Mr. Shaman
Senior Member
- May 4, 2010
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Did I hear someone say "payola"?Well wudya know?
GE stock took a tumble under Immelt's tenure, and look how he's rewarded. We don't stand a chance, folks...
General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt will be the new head of a Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. This panel will replace Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, formerly headed by Paul Volcker.
Jeffrey Immelt, GE CEO, To Replace Volcker On Obama's Economic Team
In his first public speaking engagement since a barrage of criticism about not having to pay taxes in 2010, GE chief executive Jeff Immelt told the Economic Club in Washington that his company did nothing wrong. "At GE, we do like to keep our tax rate low, but we do it in a compliant way, and there are no exceptions," Immelt said. "Our tax rate will be much higher in 2011 as GE Capital recovers."
But Immelt added that he, along with many other corporate leaders, wants the federal government to reform the U.S. tax code, which he called "old, complex and uncompetitive." Immelt also pointed out that over the past five years GE has paid $14 billion in taxes. He said that even though GE made money in 2010, "we didn't make a lot of that in the U.S."
The company is particularly in the spotlight because Immelt also serves as the chief of President Obama's innovation and jobs council. When asked what he thought of criticism that GE isn't a good role model and shouldn't be leading the jobs council, Immelt said he was committed to helping the president build jobs. "I'm completely committed to doing this job and working with the president and building jobs in the U.S.," Immelt said.
Later, in an interview with the media after his speech, when asked what GE was doing to help job growth, he said the company expects to have hired 16,000 new employees this year and last year, mostly in manufacturing and high tech services industries. Immelt said he understands why his company is taking heat in the media. "I don't fault this type of reporting," Immelt said. "It is what it is. You can't do any job like this unless you have a thick skin."
Source
It’s the kind of accountability journalism that makes readers raise an eyebrow, if it doesn’t raise their blood pressure first. General Electric Co., reported the New York Times last week, earned $14.2 billion in worldwide profits last year, including $5.1 billion in the United States — and paid exactly zero dollars in federal taxes. The front-page story drew widespread commentary in newspapers and on many Web sites. ABC News and Fox News, among others, were all over it. But the story was conspicuously absent from the reportage of one news organization: NBC. During its Friday broadcast, “NBC Nightly News With Brian Williams” had no time to mention that America’s largest corporation had essentially avoided paying federal taxes in 2010. Or its Saturday, Sunday or Monday broadcasts, either. Did NBC’s silence have anything to do with the fact that one of its parent companies is General Electric?
NBC News representatives say that it didn’t. “This was a straightforward editorial decision, the kind we make daily around here,” said Lauren Kapp, spokeswoman for NBC News. Kapp declined to discuss how NBC decides what’s news or, in this case, what isn’t. But to others, NBC’s silence looks like something between a lapse and a coverup. The satirical “Daily Show” on Monday noted that “Nightly News” had time on Friday to squeeze in a story about the Oxford English Dictionary adding such terms as “OMG” and “muffin top,” but didn’t bother with the GE story.
Ignoring stories about its parent company’s activities is “part of a troubling pattern” for NBC News, said Peter Hart, a director at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a liberal media watchdog group that often documents instances of corporate interference in news. He cited a series of GE-related stories that NBC’s news division has underplayed over the years, from safety issues in GE-designed nuclear power plants to the dumping of hazardous chemicals into New York’s Hudson River by GE-owned plants.
What’s more, Hart notes, NBC News has covered corporate tax-avoidance stories before — that is, when they didn’t involve GE. All three networks’ news divisions, according to Hart, have become reliable sources of publicity for their parents’ other corporate interests, doing news stories about upcoming sporting events or new TV shows carried on their own networks. “It’s very curious,” Hart said. “Imagine if a different company were involved. If you changed the name to Citibank or Goldman Sachs, would NBC be interested in the story then? I suspect they would be.”
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Mebbe he shoulda told ol' Jeffie-boy to pay their fair share of taxes while he was there...
April 03, 2011
"In the congressional budget showdown, all the maneuvering has been about what to cutas if we wont also need higher taxes to curb deficits. A glaring reminder of that came with the news that General Electricwith $14.2 billion in worldwide operating profits in 2010owes no U.S. corporate taxes for the year. Gulp. The story, first reported in The New York Times, surely caused heartburn in the White House, because President Obama has named GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt as head of the Presidents Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Well, GE seems plenty competitive in tax avoidance. The question is, can we do anything about it?
The answer is yes, but the right response is counterintuitive. Its not to raise taxes on multinational companies, but to lower them.
To offset that tax loss, we should increase individuals taxes on corporate dividends and capital gains (profits from sales of stock or property). They enjoy a ridiculously low top rate of 15 percenta giveaway to the rich that makes no sense as economic policy. The wealthiest 1 percent receives two thirds of capital gains and dividends."
There you have it folx....The ends justify the means.