Hail to the Robber Baron?

[Guest guest]

M

 

 

Fri, 8 Apr 2005 20:39:59 -0500

Hail to the Robber Baron?

 

 

 

The Harvard Crimson

 

Originally published on Wednesday, April 06, 2005 in the Opinion

section of The Harvard Crimson.

 

 

 

Hail to the Robber Baron?

By YOSHI TSURUMI

YOSHI TSURUMI

 

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.

http://www.thecrimson.com/printerfriendly.aspx?ref=506836