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 had this professor last year.
Yes and No.
He's got mental and emotional problems which hamper him.
If you say something that disrupts he view of reality, he gets emotional (or as others put it "ecentric").
Saying Krugman served on the advisory board of Enron makes him go ballistic, he calls it all lies, even if its on Krugmans own website, he sort of called Krugman wrong (or liar, your pick) in trying to defend him.
He does not need censure, he needs therapy, I told the director of the program this, and most of Yoshi's collegues answer with the usual "ah, he's harmless" and "excentric" explanations.
Having lived and worked in both countries, neither is perfect, and both would do well to adopt a principle or two from the other, but statistically America's economy is a much better performer.
"...capitalism becomes corrupt without democratic civic values and ethical restraints."
Clearly, "professors" become corrupt without a minimal understanding of economic reality and without restraints on their fanciful notions of self-importance.
"...capitalism becomes corrupt without democratic civic values and ethical restraints."
Clearly, "professors" become corrupt without a minimal understanding of economic reality and without restraints on their fanciful notions of self-importance.
I would not argue with that, but I do not think its honest to automatically assume, Japan, at anything, and everything must be better.
One of the gripes I had with him, which we discussed, had to do with international business we were studying, I wanted to see if we could cover material that spanned from asia (china, south korea, south east asia) to europe, and to Latin America to the US. He addmitted that the international party of the class was a bit to japan/american centric, but also addmitted, in a vague way, his lack of "expertise" in those realms, and when questions came concerning europe, he tried to change the subject back to Japan, it's clear to his students, that his knowledge of business only concerns 2 countries in the world.
The author is one mendacious SOB. If you asked me how I graded a student of mine thirty years ago, being of sound mind I would certainly have one hell of a time recalling as much as this clown did. I wonder, is it a sickness like West Nile virus that leads Democrats to persistently lie about anything and everything political?
I agree.
How about Mike Pence in 2008 then?
There was actually a few schools in between.
He doesn't like to talk about that.
And I did have him at Baruch.
Sounds like unless you were there to study the business practices of either Japan or the U.S., the class was screwed. Too bad.
Are you describing the professor or the MSM?
Its MARK HANNA, HANNA, HANNA.
I told this Jackass more then once, the guys name was Mark Hanna, not Hunter, I even told him Mark Hanna's bio, why the hell can't he ever remember the guys name or get his background right.
Its like a mental brain block. I told him this every damn time, it was Mark Hanna, not Mark Hunter.
He had a grudge against Bush 30 years ago, he wanted to fail him because he hated his father , and Dubya wouldn't renounce his dad.
Or pretty much what he told me when I had him as my teacher.
Yea, and he teaches international business, the school was alright, and the other teachers good, they kind of thought of Yoshi as a "harmless" guy.
Nice, huh?
The first day I had him in class, and he talked about being the victim of a conspiracy by Bush using the media, I knew it was going to be a long class and that he was nuts.
Socialism is putting it nicely.
There was a paper he wrote that he handed out to us in class, looking at it, you could justify slavery if you so wanted to.
T(surumi): 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, ...
Secret Service needs to make a house call on these loons.
As one of my former professors said "Those who can do, Those who can't teach" become tenured professors and really ad nothing to thousands of young minds.
I like Garafelo implying that Bush would have supported the Japanese Internment. Like the way the ACLU did? Who enacted that internment Yosh baby?
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