ceo of general electric - Represent Consumers

While there’s some shuffling of desks close to President Obama, the most important factor isn’t changing ¬– the 1 percent is retaining a tight grip on the administration.

Exit Bill Daley (income from J.P. Morgan in 2010 = $8.7 million). Enter Jacob Lew (income from Citigroup in 2010 = $1.1 million). Lew was CEO of the Citigroup division that invested in credit default swaps, among other risky investments that sank the economy. But the bank, which survived only thanks to taxpayer generosity, paid Lew a $900,000 bonus.
Were they really paying him for overseeing the investments that nearly sank the bank – or were they compensating him for the work he did for the bank while he served in the Clinton administration, betting that Lew would serve again?
And who can forget Daley’s predecessor, Rahm Emanuel, who got paid $16.2 million during a 2 1/2/ year as an investment banker, and remained a hedge fund favorite?
Meanwhile, still firmly in place near President Obama’s ear as his closest outside adviser on creating jobs is Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric. The Center for Public Integrity’s i-watch news is out with a devastating investigation into how GE under Immelt lost more than $1 billion getting into the subprime loan business, ignoring its own whistleblowers who were trying to tell their bosses how the irresponsible pursuit of profits led to widespread fraud.
This is more than just inside baseball – with these people in charge of the Democrats and the Republicans as well, there’s little hope that the administration will come to grips with the foreclosure crisis – or hold bankers accountable for looting and tanking the economy. Only a huge public outcry, much larger than the Occupy has mustered so far, can hope to change that.

About the only the job that Jeffrey Immelt would be less qualified for than jobs czar would be to lead a crackdown on the influence of big money lobbyists.

Oh wait- there is no crackdown on lobbying.

So Immelt, the CEO of General Electric, will have to make do with the job the president has given him as head of the administration’s reconfigured outside economic advisory council, which is supposed to focus on job creation.

I’ve written before about G.E. as a prime example of how major corporations benefited from the bailout without exhibiting any gratitude to taxpayers.

To say that Immelt is a weird choice for a job creation initiative is an understatement.

Under Immelt’s stewardship, G.E. has shredded thousands of jobs in the U.S. while outsourcing many jobs to India and China. In the years before the financial collapse, G.E. focused on building up its enormous credit operation, which melted down under the weight of bad loans along with the rest of the financial sector. If not for the generosity of taxpayers, who gave G.E. more than $16 billion in low-interest loans to keep it afloat, Immelt himself probably wouldn’t have a job. In 2008, Forbes named Immelt one of the U.S. most overpaid executives.

His company has engaged in economic blackmail, threatening the state of Massachusetts that G.E. would close plants if state officials didn’t cough up tax breaks. It’s true that Immelt’s GE has embraced green technology – but only wherever there is a substantial government subsidy involved.

Meanwhile, GE is spending more than any other firm on lobbying, while it pays little or no taxes.

If Immelt has had any previous innovative ideas about substantially reducing unemployment, he’s kept them to himself. This is the person our president chooses to lead his jobs effort? For Immelt and other corporate and financial titans, the “too big to fail” bubble has never really burst. They’re continuing to rake in profits and shape government policies in their own interests, while the majority who don’t have access to power are shut out from financial security as well as political influence. Rather than challenging this unequal equation, our president has chosen to try to climb into the bubble himself.

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