Posted on 04/06/2005 12:26:45 PM PDT by rface
(George W. Bush) epitomizes the worst aspects of America’s business education. To privatize Social Security, he is peddling a colossal lie about its solvency. Furthermore, Bush, along with today’s business aristocrats, shows no compassion for working Americans, robbing them to benefit big business and the very rich.
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. To privatize Social Security, he is peddling a colossal lie about its solvency. Furthermore, Bush, along with today’s business aristocrats, shows no compassion for working Americans, robbing them to benefit big business and the very rich. Last year, due to Bush’s tax cuts, over 80 of America’s most profitable 200 corporations did not pay even a penny of their federal and state income taxes. Meanwhile, to pay for his additional tax cuts for the very rich, Bush is drastically cutting back several social services, such as federal lunch programs for poor children.
Business education has also produced former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and other MBAs behind the malfeasances of Tyco, HealthSouth, Haliburton, AIG, and WorldCom. Many executives of corporate America who hold MBAs have also been engaged in the unethical acts of raiding their corporate treasuries at the expense of employees and stockholders. Emulating President Bush’s hubris, a multitude of CEOs in corporate America give themselves obscenely large bonuses that have little to do with their performance. In 1980, the CEOs of Fortune 500 large corporations received, on average, 70 times larger annual compensations than their average employees. 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 built up since Roosevelt’s New Deal era.
Meanwhile, American economics study has increasingly become a pseudoscience of mathematical formula manipulation that is devoid of humanity. This economics has conquered America’s business education and become fused with the robber baron culture of greed supremacy. American MBAs are taught to treat ordinary employees as disposable costs and to swallow uncritically the gospel that corporations exist only to reward abstract stockholders. MBAs are taught the pretend-science of manipulating accounting, finance, employees, customers, and stock prices. Financial games and hostile takeovers of competitors are taught to accomplish corporations’ sole objective—to make money and manipulate stock prices. Such a mistaken view of corporations has caused the dismal decline of American auto manufacturers while Toyota and Honda widen their market shares and profits in America, pursuing their goals of expanding employment and technological innovations.
To justify the robber baron culture, America’s business educators and economists falsely cite their demigod of laissez-faire market economics, Adam Smith. Little do they know that Adam Smith in fact scathingly castigated Bush’s type of government: business collusion and unfair taxes, Wal-Mart’s exploitations of labor and communities, and robber barons’ hubris. Nowhere in his 900-page book, The Wealth of Nations, does Smith even imply that those who knowingly harm others and society in their pursuit of personal greed also benefit their society. He rejects the notion that a corporation exists to make money without ethical constraints.
Yoshi Tsurumi is a professor of international business at Baruch College. He earned his Doctor of Business Administration from Harvard in 1968, and he taught at Harvard Business School from 1972 to 1976.
I'll get the popcorn..
This kind of article should come with the "Oh! Not that shit again poster."
Good one.
Sounds fine to me.
FDR WAS a socialist. Next question...
Franklin Delano was a socialist, and that is being kind.
I am delighted to hear that GW has remained true to his beliefs for all of these years.
I am surprised to hear that there has been a communist professor there at Harvard for so long but I guess some things never change.
I had Yoshi Tsurumi as my professor last year.
He is a mentally unstable, jackass who needs help, not a column.
Every time this lunatic opens his mouth, my masters drops in value.
He was disturbed then, he's more unhinged now.
Hurray for socialist system crap. It owns everything, devides everything "according to needs" (stuffs the pockets of opressors) so everybody is even (poor and controlled). Smart guys (rebels) go into gulags to work for the moron apparatchiks. Good one, as taught at liberal universities.
(Where is the barf, barf, barf allert?)
Professor, if George W. Bush, as your student, was so dumb as to not understand the material you lectured on, why did you pass him?
Really !!!
(Thing I love about freep is the quick cross-checking possible with people who have first-hand experience.)
Yoshi Tsurumi is the leading crapola salesman for the New England District.
A google search on this professor reveals a history of Bush bashing on a number of already discredited points.
Where's the barf warning?
"Every time this lunatic opens his mouth, my masters drops in value."
Great line!
"...capitalism becomes corrupt without democratic civic values and ethical restraints."
That sounds good, but the Harvard Professor, sitting in his ivory tower, doesn't seem to grasp the thought that being
on welfare has corrupted many a potential worker, who
now chooses to sit on his duff and collect "his due"
thanks to liberals buying his vote!
Two sides to every coin.
President Bush and his rapacious “captains of piracy” of corporate America are destroying America’s democracy built up since Roosevelt’s New Deal era.
Yeehaa!! What an enjoyable article. It's Adam Smith vs. John Maynard Keynes. Social "values" be damned. Let Liberty flourish. My God, how did mankind survive for 6,000 years until Franklin Roosevelt and his beloved safety net came along. Honest John Adams would call this type of thinking rubbish.
This guy is something of a Luddite. I get the impression he doesn't think much of scientific approaches to economics.
I am still trying to figure out what any of the vile he spewed has anything to do with privatizing social security.
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