Quake3World

Hail to the Robber Baron?

By Yoshi Tsurumi

04/07/05 "Harvard Crimson" - - 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.

Doombrain wrote:rubbish

SOAPboy wrote:

Doombrain wrote:rubbish

Spammer

Doombrain wrote:rubbish

Doombrain wrote:

SOAPboy wrote:

Doombrain wrote:rubbish

Spammer

dead dad

R00k wrote:

Doombrain wrote:rubbish

british

Doombrain wrote:

R00k wrote:

Doombrain wrote:rubbish

british

Great British

SOAPboy wrote:

Doombrain wrote:

SOAPboy wrote: Spammer

dead dad

Want a cookie?

Go troll R&R you fuck.. this is General, this isnt your playground

R00k wrote:

Doombrain wrote:

R00k wrote: british

Great British

English. :lol:

Doombrain wrote:

SOAPboy wrote:

Doombrain wrote: dead dad

Want a cookie?

Go troll R&R you fuck.. this is General, this isnt your playground

going to cry?

SOAPboy wrote:

Doombrain wrote:

SOAPboy wrote: Want a cookie?

Go troll R&R you fuck.. this is General, this isnt your playground

going to cry?

Over a retard like you? on a internet forum? lmfao :icon19:

Doombrain wrote:

SOAPboy wrote:

Doombrain wrote: going to cry?

Over a retard like you? on a internet forum? lmfao :icon19:

no, over your dad getting shot by some cool dude :lol:

SOAPboy wrote:

Doombrain wrote:

SOAPboy wrote:
Over a retard like you? on a internet forum? lmfao :icon19:

no, over your dad getting shot by some cool dude :lol:

Nope, i dont cry. thanks for caring tho :icon22:

Doombrain wrote:

SOAPboy wrote:

Doombrain wrote:
no, over your dad getting shot by some cool dude :lol:

Nope, i dont cry. thanks for caring tho :icon22:

Goths don't cry? Not even to cat poetry?

SOAPboy wrote:

Doombrain wrote:

SOAPboy wrote: Nope, i dont cry. thanks for caring tho :icon22:

Goths don't cry? Not even to cat poetry?

If you paid any kind of attention, you would know im NOT goth.. shit im wearing WHITE right now, in fact, white soccer warmup pants and a white half life 2 shirt.. ffs man GROW UP

Grudge wrote:It's funny how the US not only ass-rapes small countries like Afghanistan, Cuba and Iraq, but also keeps fucking itself right in it's own ass.

Fender wrote:FDR was a socialist and his New Deal programs are probably the worst thing (economically) any president has done to this country. We can trace the downward spiral of personal responsibility and accountability back to his programs when the gov't started handing out money.

Fender wrote:FDR was a socialist and his New Deal programs are probably the worst thing (economically) any president has done to this country. We can trace the downward spiral of personal responsibility and accountability back to his programs when the gov't started handing out money.

Ryoki wrote:Eh? I was always taught that the New Deal ended the Great Depression... you know, bring jobs to a lot of unemployed people, which upped the 'buying power' (not the right word i know) of the general population, which lead to a slow revival of the economy...

And what do you mean with the personal responsibility and accountibility bit? Ryoki needs explaining.