Hail to G. W. Bush - the Robber Baron?

(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.

July 16, 2004 Air America Radio Majority Report Radio

Sam Seder: S

Janeane Garofalo: G

Yoshi Tsurumi, T:

G : We’re back on the Majority Report here with Sam Seder and in studio we are very pleased to welcome back for the second time Yoshi Tsurumi, who was George W. Bush’s professor from Harvard Business School. He is a professor of international business at Baruch College and at SUNY. Or is it CUNY?

T: CUNY.

G: CUNY. I always do. CUNY City. What is it?

T: City University of New York.

G: That’s what I figured. So what’s City College of New York?

T: That’s a part of CUNY.

G: Okay, then there you go. It used to be a real hot bed of politic activity back in the 1930’s. I don’t think it is like that still anymore.

T: Well there is some remnant of it, yes, just the we have many international students who are politically and historically very aware. And very critical of the way that the United States is heading.

G: But I don’t think there are a lot of socialist, communists running around like there was in the 1930’s.

T: No. Not any more. In the United States anywhere there. Not like the 1960’s for that matter. But eh Baruch College hosted a series of Anti-Iraq war panel discussions, students and facility members, so eh.

G: Well, I know that New York still does have a lot of political activity. I saw a documentary about City College of New York, eh which you probably familiar with. I wish I could remember the title of it, which was about that that very special time in the 1930’s and New York. Not only at the College but at New York City in General.

S: Arguing the World.

G: Arguing the World. That’s right! Wow Sam! (laughs)

S: Yes I wanted to segue into, you were here before, you told us some of these things before, but they created such a warm feeling inside me when you said these words that I want to (and I don’t mean that in a weird way) I want to hear you talk about this again, then were going to talk a little bit more about his policies because you are also, you understand economics in a way that the rest of us don’t.

G: And the way the president doesn’t. (laughs)

S: Exactly. So now tell us. You had him as a student right? In business school.

T: Yes. From the fall of 1973 to the spring 1974. I taught him Microeconomics, international business and industrial policies.

S: So you had him for multiple classes?

T: No. Just the whole year long classes which combined these three key elements of the policy decisions.

S: Alright, let’s start with something simple. How was his attendance?

T: Well attendance was not that bad. But his attention span was very short.

S: Very short.

T: And either he was clowning in class or if he’s called on (I often do that) he makes all kinds of flippant statements. Very shallow. Most of all those flippant statements are nonsensical. But often he revealed his strong biases against the medical, Medicare, social security anything the United States has built up since the Great Depression.

S: Now let me ask you this, I know you told us before, but I’d like you to say again. Now how is it that you remember that you had George Bush? I mean you must have had hundreds of thousands of, probably thousands of students in your career.

T: Yes. In thirty years you always remember the two kinds of students. One is really good. The other is a George Bush kind. Terrible. Intellectually very shallow. But more importantly immature, but lacking the sense of responsibility, compassion, always indulging in denials when he is called on in his lies. And lies came very easily to him.

S: What kind of lies would he tell?

T: Lots of times the students, just the eh. For example. One statement that he made still stuck with me. We were discussing how the United States Government should help the lower income group or people on the fixed pension to adjust themselves to the high energy costs during the oil crisis, to bring in the fairness into the US economic policies. And he raised the issues and he said, “People are poor because they are lazy.” Those are the lies. And he goes into ranting and all kinds of things that there are no racial discriminations in the United States because at the times the civil rights movement was still smoldering.

S: It’s amazing that he could actually say, “People are poor because they are lazy.” Because he’s a guy who is almost admittedly on his own extremely lazy. Somehow he managed to make a lot of money. I wonder how that happened? Or at least GET a lot of money. Well we have to take a break, but we are talking to Yoshi Tsurumi, professor of economics and George Bush’s old business school professor. You’re listening to the Majority Report on Air America Radio Janeane Garofalo and I shall return momentarily.

Commercial Break

G: We are back on the Majority Report. My name is Janeane Garofalo I’m here with Sam Seder and we are very pleased to welcome back to our show Yoshi Tsurumi who was George W. Bush’s professor from Harvard Business School. He is also a professor of international business at Baruch College and at CUNY. So when we left we were talking about not only that after 30 years of teaching you do remember two kinds of students. You remember the best and you remember the worst. But you don’t just remember them for simply being abstractly the best or worst. You remember certain things about their character. And of course this is going to spring to mind with George W. Bush since he is the quote unquote Leader of the Free World as they say, the commander in Chief. And he was a guy that in his 20’s displayed to you a noteworthy lack of personality.

T: The lack of leadership quality we like to expect of any president. Certainly presidency of the United States. For example, lack of compassion, lying, indulging self-denial. Blaming the victims there are others. Certainly in trying to justify his own prejudices as if they are the American Way. Now a days he is trying to justify his prejudices as if they are given by God.

G: But they are his American way. They are for a certain type of person.

T: Right.

G: A type of person who would have support Japanese internment, that would have supported the Jim Crow laws, segregation, women not being able to vote, not having access to birth control. That is George Bush’s America.

T: Yes. That’s why please make no mistake. What he has been doing, not only in economics but externally everything else, what he’s trying to do, he’s trying to bring back the, what we call the gilded age of 1900 to 1920s when we didn’t have any votes even for women, segregation was a way of life (certainly in the south and Texas). Lynching was going on. He’d like to bring one of those few things, and what he is doing is suddenly he’s carrying out the radical revolution. It’s not (unintelligible) way of doing it, he is committed to really just revolutionizing the United States that the eh, to bring back the United States of 1900 to just before the Great Depression. The same thing that produced the Great Depression. For example, his economic policy could be characterized as the Reverse Robbing Hood Philosophy.

S: The Reverse Robbing Hood Philosophy?

T: Yes. Robbing the poor and the working people to benefit the rich and powerful corporations. He believes in that because in my class he said he was opposed to the Securities Exchange Commission.

S: He said this when he was in your class room?

T: Oh yeah. He said that the Securities Exchange Commission was the enemy of capitalism and that greed is beautiful and all those stuff. And to him Franklin Roosevelt was a socialist, the New Deal was socialism. So now what he’s doing is trying to push the United States back to pre-Great Depression era.

S: I’ll tell you something, it’s funny that you say that because I think I heard a story, maybe it was from the Richard Clarke book. Or I can’t re..or Paul O’Neil? I can’t remember what story it was. They were discussing why when he was in office early on; this is after 9/11, why the stock market wasn’t doing well. And he’s in the room full of advisors and says, “The stock market isn’t doing well because the SEC is regulating them too much.” Now this a time where all the, where we’re finding out of all the incredible, you know the Enron scandal, WorldCom, all of it. And they all look at him with a blank face and he goes, “Well it’s actually because of Iraq. Because Iraq is a people aren’t sure what’s going to happen.”

G: So, in a nutshell if I may, it’s neoCons and neoconfederates bring on a neo-gilded age. And what George Bush was doing at that time, because he obviously doesn’t have the intellectual curiosity to come up on these theories on his own. He was mimicking what he’s heard at home probably. And from his peer from his peers in that world that he lived in. Like his father and mother had probably said things like that and he was just mimicking what they would say.

T: He was just parroting what I thought he heard from his Texas friends.

G: Right. Because there is no way he would come to these theories on his own after extensive research.

T: No. No. He doesn’t the intellectual base to be able to do that, he was just parroting all the superficial strongly held prejudices. For example his economic policies, intentionally are really robbing the middle class and working class to benefit the rich. We know that. His tax cuts benefiting the large corporations without conscience and the very rich. And 80% of Americans are really suffering. Because if you adjust the real income, adjusted for price increases of working class and middle class. The real income has in fact declined during the Bush’s the administration during the last three and one half years. But he talks about the alright the economy is great because the GDP, the Gross national Domestic Product, that’s a gross index and only about 18% at most of American’s can eat GDP. Money gamers, and corporate aristocrats. 80% of the rest of us can not eat GDP. Our real income has stagnated or in fact declined. Our tax burdens, overall tax burdens have increased. Bush talk about cutting federal taxes, even for the middle class. Indeed he has reduced federal tax rates for some middle class income brackets. But, he hasn’t reduced the payroll taxes or Medicare taxes and since he has cut many subsidies or direct services in the municipality. We are saddled with a local... increase in local taxes on sales in our taxes.

S: So the net effect really is, by his supposal, supposedly federal income tax cut, the net effect is actually raising taxes on people who earn a wage and get paid and have money deducted out of their taxes.

T: Precisely, and his tax policies is really to exempt taxes from the income of assets such as dividend and interest and all the things and tax heavily anything like wages or salary. So that’s his policy and he’s doing it purposely. And as a result, the United States economy is already saddled with the huge budget deficit. Already just the growth of even GDP started slowing down because of the huge budget deficit and the recent interest increases, which was really necessitated by the huge budget deficits, are hurting middle to working income group. Because immediately, mortgage rates, auto loans,

S: Credit cards

T: Credit cards rates. Gas prices and necessary services prices are going up.

G: Is this a theory that sounds logical. As the debt expands. For every dollar that the debt expands, that’s another dollar that we have to borrow. Is that correct?

T: Right.

G: From other people? And that means a dollar less they have to buy things from us. Is that how it works? And we become sort of a debtor nation?

T: Oh my. US is the most indebted nation of the world. And every time the United States, particularly the Bush Administration councils Mexico or Latin America or others to be frugal and not to run up the deficits well I chuckle. (Chuckles). US is the most indebted nation in the world. But.

S: Yeah but if we anybody but American and even the IMF at times are starting to get nervous about us. Aren’t they?

T: Already is. But unfortunately for the United States. The US dollar which US continues to print is accepted as international currency. So the United States doesn’t feel right away that the bad impact of the budget deficits and everything else.

S: It takes a longer time because our currency is used around the world.

T: Eventually it will catch up. But the Bush’s game is to just say, alright during this administration; hopefully in a few years the reality will not catch up with him. I’m hoping that the people will realizing that the Bush’s are purposely bankrupting American government’s budget. Bankrupting household’s budget and bankrupting the United States international balance of payments.

G: For what end game?

T: End game is certainly that he gets the new gilded age back. Certainly to benefit a few friends, and large rich corporations including himself.

G: So he is willing to sacrifice the many for a neo-gilded age if you will, but the point is is doesn’t this make the country harder to govern? It starts losing in business, in science in technology and crime rates go through the roof. So how does this benefit even a charlatan administration like this one?

T: It doesn’t benefit! But these neo-cons in office, Cheney’s included do not have such a long term view of the United States.

G: Will they be traveling off world?

S: I want to ask you this. Is it possible that you have people like Grover Norquist who that that his goal, his stated goal is to weaken government enough so that he can drown it in a bathtub. Now something has to fill that void. And for these neo-cons it is complete privatization of everything. And isn’t it basically what they want to do is turn this into a feudal system?

T: Certainly, that is why the democracy is really dying in the United States. Already what we have in the United States what I call the Kleptocracy. Banditocracy. Kleptomaniacs neo-cons really robbing 80% of Americans

S: I love that Kleptocracy.

G: Is that why also Bush is also turning a blind eye to Putin’s Russia?

T: Precisely. It’s the same.

G: As it goes much more into the old KGB style of things? Because that’s really sort of something that he admires?

T: It’s in the same boat, yes. Putin and Bush.

S: Alright we have to take a break, but when we come back from the break, I want you to tell me the truth. You have to tell me the truth about this. How many times did George Bush come drunk to your class? Don’t answer it now. We’re going to wait till we get back from the break to find out how many times George Bush came to class drunk. And also and if you are an economics professor I want to see if you can retroactively go back and change my grades.

G: (Laughs)

S: You’re listening to the Majority Report on Air America Radio.

BREAK

S: Welcome back to the Majority Report on Air America Radio. Streaming at airamericaradio.com blogging at majorityreportradio.com. My name is Sam Seder sitting across from me is Janeane Garofalo and in studio with us is Yoshi Tsurumi, who was George W. Bush’s professor back in ’72-73 I think it was at Harvard Business school.

T: ’73-74

S: ’73-74. Now when we left. I posed the question to you. I would not let you answer. How many times did George Bush come drunk to your class, as a student?

(silence)

S: He’s counting on his fingers. He’s counting

G: Hangovers count as well, because sometimes there is residual.

T: Well certainly he missed quite a few.

S: He missed quite a few classes?

T: And when he came to classes some times he stays half-drunk.

G: But wait, we said at the being that his attendance was good.

Crosstalk

T: But, but he I would say never, but he rarely came to class prepared. It’s easy, he has to come to class after he read a least some assignments or thought about some of the question and other things. Then he goes into all kinds of ranting and the flippant statements to cover up his shallowness.

S: That’s called confabulation. Which he still actually has a problem with. So to be fair to George Bush, we can not prove that he showed up to class drunk all the time.

T: Not all the time, no.

S: Right

G: But he was probably hung over when he was...you know what I mean he’s hung over. It’s college, that’s normal we can not hold, and graduate school, that just normal drinking especially in that era.

T: Well, he was rare even among the 85 students that I had, and he often had a binge drinking problems.

G: Right, but he’s got the severe leaning disability too. He’s probably frustrated because he doesn’t read very well.

T: Yeah. On top of that. On top of that.

S: Now I want to ask you about William McKinley. President William McKinley. Can you talk about it a little bit? Can you see any similarities between McKinley and Bush?

T: Okay, some history lesson. William McKinley, finally he was assassinated, and replaced by the better president like the Theodore Roosevelt, but he reigned from 1897 to 1901 and his Karl Rove equilivant was Mark Hunter,

S: Mark Hunter

T: Mark Hunter, and he publicly stated that the government exists for the benefits of large corporations. At the time railroads, timber, coal, oil, gas those industries. It’s seen as the most corrupt presidency of the United States. The current Bush presidency is very much in contest for the worst most corrupt administration. (laughs) and that is beginning of the gilded age, the neo-rich own things. Greed is beautiful and lynching was rampant, especially from Texas and the south. Racial prejudice was of course practiced in the United States and nobody questions, very few questioned. Women didn’t have votes.

S: Right.

T: Abortion was criminally prosecuted.

S: Traditional marriage still existed where women were the property of men.

T: Precisely.

S: Okay, not necessarily.

T: Not necessarily.

G: (laughs)

T: So the gilded age was (that’s a Mark Twain terminology) but the gilded age was in fact gilded only for the silver of the greedy, rich powerful corporations and persons. The rest of Americans was below poverty lines.

S: And would you say, I mean, this is, this is almost like, it’s almost as if George Bush was reading this guys manual and this was the model for his presidency.

T: Well Karl Rove is on the record, has been on the record to say that his model is Mark Hunter, who was the advisor to McKinley. So it’s no question that the Bush’s policies resemble purposely what the gilded age America was. For example.

G: Yoshi can I interrupt you one second to ask if you have read the Mark Twain novel “The Gilded Age?” , which I haven’t, but I hear it is absolutely wonderful. Would you say for our listeners that if they did this weekend get a copy of the Gilded Age by Mark Twain, they might have an interesting of what is going on?

T: I’m quite sure that the do. I’m quite sure that Mark Twain’s Gilded Age would remind listeners very much of what the Bushes doing today.

G: Get it on the blog Sam.

T: For example the widening income gap between the few haves and the many have not. And totally inhuman society and unfairness, unfair society and everything else. Bushes problem are many. But from my vantage viewpoint he purposely lies. For example I taught him a piece that he showed me on the written exam, that when you interpret, for example the unemployment rates, or such macro index as job creation, you have to look into the quality, inside of it. And he refused to do that. He boasted about creating many jobs, well he refused to look into the quality of those jobs statistics. Most of them minimum wage paying, part-time service jobs.

S: Alright let’s break this down for a second now. George Bush right now it looks like is almost impossible that he won’t be the first president since Hoover to actually have a net loss of jobs. But lately, and actually not the last month but two months ago there was like a four month period where he was creating some jobs, not enough to ever reach his goals, and not as much as he said he would, but you’re saying that those jobs, they were crappy jobs.

T: Right. For example, just the saddest picture we have about the unemployed today, is the persons who have lost good paying jobs, college graduates and others, good service jobs, good manufacturing jobs and now caring out at least three part time jobs. All of which are paying at minimum, minimum wages no benefits. No medical benefits, no other benefits. This is the saddest situation we have, that’s why you ask your listeners where they feel they are secure about their future job prospect, or they feel far better off today than before.

S: Right. They’re not.

T: They’re not.

S: I don’t even have to ask anybody, it’s pretty obvious. It is pretty obvious.

T: Well since Bush says they are better off, that is why they better to keep reminding themselves of the reality.

S: That’s right.

G: And where do you see in your opinion, if Kerry wins. Which we think he will, what do you see, where do you see the economy going under a Kerry administration?

T: At least it will put the United States back onto the long term economic growth. For example, economic growth is carried out and sustained by bulging middle class. That has been the history since the Great Depression of the United States. So Kerry’s policies to simply reduce the Bush tax cut for the rich and simply shift the tax cuts to the overall tax burdens of the working and middle class and use the tax cuts for the rich to pay for the health insurance for the 44 million uninsured. That’s very important, health insurance should be the human rights problem and economic problem. And Bush’s heath plan is nonsensical because he is subsidizing pharmaceutical companies and HMO and others and not benefiting any uninsured people.

S: Alright professor we have to say good bye, it’s been great having you. We are going to have you back on again real soon. Thank you very much, we’ve been talking to Yoshi Tsurumi. George W. Bush’s professor from business school.

Transcript by Spocko 7/28/2004

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