Hail To The Robber Baron?

[Tace]

(posted last night on gd, but got few takers. this is a great story!)

By YOSHI TSURUMI -- The 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.

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

[izzie]

1. I have been telling you it is like the 1880's

You should look up some of the art done about that time. To early for me to recall names.

[applegrove]

2. It is called forced teaming. The predator wants you to lower your

guard so he pretends you are in the same boat together. That is why Bush & his ilk ran around in the fall talking about how much they loved that Roosevelt. To make you feel safe about Bush's plans for SS. A sociopath's trick. Lower your guard - we are the same people as you. ***hole!

For more information on forced teaming and other tools used by the manipulators and their names:

http://www.kidpower.org/Articles/boundary-lowering.html

or another site where Gavin DeBecker, author of The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us From Violence, lays out these manipulative techniques used by disreputable people:

Here is what kidpower has:

"Forced teaming:

Sometimes someone will say and do things to make you feel, "We're in the same boat," or, "We're on the same team." The purpose is to establish rapport and to put you at ease. Team spirit can be an excellent motivator. Sport teams, political parties, community service organizations, and neighborhoods all work best when people feel a sense of belonging with each other.

However, notice when someone with whom you have not chosen to be connected with talks as if you are together. Remember what your relationship with this person truly is and is not."


or simply google forced teaming yourself.

[applegrove]

3. Also the Economist Magazine. They feel it is up to somebody else

to make the leaders of tomorrow...not the MBA program itself. They claim that in the worst case examples.. the ceos were not MBA educated. As if a few criminals was the the only problem we faced.

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=3672752



Here is a critique of what MBAs are taught today:

Bad Management Theories Are Destroying Good Management Practices
Sumantra Ghoshal

http://aom.pace.edu/AMLE/v4n1.html#

[necso]

4. Great piece.

I hope that there is more to follow.