Oy Gevalt: Obama replacing Volker with... GE's Jeffrey Immelt

   

  

Chris Stirewalt reports:

When Democrats said President Obama was “pro-business,” we didn’t know they meant one business in particular.

There are a few companies on the Obama corporate A List – Democratic patrons Google and Goldman Sachs both turn up again and again at White House functions and for special recognition – but no company seems to get the VIP treatment that General Electric receives.

Obama will announce today on a visit to a G.E. plant in Schenectady, N.Y. that G.E. CEO Jeffrey Immelt will lead his new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. The panel replaces the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board led by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker.

 

 

Totally unrelated, I'm sure, is this headline at FT.com -- 

GE and Google earnings lift Wall Street

Strong results from General Electric and Google lifted sentiment on Wall Street on Friday helping to pull equities away from a week of losses.

General Electric, the largest US industrial group, posted a 51 per cent jump in fourth-quarter profit, lifting the industrial sector and the wider markets.

 

But but but... according to Wikipedia, Immelt was named one of the five Worst Non-Financial-Crisis-Related CEOs of 2008 by the Free Enterprise Action Fund, and further, that since Immelt took over, "GE's stock has dropped nearly 60%."

According to this Feb. 2009 press release from the FEAF,

GE is one of the biggest players in the Washington D.C. political scene - spending an average of over $20 million annually for lobbying over the past four years."

"We also wonder whether Immelt promised to promote Obama's green agenda though NBC's vast media empire. Timely news and entertainment programming could advance public support of cap-and-trade legislation to address global warming which might mandate sales of GE wind turbines - creating a win-win for Obama and Immelt, but a lose-lose, we believe, for consumers, taxpayers and GE shareholders," [Tom Borelli, of Action Fund Management, investment advisor to FEAF] said.

 

Didn't I read somewhere, too, that GE got tens of millions of taxpayer dollars through the Obama 'Stimulus'?  (And rather than creating jobs, lost or destroyed them by the thousands?)

 

Last but not least, an interesting side note from the Daily Caller:

.... [Ronald] Reagan ... served as spokesperson for GE from 1954 to 1962. Ironically enough, it is those years that many credit as having transformed Reagan from an actor to a politician and from a liberal to conservative. He began his tenure at GE as a self-described New-Dealer. But shortly after he left the company, he gave a stump speech for 1964 Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.

Sixty years later, GE is a much different company. It now owns, among many other things, the left-leaning MSNBC ...