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.
Steve
I'm not sure how he got his numbers either for the last 4 years. I think the salaries rose that high under clinton also. I think he was saying that currently the ceo's salaries are 600-1000 times higher than the employees which is correct.
Read the uSA article last week. It's sickning. Not just the salaries but the unbeleivable perks. While at the same time the rank and file employees are paying more for their health care and are losing their pensions or are being outsourced, layed off etc.
Sounds great Mark, but here's the problem. These two words describe the result of such a party:
President Hillary.
A better solution is to re-take the GOP.
I know people that are socially conservative, pro-gun, and support tax reform that still vote Dem because the Republicans are (in their minds) the "big-business" party and all "racists" and all that garbage.
By the way, Mike Pence can do all those things you mention.
While I assume these statistics are correct, what does that have to do with the Bush Administration? It's not the job of the President to tell corporations what to pay people. If corporations overpay execs (an opinion), then the employees and stockholders should rise up against it.
The last thing I want is our government investigating and dictating wages of anyone. It's bad enough with the stupid minimum wage laws.
BTTT
Well, of course he only made it thru because of his name...... :)
I'm sorry, I just don't trust that data. Suppose the average worker receves 40K a year, that means that the CEO would make 24-40 million. There are few who pull that down, mostly through stock options, but not very many.
Hey, if Social Security is solvent, cut me a check for what I have into it. To paraphrase Tom in It's A Wonderful Life, a few measly thousand isn't going to break anybody.
I'll see pigs fly before they cut my check...
Which is what tells me it's a pyramid scheme.
Take this guys class, according to him (on certain days), he tried to fail him...only because of his name.
Yoshi (and I had him as a teacher last year) had it in for Bush just because of his father, Yoshi followed politics, and since he had Bush as a student, his mental health has worsened. He needs help, his collegues know this, and so does the rest of the faculty, and many of whom agree with his politics, know, he has issues, as a student, I was clear, he is nuts.
For the record, I got a pretty good grade in his class, and thats in spite of the fact that he has issues. He needs help, not attention.
I had this jackass as my teacher, and after I told him more then once, repeatedly, that McKinley's adviser was Mark Hanna (I used to almost scream this to him, including telling him the bio), he still calls the guy Mark Hunter.
After awhile, you start to go as nuts as he is.
For perspective, on my first day in class, he gave us a conspiracy theory about how the Bush family was suppressing media coverage about him. His fellow professors (aka my other teachers) describe him as "He's harmless" or "he's weird but not dangerous" or "He's eccentric". Tells you alot doesn't it?
I thought it should be noted, the writer of this article (also a former professor of mine), if you talk about race or ethnicity, is pretty much a anti-american/japanese nationalist.
You may or may not know what its like to sit through class after class listening to a lunatic whose grip on reality is gone, but who insists on bashing American, and in comparision, praising Japan, like it was a nation of the 2nd coming of jesus.
He does play the race card, but in the most dishonest way, long story short, anything you can say about McKinley, you could say about FDR, but watch him explode if you do so.
To him, America is bad, and Japan is great, and we are will suffer, and they (are)will thrive.
Quote: I'm sorry, I just don't trust that data. Suppose the average worker receves 40K a year, that means that the CEO would make 24-40 million. There are few who pull that down, mostly through stock options, but not very many
Read the USA today article. The top 100 ceo's are making 25 million and on up. The guy from United tech is making 98 million per year + perks. The 24-40 million you quoted was actually at the bottom of the pay scale. These numbers were not pulled out of thin air but from the corporate balance sheets
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