Conservative CEO Solves Poverty & Racism: "Get Rid of Rev Wright" (Updated)

One hardly knows what to say about an opinion this stunningly clueless. Perhaps - I'm trying hard to give him the benefit of the doubt - Mr MacDougal has been living in a bubble at the bottom of the ocean since the age of 5. But no such luck. He's an oil man. Been aboveground at least since 1969 when as a venture capitalist, he.... Well, let him tell it since he's so proud he put it in as the very first two grafs of his official bio:

Mr. MacDougal became Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Mark Controls Corporation in September 1969 when he and a group of venture capital investors assumed control of the company. Mark Controls has been a leading manufacturer and installer of building management systems and services, and a manufacturer of flow control equipment for the petroleum, process and power industries.

During Mr. MacDougal’s tenure as CEO, the investors achieved more than a sixteen-fold increase, with the stock rising from $10 per share in 1969 to the equivalent of more than $160 per share in October 1987 (adjusted for splits). Investors experienced growth of over 17% per year compounded (including dividends) over the eighteen-year period. Prior to Mr. MacDougal’s joining the company, Mark Controls lost money in six of the ten preceding years (1960-1969), but then grew to be ranked #687 in the “Fortune 1000” and was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In October 1987, he turned over CEO responsibilities to a long-time partner and became Honorary Chairman of the Board of Mark Controls.

Naturally this history makes him the perfect choice to chair the Illinois Governor’s Task Force on Human Services Reform, his chief claim to fame in this area being that he reduced Illinois' welfare rolls by 87%. He called it "moving them into self-sufficiency" but all he really did was cut them off.

This makes him an expert, I guess, and the Washington Post gave him op-ed space so he could explain to us that the reason for poverty and racism is Obama's buddy, the Rev Wright. Viz:

Consider the corrosive effect Wright and others like him have on their communities as they rob thousands of listeners of the American dream: hope that through their hard work they can have better lives.

***

With powerful rhetoric, Wright has asserted, for instance, that white America sees black women as useful only for their bodies. If this is the message you got from your mentor, would you expect that you could succeed? Would you try very hard, if at all?

***

Through my work with the Illinois governor's task force on human services reform and its efforts to reduce welfare dependency, I have encountered misguided community "leaders" like Wright who tell their followers, for example, that the job market is stacked against them and that the jobs that are available aren't good enough -- that they are entitled to more. The underlying message: You can't win because of who you are, regardless of what you do.

***

I also recall a conversation I had during a visit to the maximum-security prison in Joliet, Ill. As I sat in the library there, talking with three men about why they were incarcerated, one man said: "Look around this room -- almost everybody here is black. This is white man's genocide. You put us in here to keep us down." Where would this 20-something black man, or other relatively uneducated young people, get such an idea? From the vitriol spewed by the Rev. Wrights of this world.

And so on.

This op-ed by an American CEO is a brilliant example of why successful businessmen and loudmouthed, disconnected-from-real-life conservative ideologues should never EVER be put in positions of political power. When it comes to anything except making $$$ and providing simple-minded prescriptions for complicated problems, they're idiots. MacDougal's boneheadedly simplistic explanation for poverty? Why, it's "perceived victimization".

Each year the federal government spends hundreds of billions of dollars -- specifically, more than $10,000 per poor person for welfare, Medicaid, the earned-income tax credit, job training and food stamps. Put another way, taxpayers are doing their share. We need to work together to help people move from dependency to self-sufficiency. No one, especially spiritual leaders who ought to be lifting people up, should provide rationales for escaping individual responsibility by encouraging perceived victimization.

Mr MacDougal, silver birth-spoon clamped tightly between his teeth, is just positive that the reason black people have a tough time is a difficult economy and their own exaggerated sense of themselves as victims brought about by a "dependency" on govt handouts and the "vitriol spewed" by black preachers who are too uppity for their own good. After all, life is tough for everybody.

A community "leader" in Miami's Overtown neighborhood, for instance, told me that he counseled unemployed people not to work on nearby construction projects because racist employers abused them. Pressed for an example of such abuse, he cited an employer's failure to pay overtime for Saturday work. Two blocks away, more than a dozen homeless men were camped out under a bridge. Yet a man who was supposed to be guiding people was counseling against working.

Life isn't fair for people of any skin color.

*sigh* No, Gary. First, he was counseling against working for a rich guy who didn't want to pay them what they'd earned, who probably wanted them to work Saturdays for free, like at Wal-Mart. And second, you asked him for a form of abuse and not paying somebody what you owe them because their skin is the wrong color IS ABUSE. You brain-dead fathead.

What Mr MacDougal needs is a few years getting arrested for DWR (Driving While Rich) and having deals go sour because he has brown eyes instead of the blue preferred by investors and managers. Then he needs to get arrested for driving in the wrong neighborhood and convicted of dope smuggling because the cop who arrests him doesn't care if he's got a prescription for that bottle of pills or not, and neither does the judge or Mr MacDougal's overworked legal aid defense attorney, who pled him guilty on the grounds that even though the police had no proof the drugs were illegal, neither the jury nor the judge is going to believe they weren't because MacDougal is a Scot and the Scottish are always guilty.

But as silly as it is to put a snowball like MacDougal on a panel of "human services" experts, it is a horrendous disservice on the part of the WaPo to give him a whole page to spout off on. Why don't they just hire David Duke to write about how to improve race relations in America and be done with it?

My greatest fear is that Barack Obama is going to see this moron as someone willing to reach across the aisle, someone willing to compromise, someone non-partisan who believes, as does BO himself, that "[a] positive mind-set is at least a start toward success," and put him in the Cabinet at HUD or HEW. You think Alphonso Jackson was a disaster?

Oy.

UPDATE (May 8, '08): TMiss at The Mississippifarian writes a much better and more on-point rant about MacDougal's blockheadedness, and uncovers the secret messages in his op-ed.

Jeez, what kind of community leader tells people not to work for lawbreaking corporate thugs? Just guessing, but this sounds like a $10/hour, no benefits job as a day laborer, breaking your back for less money than the chiropractic bills awaiting you in middle age.

Life isn’t fair for people of any skin color.

Translation: corporate CEOs like me fuck over white people too, so why do blacks think they’re special?

Don't miss the rest.

Comments

[eRobin]

My greatest fear is that Barack Obama is going to see this moron as someone willing to reach across the aisle, someone willing to compromise, someone non-partisan who believes, as does BO himself, that "[a] positive mind-set is at least a start toward success," and put him in the Cabinet at HUD or HEW.

And how.