America, Inc., it becomes clearer why his poll numbers have been so low (low to mid forties) in the run up to the election. No president with those kinds of poll numbers in the spring before the election has ever won.

Bush's basic characteristic is not steadfastness, as the convention attempted to argue, but rashness. He is a gambler who goes for the big bang. He loses his temper easily, and makes hasty and uninformed decisions about important matters. No corporation would keep on a CEO that took risks the way Bush has, if the gambles so often resulted in huge losses.

Let us imagine you had a corporation with annual gross revenues of about $2 trillion. And let's say that in 2000, it had profits of $150 billion. So you bring in a new CEO, and within four years, the profit falls to zero and then the company goes into the red to the tune of over $400 billion per year. You're on the Board of Directors and the CEO's term is up for renewal. Do you vote to keep him in? That's what Bush did to the US government. He took it from surpluses to deep in the red. We are all paying interest on the unprecedented $400 billion per year in deficits (a deficit is just a loan), and our grandchildren will be paying the interest in all likelihood.

(MUCH more -- please click on the link and read the whole thing!)

sw

[2Design]

1. Excellent

[Sparkly]

2. Great reading

Thanks for posting it.

[Veggie Meathead]

3. Thanks for your post.You may want to add that even the $400

Billion dollar deficit used fake accounting as in Andersen,Inc.Lord knows what the real deficits are now.