The Capitalist Culture That Built America
By Zachary Karabell, 5/14/21, Wall St. Journal

At the dawn of the 19th c., an Irish immigrant named Alexander
Brown arrived in Baltimore & set up shop as a linen merchant.
The firm that he founded would evolve into one of America’s
most important investment banks, Brown Brothers Harriman,
which is still in business today. Over more than 2 centuries,
as a unique form of capitalism turned the U.S. into the most
potent & affluent country in the world, Brown Brothers was
the alchemist at the center.

In its first hundred years, the firm helped to make paper
currency standard in the U.S., underwrote the earliest
railroad & trans-Atlantic steamship companies & almost
unilaterally created the first foreign exchange system
between the American dollar & the British pound. In the
20th c., it became a cornerstone of what came to be known as
“the Establishment,” as its partners entered the halls of govt
to shape the global economic & security system that remains
the world’s institutional architecture.

Today, as American capitalism faces the challenge of
reinventing itself for a post-pandemic future, the story
of Brown Brothers offers crucial lessons. Its legacy is by
no means simple: Like capitalism itself, the firm exhibited
a panoply of virtues & not a few vices. Brown Brothers helped
to unlock immense wealth & spurred the growth of American
creativity & power, but its partners too often equated the
public good with what was good for the firm.

Generations of Brown Bros partners became rich while
sustaining a culture of prudence & public service. Yet, as
the largest cotton trader before the Civil War, the firm was
deeply complicit in the evils of slavery, like much of
American business at the time. The int'l system that Brown
Brothers helped to establish after WWII unleashed decades of
widening prosperity in the West, but it also cemented the
wealth & power of a narrow elite.

For all the complications of its legacy, Brown Bros embodies
an ethos that still has much to recommend it, especially in
contrast to the form of finance capitalism that emerged in
the 80s & nearly capsized the global economy in 2008-09.
Today, when the wealth of a few has reached extraordinary
heights, we can learn from Brown Brothers’ commitment to
sustainable capitalism—to the belief that no individual or
firm can ultimately thrive unless the wider society thrives
as well, & that sometimes enough is enough.

Luck & contingency certainly played important roles in the
firm’s longevity, but its culture was its lifeblood. That
culture began with Alexander Brown, bespectacled & almost
scholarly in demeanor, whose letters two centuries ago to
his 4 sons—the original Brown Bros—have the pithiness of Ben
Franklin’s Poor Richard: “Don’t deal with people about whose
character there is a question. It keeps your mind uneasy. It
is far better to lose the business.” If “the risks are too
great,” he advised, it’s best not to take them: “You cannot
make a mistake by being sure.” Where others engaged in
speculation, Alexander preached investment.

When he did embark on riskier ventures, it was usually for
a greater public purpose. In the 1820s, concerned that
Baltimore was being eclipsed by New York & Philly as an
economic hub, Alexander Brown championed a new technology:
an iron railroad with cars pulled by a steam engine. The
Baltimore & Ohio RR was inaugurated on July 4, 1828, with
the promise that it would transform the American landscape.
The project cost the equivalent of billions today, & it made
the family no real money, but the Browns knew that they
wouldn’t prosper unless Baltimore did.

After Alexander Brown died in 1834, leaving an estate worth
close to $100 million in today’s terms, his 2nd son James—
ramrod straight, courteous to a fault—made a bet on another
new form of transport, the trans-Atlantic steamer. In the
1850s, he & the roly-poly shipping magnate Edward Knight
Collins launched the Collins Line, with the fastest & most
luxurious ships ever to cross the Atlantic. They were on the
cusp of triumph when the jewel of the line, the plush S.S.
Arctic, collided with a French trawler & sank in 1854. The
popular preacher Henry Ward Beecher used the disaster as an
occasion to attack the triumph of materialism, intoning that
God “is striking thundering strokes at the wealth of the
whole community.”

Never again did the firm wager speculative capital on a
newfangled venture. Brown Bros steered clear of the railroad
boom that began midcentury, which brought a few investors to
great heights & buried almost everyone else. The Browns
understood that finance could unleash growth & good times
but also cause crashes & usher in the bad. The firm remained
immensely profitable, but it carefully skirted the highest
highs & lowest lows of the last years of the 19th c.

In the decades before the Civil War, Brown Bros moved away
from the physical shipment of cotton & focused on financing
the industry, while the family became staunch supporters of
the Republican Party & the Union cause during the Civil War.
After the war, the firm made considerable profits providing
letters of credit for travelers in the burgeoning tourism
industry. It also pioneered the unglamorous but lucrative &
necessary business of foreign exchange, helping other banks
to integrate their foreign & domestic business.

The Great Depression led the firm to a corporate marriage
that would prove lasting & consequential. In the fall of
1930, a group of nattily dressed young men chartered a railcar
to take them to their 15th reunion at Yale. Among them was
Prescott Bush, a tall, lanky man who had married the daughter
of George Herbert Walker of St. Louis, the president of the
banking firm founded by Averell Harriman, the son of one of
the country’s wealthiest railroad magnates. Others were
junior partners of Brown Brothers, then being led by the
cousins Thatcher & James Brown, great-grandsons of Alexander.

These sophisticated young men were to the manor born, & as
they played poker on the journey, they bet sums well beyond
the daily wages of most Americans. But even they weren’t
protected from the economic devastation of the Depression;
outside the windows of their cosseted car, storms were brewing,
& their two firms were suddenly vulnerable. They broached the
idea of a merger, & after a few months of negotiations, the
deal was made. Robert Abercrombie Lovett, a veteran of the
select Yale Air Unit in WWI who had married into the Brown
family & just become a partner at Brown Bros, recalled that
“Harriman had this little business & too much capital; Brown
Bros had too much business & little capital.”

They decided to link their names, creating Brown Brothers
Harriman. In a storied building at 59 Wall St, the new bank
helped to create the modern wealth management industry & to
craft the financial & security system that governs the world,
albeit shakily, to this day.

Even before the war, the firms had experience in global
finance. Brown Brothers owned a majority share of Nicaragua’s
main railroad & its national bank, & its loans to the govt
of Nicaragua provided President Taft with an excuse to send
the Marines to occupy the country in 1912. Nicaragua would
remain a vassal of the U.S. for much of the decade, leading
The Nation magazine to dub the country the “Republic of
Brown Brothers.” The Browns averred that they were only
looking after their loans & the interests of their clients,
& that Nicaragua was ultimately better for their investments.
But for generations of Latin Americans, the bank represented
the ugly legacy of U.S. imperialism.

WWII & the Cold War propelled the combined firm into the
political stratosphere, as Harriman, Lovett & Bush each
served in high govt positions. Their partnership was a
microcosm of the WASP elite that helped to make the “American
century.” During the war, Harriman became “the plenipotentiary,”
as the New Yorker magazine dubbed him, serving as President
Roosevelt’s envoy to Churchill & Stalin. Later he became
admin of the Marshall Plan & governor of New York. As
assistant secretary of state in the Kennedy admin, he was
responsible for East Asia policy, & thus for America’s descent
into the Vietnam War.

Harriman’s ambition was clear, as was his unquestioned
acceptance of his inherited fortune, but his career was
shaped by the belief that elites had a responsibility to
work for the public good. As he told one interviewer, “It
is indefensible for a man who has capital not to apply
himself diligently to using it in a way that will be of
most benefit to his country.”

It was Robert Lovett who perhaps best epitomized this elite
commitment to public service, as starkly embodied in the
motto of his prep school, Groton: “to reign is to serve.”
At the end of 1940, a year before the U.S. entered the war,
he declared his readiness to serve, writing to Secretary of
War Henry Stimson, “I want to help in any way I can, as soon
as I can.” Appointed assistant secretary of war, he became
the chief architect of the modern U.S. Air Force. When
Japan surrendered in 1945, Lovett contentedly returned to
Brown Brothers, where he planned to remain.

On Thursday, May 20, 2021 at 2:18:58 AM UTC-4, David P. wrote:
> The Capitalist Culture That Built America
> By Zachary Karabell, 5/14/21, Wall St. Journal
>
> At the dawn of the 19th c., an Irish immigrant named Alexander
> Brown arrived in Baltimore & set up shop as a linen merchant.
> The firm that he founded would evolve into one of America’s
> most important investment banks, Brown Brothers Harriman,
> which is still in business today. Over more than 2 centuries,
> as a unique form of capitalism turned the U.S. into the most
> potent & affluent country in the world, Brown Brothers was
> the alchemist at the center.
>
> In its first hundred years, the firm helped to make paper
> currency standard in the U.S., underwrote the earliest
> railroad & trans-Atlantic steamship companies & almost
> unilaterally created the first foreign exchange system
> between the American dollar & the British pound. In the
> 20th c., it became a cornerstone of what came to be known as
> “the Establishment,” as its partners entered the halls of govt
> to shape the global economic & security system that remains
> the world’s institutional architecture.
>
> Today, as American capitalism faces the challenge of
> reinventing itself for a post-pandemic future, the story
> of Brown Brothers offers crucial lessons. Its legacy is by
> no means simple: Like capitalism itself, the firm exhibited
> a panoply of virtues & not a few vices. Brown Brothers helped
> to unlock immense wealth & spurred the growth of American
> creativity & power, but its partners too often equated the
> public good with what was good for the firm.
>
> Generations of Brown Bros partners became rich while
> sustaining a culture of prudence & public service. Yet, as
> the largest cotton trader before the Civil War, the firm was
> deeply complicit in the evils of slavery, like much of
> American business at the time. The int'l system that Brown
> Brothers helped to establish after WWII unleashed decades of
> widening prosperity in the West, but it also cemented the
> wealth & power of a narrow elite.
>
> For all the complications of its legacy, Brown Bros embodies
> an ethos that still has much to recommend it, especially in
> contrast to the form of finance capitalism that emerged in
> the 80s & nearly capsized the global economy in 2008-09.
> Today, when the wealth of a few has reached extraordinary
> heights, we can learn from Brown Brothers’ commitment to
> sustainable capitalism—to the belief that no individual or
> firm can ultimately thrive unless the wider society thrives
> as well, & that sometimes enough is enough.
>
> Luck & contingency certainly played important roles in the
> firm’s longevity, but its culture was its lifeblood. That
> culture began with Alexander Brown, bespectacled & almost
> scholarly in demeanor, whose letters two centuries ago to
> his 4 sons—the original Brown Bros—have the pithiness of Ben
> Franklin’s Poor Richard: “Don’t deal with people about whose
> character there is a question. It keeps your mind uneasy. It
> is far better to lose the business.” If “the risks are too
> great,” he advised, it’s best not to take them: “You cannot
> make a mistake by being sure.” Where others engaged in
> speculation, Alexander preached investment.
>
> When he did embark on riskier ventures, it was usually for
> a greater public purpose. In the 1820s, concerned that
> Baltimore was being eclipsed by New York & Philly as an
> economic hub, Alexander Brown championed a new technology:
> an iron railroad with cars pulled by a steam engine. The
> Baltimore & Ohio RR was inaugurated on July 4, 1828, with
> the promise that it would transform the American landscape.
> The project cost the equivalent of billions today, & it made
> the family no real money, but the Browns knew that they
> wouldn’t prosper unless Baltimore did.
>
> After Alexander Brown died in 1834, leaving an estate worth
> close to $100 million in today’s terms, his 2nd son James—
> ramrod straight, courteous to a fault—made a bet on another
> new form of transport, the trans-Atlantic steamer. In the
> 1850s, he & the roly-poly shipping magnate Edward Knight
> Collins launched the Collins Line, with the fastest & most
> luxurious ships ever to cross the Atlantic. They were on the
> cusp of triumph when the jewel of the line, the plush S.S.
> Arctic, collided with a French trawler & sank in 1854. The
> popular preacher Henry Ward Beecher used the disaster as an
> occasion to attack the triumph of materialism, intoning that
> God “is striking thundering strokes at the wealth of the
> whole community.”
>
> Never again did the firm wager speculative capital on a
> newfangled venture. Brown Bros steered clear of the railroad
> boom that began midcentury, which brought a few investors to
> great heights & buried almost everyone else. The Browns
> understood that finance could unleash growth & good times
> but also cause crashes & usher in the bad. The firm remained
> immensely profitable, but it carefully skirted the highest
> highs & lowest lows of the last years of the 19th c.
>
> In the decades before the Civil War, Brown Bros moved away
> from the physical shipment of cotton & focused on financing
> the industry, while the family became staunch supporters of
> the Republican Party & the Union cause during the Civil War.
> After the war, the firm made considerable profits providing
> letters of credit for travelers in the burgeoning tourism
> industry. It also pioneered the unglamorous but lucrative &
> necessary business of foreign exchange, helping other banks
> to integrate their foreign & domestic business.
>
> The Great Depression led the firm to a corporate marriage
> that would prove lasting & consequential. In the fall of
> 1930, a group of nattily dressed young men chartered a railcar
> to take them to their 15th reunion at Yale. Among them was
> Prescott Bush, a tall, lanky man who had married the daughter
> of George Herbert Walker of St. Louis, the president of the
> banking firm founded by Averell Harriman, the son of one of
> the country’s wealthiest railroad magnates. Others were
> junior partners of Brown Brothers, then being led by the
> cousins Thatcher & James Brown, great-grandsons of Alexander.
>
> These sophisticated young men were to the manor born, & as
> they played poker on the journey, they bet sums well beyond
> the daily wages of most Americans. But even they weren’t
> protected from the economic devastation of the Depression;
> outside the windows of their cosseted car, storms were brewing,
> & their two firms were suddenly vulnerable. They broached the
> idea of a merger, & after a few months of negotiations, the
> deal was made. Robert Abercrombie Lovett, a veteran of the
> select Yale Air Unit in WWI who had married into the Brown
> family & just become a partner at Brown Bros, recalled that
> “Harriman had this little business & too much capital; Brown
> Bros had too much business & little capital.”
>
> They decided to link their names, creating Brown Brothers
> Harriman. In a storied building at 59 Wall St, the new bank
> helped to create the modern wealth management industry & to
> craft the financial & security system that governs the world,
> albeit shakily, to this day.
>
> Even before the war, the firms had experience in global
> finance. Brown Brothers owned a majority share of Nicaragua’s
> main railroad & its national bank, & its loans to the govt
> of Nicaragua provided President Taft with an excuse to send
> the Marines to occupy the country in 1912. Nicaragua would
> remain a vassal of the U.S. for much of the decade, leading
> The Nation magazine to dub the country the “Republic of
> Brown Brothers.” The Browns averred that they were only
> looking after their loans & the interests of their clients,
> & that Nicaragua was ultimately better for their investments.
> But for generations of Latin Americans, the bank represented
> the ugly legacy of U.S. imperialism.
>
> WWII & the Cold War propelled the combined firm into the
> political stratosphere, as Harriman, Lovett & Bush each
> served in high govt positions. Their partnership was a
> microcosm of the WASP elite that helped to make the “American
> century.” During the war, Harriman became “the plenipotentiary,”
> as the New Yorker magazine dubbed him, serving as President
> Roosevelt’s envoy to Churchill & Stalin. Later he became
> admin of the Marshall Plan & governor of New York. As
> assistant secretary of state in the Kennedy admin, he was
> responsible for East Asia policy, & thus for America’s descent
> into the Vietnam War.
>
> Harriman’s ambition was clear, as was his unquestioned
> acceptance of his inherited fortune, but his career was
> shaped by the belief that elites had a responsibility to
> work for the public good. As he told one interviewer, “It
> is indefensible for a man who has capital not to apply
> himself diligently to using it in a way that will be of
> most benefit to his country.”
>
> It was Robert Lovett who perhaps best epitomized this elite
> commitment to public service, as starkly embodied in the
> motto of his prep school, Groton: “to reign is to serve.”
> At the end of 1940, a year before the U.S. entered the war,
> he declared his readiness to serve, writing to Secretary of
> War Henry Stimson, “I want to help in any way I can, as soon
> as I can.” Appointed assistant secretary of war, he became
> the chief architect of the modern U.S. Air Force. When
> Japan surrendered in 1945, Lovett contentedly returned to
> Brown Brothers, where he planned to remain.
>
> Then one early morning in 1947, as he was about to drive
> from his house on Long Island to his office on Wall Street,
> his wife Adele answered the phone & said “Bob, Washington
> is calling.” Lovett picked up, & the voice on the other end
> said, “This is the president.” Lovett snapped, “Now listen,
> this isn’t at all funny. I’m in the middle of breakfast &
> trying to get the early train to New York, & for God’s sake
> this is no time for jokes.” The voice said, “No, this really
> is the president.” President Truman summoned Lovett to be
> Secretary of State George Marshall’s #2, & at the urging
> of his partners, he said yes.
>
> Over the next 4 years, Lovett & Harriman were part of a
> small circle of leaders who confronted the postwar vacuum
> of global power & led the U.S. into a Cold War with the
> Soviet Union. They also engineered the replacement of the
> British pound with the dollar as the standard means of
> exchange, established the General Agreement on Tariffs &
> Trade—the precursor to the WTO—& restructured the federal
> govt, creating the Pentagon, the CIA & the other pillars of
> today’s national security state.
>
> Then there was Prescott Bush, a 2-term Republican senator
> from Connecticut who became the father & grandfather of
> presidents. A genial bipartisan backbencher who golfed
> regularly with Pres. Eisenhower, he reviled the excesses of
> Sen. Joe McCarthy. Harriman, Lovett & Bush were founding
> members of the Establishment—a small network of elite men
> who attended the same schools, worked for a few interlocking
> firms & moved into the corridors of power.
>
> In the 60s, American culture turned decisively against the
> Establishment. Brown Brothers came to be seen as emblematic
> of a cosseted class of wealthy men who enriched themselves
> while plunging the U.S. into a morass in Vietnam. By the 80s,
> however, the pendulum had begun to swing the other way. After
> years of stagflation, in 1982 stocks began to climb & interest
> rates to fall. Wall Street was lionized in popular culture.
> Brown Brothers Harriman, controlled by a few dozen partners,
> received almost no attention as flashier firms like Lehman
> Brothers & Morgan Stanley went public, & Drexel Burnham
> Lambert and its junk bonds went ballistic.
>
> But Brown Brothers was doing more & more business for large
> banks like Citibank, Lloyd’s of London & HSBC, handling stock
> trades in multiple markets & currencies. It had so much biz,
> in fact, that in the mid-80s, the partners decided it was
> too much. They informed their larger clients that they'd have
> to find someone else to handle the volume. Reflecting on the
> decision, one Brown Brothers partner remarked to me, “You
> know, we didn’t do what a firm like Goldman [Sachs] might
> have. We didn’t ask ourselves what size we should be to meet
> the business. We asked what business we should take to match
> our size.”
>
> Such restraint & respect for limits have become increasingly
> rare on a Wall Street characterized by the relentless push
> for more profits. It is also an example of why Brown Brothers
> has persisted for more than 200 years. Living long is not a
> virtue in & of itself, but living well is. Unlike its rivals,
> Brown Brothers never went public or became too big to fail.
> Its refusal, starting with Alexander Brown, to pursue
> expansion at all costs meant that, in contrast to a firm
> like Lehman Brothers, it never endangered the entire
> financial system.
>
> As we plunge into the post-Covid future, the lessons of
> Brown Brothers’ history have never been more urgent: how to
> tame the power of money so that it builds up rather than
> tears down; how to ensure that those who have benefited
> greatly from American capitalism serve & contribute in
> return; above all, how the U.S. might once again play a
> global role that helps to increase prosperity & security for
> all. For more than 200 years, Brown Brothers has grappled
> with those questions; now we all have to do the same.
>
> This essay is adapted from Karabell’s new book “Inside
> Money: Brown Brothers Harriman & the American Way of
> Power,” which will be published on May 18 by Penguin Press.
>
> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-capitalist-culture-that-built-america-11621004177

ltlee1 wrote:
> David P. wrote:
> > The Capitalist Culture That Built America
> > By Zachary Karabell, 5/14/21, Wall St. Journal
> >
> > At the dawn of the 19th c., an Irish immigrant named Alexander
> > Brown arrived in Baltimore & set up shop as a linen merchant.
> > The firm that he founded would evolve into one of America’s
> > most important investment banks, Brown Brothers Harriman,
> > which is still in business today. Over more than 2 centuries,
> > as a unique form of capitalism turned the U.S. into the most
> > potent & affluent country in the world, Brown Brothers was
> > the alchemist at the center.
> >
> > In its first hundred years, the firm helped to make paper
> > currency standard in the U.S., underwrote the earliest
> > railroad & trans-Atlantic steamship companies & almost
> > unilaterally created the first foreign exchange system
> > between the American dollar & the British pound. In the
> > 20th c., it became a cornerstone of what came to be known as
> > “the Establishment,” as its partners entered the halls of govt
> > to shape the global economic & security system that remains
> > the world’s institutional architecture.
> >
> > Today, as American capitalism faces the challenge of
> > reinventing itself for a post-pandemic future, the story
> > of Brown Brothers offers crucial lessons. Its legacy is by
> > no means simple: Like capitalism itself, the firm exhibited
> > a panoply of virtues & not a few vices. Brown Brothers helped
> > to unlock immense wealth & spurred the growth of American
> > creativity & power, but its partners too often equated the
> > public good with what was good for the firm.
> > [ . . . ]
> >
> > This essay is adapted from Karabell’s new book “Inside
> > Money: Brown Brothers Harriman & the American Way of
> > Power,” which will be published on May 18 by Penguin Press.
> >
> > https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-capitalist-culture-that-built-america-11621004177
> Could you summarize?
---------
Sure. There's a free market wherever people live. It's just a question of
how much of it will be HIJACKED by the POLITICAL CLASS !! lol
- -
--

On Thursday, May 20, 2021 at 3:25:10 PM UTC-4, David P. wrote:
> ltlee1 wrote:
> > David P. wrote:
> > > The Capitalist Culture That Built America
> > > By Zachary Karabell, 5/14/21, Wall St. Journal
> > >
> > > At the dawn of the 19th c., an Irish immigrant named Alexander
> > > Brown arrived in Baltimore & set up shop as a linen merchant.
> > > The firm that he founded would evolve into one of America’s
> > > most important investment banks, Brown Brothers Harriman,
> > > which is still in business today. Over more than 2 centuries,
> > > as a unique form of capitalism turned the U.S. into the most
> > > potent & affluent country in the world, Brown Brothers was
> > > the alchemist at the center.
> > >
> > > In its first hundred years, the firm helped to make paper
> > > currency standard in the U.S., underwrote the earliest
> > > railroad & trans-Atlantic steamship companies & almost
> > > unilaterally created the first foreign exchange system
> > > between the American dollar & the British pound. In the
> > > 20th c., it became a cornerstone of what came to be known as
> > > “the Establishment,” as its partners entered the halls of govt
> > > to shape the global economic & security system that remains
> > > the world’s institutional architecture.
> > >
> > > Today, as American capitalism faces the challenge of
> > > reinventing itself for a post-pandemic future, the story
> > > of Brown Brothers offers crucial lessons. Its legacy is by
> > > no means simple: Like capitalism itself, the firm exhibited
> > > a panoply of virtues & not a few vices. Brown Brothers helped
> > > to unlock immense wealth & spurred the growth of American
> > > creativity & power, but its partners too often equated the
> > > public good with what was good for the firm.
> > > [ . . . ]
> > >
> > > This essay is adapted from Karabell’s new book “Inside
> > > Money: Brown Brothers Harriman & the American Way of
> > > Power,” which will be published on May 18 by Penguin Press.
> > >
> > > https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-capitalist-culture-that-built-america-11621004177
> > Could you summarize?
> ---------
> Sure. There's a free market wherever people live. It's just a question of
> how much of it will be HIJACKED by the POLITICAL CLASS !! lol
> -
> -
> --

Only if one is white and belongs to the boomers. The "free market" is a lot less free for others. Millennials, especially the black and brown kind, are struggling. And they need something besides the capitalist culture that built America.

The following is from a short description of about the book "It Was All a Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America."
"Young Black Americans have been trying to realize the promise of the American Dream for centuries and coping with the reality of its limitations for just as long. Now, a new generation is pursuing success, happiness, and freedom — on their own terms.

In It Was All a Dream, Reniqua Allen tells the stories of Black millennials searching for a better future in spite of racist policies that have closed off traditional versions of success. Many watched their parents and grandparents play by the rules, only to sink deeper and deeper into debt. They witnessed their elders fight to escape cycles of oppression for more promising prospects, largely to no avail. Today, in this post-Obama era, they face a critical turning point."

"ltlee1" wrote in message
news:46d49be8-85a7-4df8-8f3c-f9fe94bf9784n@googlegroups.com...
>
> The following is from a short description of about the book "It Was All a
> Dream: A New Generation Confronts the Broken Promise to Black America."
> "Young Black Americans have been trying to realize the promise of the
> American Dream for centuries and coping with the reality of its
> limitations for just as long. Now, a new generation is pursuing success,
> happiness, and freedom — on their own terms.
>
> In It Was All a Dream, Reniqua Allen tells the stories of Black
> millennials searching for a better future in spite of racist policies that
> have closed off traditional versions of success. Many watched their
> parents and grandparents play by the rules, only to sink deeper and deeper
> into debt. They witnessed their elders fight to escape cycles of
> oppression for more promising prospects, largely to no avail. Today, in
> this post-Obama era, they face a critical turning point."

And if the shitskins don't like it, they can all go the hell back to Africa:
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=back+to+africa+movement

"ltlee1" wrote in message
news:5d5c7271-ca5b-436f-b0a1-ca57200c2702n@googlegroups.com...

On Thursday, May 20, 2021 at 2:18:58 AM UTC-4, David P. wrote:
>> The Capitalist Culture That Built America
>> https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-capitalist-culture-that-built-america-11621004177
>
> Could you summarize?

I've posted this before, but since other posters and lurkers may have missed
it, here it is again: On the tenth anniversary of the Cuban Mariel boatlift,
a "Nightline" episode was devoted to comparing the accomplishments of Cuban
immigrants versus American blacks. A young Cuban man described how he came
to Florida as a teenager with nothing more than the clothes on his back, and
he moved in with a relative, leaned English, and finished high school.
Working at a Kentucky Fried Chicken stand, he worked his way through a local
junior college and then got a scholarship to attend the University of
Florida, from which he graduated with a business degree. He opened up a
furniture store, worked hard and put in a lot of long hours, and eventually
had a chain of furniture stores. In the meantime he'd bought a home, gotten
married and had kids, and his family was solidly in the American middle
class. All this in ten years.

Ted Koppel then turned to this local Miami nog "community activist" and
asked why American blacks hadn't been able to do the same. This spade then
loudly blurted out, "Well, we been da victims of 400 years of
o-pression....." I nearly fell out of the chair laughing. Koppel couldn't
have kept a straight face had his life depended on it....