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.
This idiot teaches business? Why doesn't he discuss how corrupt GOVERNMENT is? Businesses don't gas millions of people, businesses don't execute people in concentration camps - governments do.
The bar for intellectual thought on the left is at an all time low. Next thing you know, some nut job at the Univ of Colorado will start railing against America and claim he's an Indian.
Has anyone got a CV on the Professor that shows if he ever made a dollar in his life doing anything except lecturing Gen X'r students about how to run a business, probably making money as a "consultant" by selling his business students' class projects...and, of course, working with Kitty Kelley on the fictional work "The Unauthorized Biography of the Bush Family"?
What, did Bush claim that Social Security was solvent while I wasn't looking?Social Security is predicated on the conceit that the federal government has unbounded creditworthiness. If that is true, then the government IOUs in the Social Security Trust Fund are as good as gold. But if the government is already spending as much money as it can raise, and/or if it will have unanticipated expenses in the future, having those government IOUs in the "trust fund" is as silly as if you or I wrote an IOU for a trillion dollars and put it in a safe and claimed we were rich.
This guy is lying. Well, we knew that. Specifically though about him remembering stuff that Bush said or did 35+ years ago.
What I want all of you to do, think back to a teacher you had 20+ years ago, or in fact anyone from that time. Can you remember what they said other than vague impressions?
Someone should check Ws transcript and find out if he ever even took this wanker's classes.
He lost his mind long ago, he now has delusions of grandeur, sypntoms of paranoia, irrational problems seperating fiction from reality, and the inability to deal with outside issues unrelated to his obsession to Bush.
I told the executive director from the progran that his mental health was deteriorating, I would hope they would have helped him.
Hmmm...looks like even Harvard found this guy to be a nut and cut him loose without tenure. Says a lot.
Bush is the first president of the United States with a Master’s of Business Administration (MBA).
This must be a typo. All I hear from the MSM is how dumb W is.
I'd also like to know what W. got for grade....if he got an "A" Id' say that's good - and if he got a "D", I'd say "that's good" too.
I had this professor and asked him the same question, I got several different answers, but my favorite was that he tried, but that Bush did his homework and passed his tests (out of spite no doubt).
He made it sound like Bush was evil for just doing his class work.
Try having him for a class. He almost sounds like math is evil.
Either that or he left Harvard to teach at the prestigious Baruch College....
Government is only corrupt when people he does not like runs it.
He lost his mind long ago, and I say this with first hand knowledge of knowing the man and having been his student last year.
Sounds correct to me. In fact, this Bush of this late 60s classroom sounds more like a true conservative than the one we have now!
He does remember Bush, unlike his articles, he has told his some of his students (including me, I had him last year) why he remembers him.
When Bush first came to Harvard, he had a grudge against Bush, Yoshi followed politics and hated and loathed Bush's dad, so he went after Dubya, in class, often, he tried to persecute the kid.
Bush passed his class, and did not roll over for him, it still angers him, that the student he wanted to fail, who would not renounce his father, who had conservative opinions, is now the President of the United States.
By the way, the guy has since lost his mind, and is pretty much a person with a serious mental illness and deteriorating mental health condition.
Quote: 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.
I agree with this. Read USA Today last week about pay for top 100 corp ceo's. Guy from United Technologies gets $98 million per year while laying off employees and outsourcing.
Carla Fioni(sic) screwed up Hewlett Packard financially and received a $21 million dollar severence package. Should have got a boot up her backside.
This guy is so credible and has such credentials, he had to go to the Harvard Student paper to get 'published'.
Explain further.
I'm not flaming, I have my beefs with W. Just want to know more about your statement.
C+, with teacher trying to fail him because of his dad.
If that old fart had known GWB would be a President one day....and a conservative capitalist...he'd would've failed him...too funny...
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