Portrait of the Idiot as a Young Man

My friend, Tim Clark, has an interesting article on his site - Dysfunctional Management Education and Damaged Capitalism in America (168k PDF) by Yoshi Tsurumi, who was one of Dubya's teachers in the MBA program at Harvard Business school. While the bulk of the piece is about how the crap they teach in MBA programs these days produces the unethical monsters that run modern American corporations into the ground, it starts off with this remembrance of the young G.W. Bush.

Thirty-one years ago, George W. Bush was my student at Harvard Business School. In my class, he called President Franklin D. Roosevelt a "socialist," and opposed Social Security and the Securities and Exchange Commission, unemployment insurance, and other New Deal innovations, because he thought they were "bad for business." In reality, the New Deal innovations and the federal government's positive role in managing the economy bailed the U.S. out of the Great Depression, won World War II, produced the Golden Age of the post-World War II era, and repaired American democracy and capitalism.

In those days, however, Bush belonged to a minority of MBA students who were seriously disconnected from accepting the moral and social responsibility for their actions. Today, he would fit in comfortably with an overwhelming majority of business students and teachers. President George W. Bush epitomizes the dysfunctional aspects of MBA mindset - anti-intellectualism, flawed integrity, greed, and lack of compassion for the unfortunate. At present, to privatize Social Security - his dream since his MBA days - President Bush is falsely claiming that Social Security is insolvent and inefficient.

President Bush has modeled his presidency on the Gilded Age of the McKinley Presidency of 1897-1901. President McKinley saw to it that Washington was ruled by big business. Corrupt crony capitalism and rampant Wall Street's money games finally brought about the Great Depression. Under the Bush Administration, Wall Street's money games are dominating the economy, and the jobless economic recovery is hurting the global competitiveness of the U.S. economy. As it was during the McKinley-Gilded Age, America is beset by a widening income gap between the haves and have-nots and by mounting foreign debts and is rapidly resembling a divisive, undemocratic Latin American country.

George W. Bush really is the CEO President - an unethical and unconcerned President. The horrifying thing is that our economy is being destroyed by people just like him.