Scott Malone
Reuters
5/3/2011
General Electric Co may have grown its clean-tech business fourfold over the past six years, but Chief Executive Jeff Immelt wishes he had spent a little less time talking about it.
The head of the largest U.S. conglomerate, who in January was named a top adviser on job creation to U.S. President Barack Obama, said on Tuesday that GE’s focus on the environmentally friendly aspects of its wind turbines and high-efficiency appliances might have led his critics to believe he was more interested in saving the planet than growing the company.
“If I had one thing to do over again I would not have talked so much about green,” Immelt said at an event sponsored by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “Even though I believe in global warming and I believe in the science … it just took on a connotation that was too elitist; it was too precious and it let opponents think that if you had a green initiative, you didn’t care about jobs. I’m a businessman. That’s all I care about, is jobs.”
The article continues at Reuters.
H/T FreedomWorks
Since last fall, FreedomWorks has led the charge against cronyism and rentseeking regarding General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt and the Obama Administration. Immelt is the face of government-corporate cronyism in America today, and Obama’s appointment to Immelt to the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness was a blow for the free market.
We even attended the GE shareholder meeting last month in Salt Lake City to protest. Immelt abandoned the tenets of free enterprise to lobby on behalf of rent-seeking General Electric, and restricts its competitors in the marketplace. This is detrimental for business, for our country’s economy, and for the thousands who could lose their jobs.
Immelt bet the farm on GE’s green enterprise, at the expense of American jobs. Now that he is realizing the political ramifications of advocating policies that will bankrupt our country and continue to put Americans out of work, he’s started to walk it back…
