por admin » Lun Oct 10, 2011 9:06 am
GE a la defensiva, teme que su marca se danie.
El problema de GE es su relacion con Obama y sus ventures de negocios en China. GE se ha convertido en el blanco de los conservadores que atacan a la compania por representar todo lo que esta mal con el crony capitalismo y los subsidiso y ayuda del gobierno a las corporaciones.
Como se sabe, GE una de las corporaciones mas grandes del pais no pago un solo dolar en impuestos y esta llevandose los empleos a China donde fabricara aviones con tecnologia Americana con el gobierno de China, eso es inaudito, por no decir mas. Es decir que la tecnologia Americana va a pasar a China, gracias a Inmelt, el CEO de GE quien es el designado por Obama para crear mas empleos en el pais. Ven la controversia y la ironia. Increible.
------------
Tea-Party Attacks Put GE on Defense
By KATE LINEBAUGH
GE chief Jeff Immelt, left, heads President Obama's council on jobs.
.General Electric Co., where Ronald Reagan honed his communication skills as a company spokesman, is struggling to fend off attacks from conservatives over its relationship with the Obama administration and ventures in China, raising concerns inside GE that the controversy could damage its brand.
Former Republican Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin last month slammed GE for being "the poster child of corporate welfare and crony capitalism." Presidential candidate Newt Gingrich used GE as an applause line during the Republican debate sponsored by the tea party in September. And Fox News television personality Bill O'Reilly has derided the conglomerate and Chief Executive Jeff Immelt almost weekly.
The company's critics will get another opening this week. Mr. Immelt is to appear with President Barack Obama at a meeting of the president's jobs council in Pittsburgh on Tuesday, the same day that the Republican presidential contenders square off in a debate at Dartmouth College.
The tea party and its allies are taking aim at GE for a number of alleged sins, including the company's paltry 2010 federal tax payment, an aviation joint-venture in China, moving jobs overseas and taking federal stimulus dollars for green-energy projects.
It hasn't helped that Mr. Immelt's position as head of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, an advisory panel of executives, makes him one of the country's closest executives to Mr. Obama. The White House didn't respond to a request for comment.
"We've had concerns that Immelt uses the government rather than the marketplace to drive GE's philosophy on how to do business," said Wayne T. Brough, chief economist at Freedomworks, a national tea-party group that has protested at GE shareholder meetings. "It feeds into a crony capitalist kind of mentality that isn't actually the best way to generate economic growth."
GE said the charges are inaccurate and are based on false information. But the constant attacks are raising worries inside the company, where top communications executives have become involved in answering critics and some executives have said privately that they would like Mr. Immelt to step down from the council.
"I am leading the jobs council because I thought it was the right thing to do," Mr. Immelt said in an August interview. "In the U.S., it is controversial.…It's the times we live in."
The chief executive, a Republican, comes from conservative stock. He said that his parents watch five hours a day of Fox News, which has several conservative talk-show hosts. He said that when he told his mother that Mr. Obama had asked Mr. Immelt to lead the jobs council, she responded, "You're not going to take it, are you?"
The president's request also sparked a "spirited discussion" among some GE directors, who debated whether he should join the council and the potential political fallout, a person familiar with the matter said. In the end, Mr. Immelt said he joined the council of 27 CEOs because he felt he needed to respond to a president's request.
GE has fired back at its critics. "We are not receiving special treatment; we compete for business just like every other company," the Fairfield, Conn., conglomerate said recently on its website.
But GE, which had nearly $150 billion in revenue last year, has had little luck quieting the criticism. Experts have said it might have to just weather the assault. "If GE comes back and starts complaining and whining, all they are doing is demonstrating weakness. They would be simply making the tea party out to be a bigger force," said Robbie Vorhaus, a corporate-communications consultant. "And what they would be really saying is, It hurts us."
Gary Sheffer, GE's communications chief, said he answers letters personally from shareholders. "We certainly don't have the reach of some of our critics," he said.
GE has a history as a media company, having owned NBC Universal until this year. That paved the road for GE to become a punching bag for Republican debaters. Former MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann got into a media war several years ago with Mr. O'Reilly of Fox News, a fight that some people have pointed to as the start of friction between conservative pundits and GE. Fox News is owned by News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal.
That animosity then took root among tea-party Republicans who champion small-business owners and deride the relationship between big corporations and Washington lobbyists.
The problem for GE is that its rebuttals have failed to even reach some critics. Norman Pallot, an 88-year-old retired attorney and registered Republican in Weeki Wachee, Fla., wrote a letter to his local paper excoriating GE for moving its X-ray business to China. In fact, GE transferred four executives to Beijing as it relocated the unit's headquarters from Wisconsin. Mr. Pallot said he thought GE was moving all X-ray production.
GE has created more jobs overseas in the last decade than it did at home. GE employs more people outside the U.S. than within the country. Its U.S. employment dropped by 16% over the previous decade to 133,000 jobs at the end of last year while overseas employment fell by 2,000 jobs to 152,000. The company moved some of its avionics business, which develops electronic systems that run airplanes, into a joint venture with a Chinese company that has its headquarters in Shanghai.
GE said it has been growing in the U.S., creating 8,000 new jobs since 2009, and has invested $70 billion in its U.S. plants over the last decade. The company by year-end will announce where in the U.S. it will build a solar plant and a software facility.
Regarding accusations that the company paid no federal taxes last year, GE acknowledged that its 2010 federal tax bill was low. But the company said that was because $32 billion of losses at its lending arm during the financial crisis were used to offset profit. GE said it paid a combined $1 billion in federal, state and local taxes in the U.S., with a small part of that going to the U.S. Treasury.
The company said it isn't cozy with Washington. The company has received $127 million in contracts, grants and loans from the $787 billion federal stimulus package, according to Recovery.gov. That placed GE well out of the top 20, which received more than $400 million each. GE's sales to the federal government accounted for 4%, equivalent to about $6 billion, of the company's total revenue last year.
It is unlikely that GE will be able to break free from tea-party complaints as long as Mr. Immelt continues to associate with Mr. Obama.
When the president addressed a joint session of Congress last month to call for new legislation and spending to create jobs, Mr. Immelt sat with the first lady in the Capitol, an appearance that provoked tea-party Republicans and sparked a new round of criticism.
GE wouldn't seem to be a company that would run afoul of the right. From 1954 to 1962, Mr. Reagan was a spokesman for the industrial giant, hosting the Sunday evening General Electric Theater on TV and traveling the country to deliver speeches at GE plants.
GE last year became a sponsor for a two-year celebration of Mr. Reagan's centennial and on the company's website has detailed GE's ties to the conservative icon. Mr. Immelt has a statue of Mr. Reagan in his office.
Meanwhile, the CEO appears to be tiring of Washington's polarized politics. At a conference last week, Mr. Immelt expressed frustration at the summer's debt-ceiling standoff.
"Congress just doing one bipartisan thing, however small, would be conducive to the market," he said.