On April 22, 2009, GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt entered a raging
controversy at the University of Notre Dame surrounding an upcoming
commencement speech by Barack Obama with an
op-ed in, of all places, the Notre Dame Observer.
Without addressing any of the issues in contention, namely
Obama’s pro-choice policies and the school’s obligations as a
Catholic institution, the article expressed Immelt’s wholehearted
support for Obama and his upcoming speech. What made the article so
odd, beside the apparent cluelessness of the author, was that the
CEO of GE felt it necessary to add his opinion to an argument
involving Notre Dame. Immelt is not a Notre Dame alumnus (he went
to Dartmouth), he doesn’t have affiliations with the university
other than a commencement speech he gave in 2007, and he’s not
Catholic. One would think that the CEO of one of the largest
companies in America would have better things to do than writing an
op-ed for a student newspaper picking sides in an essentially
intra-denominational controversy. So why would Immelt weigh in?
Had the Observer provided the most routine of
disclosures for that article, the answer would have been obvious.
On February 17th of that year, Obama had signed the
stimulus bill, which included
$24.9 million in grants that would flow directly to GE, with
roughly
$20 billion more slated for health care record modernization of
the kind that GE specializes in — “with
a direct request to do so from GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt.” Months
before, during the Bush administration, GE had successfully lobbied
“behind-the-scenes”
to get its financing arm, GE Capital, included in a FDIC bailout
program that would insure up to
$139 billion of its debt. By the time Obama stepped on stage at
Notre Dame, GE Capital had used the program
to raise “$74 billion, helping to cover [GE’S] 2009 funding
needs, and about $8 billion of its projected needs for 2010.” In
addition, Immelt knew that many billions more would accrue to his
company through its green initiatives if Obama’s cap and trade
proposal became law.
It would be hard to think up a more direct conflict of
interest.
Except, of course, for the conflict of interest raised by
Obama’s decision, announced today, to name Immelt the chair of the
new President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness while Immelt
still serves as GE’s CEO.
According to the president, the purpose of the new council will
be to “focus its work on finding new ways to encourage the private
sector to hire and invest in American competitiveness.” It is not
hard to imagine ways for Immelt to fulfill that mandate by
enriching GE’s shareholders, which, remember, is his contractual
obligation as CEO.
Immelt isn’t serving on the panel out of love of Obama or
loyalty to Democrats:
he “counts former President Ronald
Reagan as a ‘personal hero,’” and donated $2,300 to both
Hillary Clinton and John McCain in the 2008 election. Nor is Immelt
concerned about fairness, competitiveness, or the free market: as
he
has explained, “It’s never been a free market; it’s never gonna
be a free market. That’s just the way it is.” And: “The fact that
I’d like GE to work in concert with where government policy is in
the U.S. doesn’t mean that I’m a traitor or a bad guy, I think it’s
just being practical that that’s gotta happen.”
Immelt is serving on the panel because of money. He represents
one of Big Business’s biggest. A post in the Obama administration
presents a huge opportunity to enrich his company and himself.
Obama is allowing him to do so because a company as big and
diversified as GE can do a lot for him, up to and including
defending him in the op-ed sections of college newspapers.
That’s the measure of the extent of the corrosiveness of this
kind of government-business collaboration. Its harmful effects
aren’t limited to the economy, but trickle down into Immelt’s
advocacy of environmentalism, the programming on GE-owned TV
channels, and so on. It introduces corruption into matters, such as
Obama’s visit to Notre Dame, that might be considered
morally significant within a small community but should have
nothing to do with big business or money changing hands. Yet Immelt
doesn’t feel the need, when writing a student paper op-ed, to
disclose the billions of dollars his company took from taxpayers by
cozying up to the administration. Nor does he, apparently, feel
compunction about promising to help people across the country find
real jobs while at the same time promising his shareholders that
he’ll prioritize the company’s bottom line.
