American business executives pride themselves on their leadership and bravado, being bold and decisive, going one way when others are going another, setting their own course, moving fast to get a jump on their competition, never letting up, out working the other bastards and being entrepreneurial at every turn.
The current crop of officials running Washington have tailored their careers from this same business cloth. They're rough, tough and unyielding; they operate from core principles, they are unwaivering, they are self-righteous and never wrong.
The above list of bullshit-bingo business babble could go on and on.
NO GOLDEN PARACHUTES IN CHINA
For guys like President George W. Bush, a Harvard MBA who thinks he's the walking, talking embodiment of the American business dream and who no doubt considers himself God's CEO on earth, the lesson described in this article from Monday's The International Herald Tribune about what real men who really perform badly do to gain a grain of Grace and respect in posterity should be a wake up call that might alert them that some people and some cultures take dishonorable and disgraceful behavior seriously.
Zhang Shuhong, who ran the Lee Der Industrial Co. Ltd., killed himself at a warehouse over the weekend, days after China announced it had temporarily banned exports by the company, the Southern Metropolis Daily said.
Liu said Zhang hung himself on Saturday, according to the report. It is common for disgraced officials to commit suicide in China.
This lesson is not just aimed at the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice and their neocon buddies who cheered them on and kept their mouths shut as they went, but to all the Democrats and all the special interests that hand out goodies to both sides of the political aisle, expanding their top line at the expense of the rest of us.
LET THE NOMINATIONS BEGIN
If this Chinese sense of duty and justice were a cultural reality in America, who would you nominate take the plunge and why?