Kinda hard to tell which is which – from Powerline on Obama’s appointment of GE boss Jeffrey Immelt as economic adviser/czar/mafia don/what-have-you:
…GE got a taste of the good life when it got in on the bank bailout. As the Washington Post reported in a major article in mid-2009, GE had quietly become the biggest beneficiary of one of the government’s key bank bailout programs. At the same time GE also avoided many of the restrictions faced by the big banks
The Post noted that GE did not initially qualify for the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program, under which the government guaranteed debt sold by banks: “But regulators soon loosened the eligibility requirements, in part because of behind-the-scenes appeals from GE.”
GE thus joined the big banks collectively saving billions of dollars by raising money for their operations at lower interest rates. The Post reported that GE Capital had issued nearly a quarter of the $340 billion in debt backed by the TLGP…
So, is Obama hiring his corporate pet in order to curry favor with corporate America prior to 2012 – or has corporate America put its man in charge of economic policy in order to pull Obama’s strings? In either case, what we don’t have here is an economic team headed up by anyone who cares about the poor and middle class. It also isn’t a team with the faintest concern for American manufacturing, farming and mining…it is concerned with subsidies, faddish business notions and raw, government power over the economy.
Immelt is the poster-boy for Big Corporation working hand in hand with Big Government to protect and enrich the Ruling Class at the expense of everyone else. Immelt isn’t interested in the American economy – he’s interested in people like him remaining rich and in charge of whatever economy is most profitable at the moment. We can expect from this appointment all sorts of demands to increase taxpayer funding of various corporate enterprises, new regulations to keep small and mid-sized players out of the market, more shipping of our farms, factories and mines to foreign lands, more fiat currency, more debt, more government spending…in short, more of what made everything a mess.
One must keep in mind just what sort of people rise high in large corporations – people who have a strong desire to make lots of money combined with a willingness to apple polish superiors. Immelt didn’t get where he is by being the man most suited to ensure long term profitability off of making the best products here in America…he got where he is because in years past some one already high up in the corporate food chain took a shine to him and gave him a leg up on the corporate ladder. From there it was simply a matter of being good at office politics, working out ways to squeeze another half percent profit on the quarterly balance sheet (done by letting people go, shipping facilities overseas, getting new government subsidies, that sort of thing…) while at the same time avoiding having a particular screw up assigned to his name.
What I’d really like to know is how our liberals feel about this – here’s your man, Obama, liberals and he’s put in charge of his economic policy a man deeply involved in what you call “corporate welfare”. Are you now going to wake up and realize that your liberal leaders are just snowing you?
I won’t hold my breath.
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