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WASHINGTON — General Electric Co. plans to hire 5,000 veterans over the next five years and invest $580 million to expand its aviation business. The announcements Monday were part of a four-day event that the global conglomerate is hosting with partners in Washington, D.C., that focuses on issues such as manufacturing and job creation in America. GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt heads up President Obama's 27-member jobs council, which also includes AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, AOL co-founder Steve Case and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. GE said Monday that its "Hiring Our Heroes" partnership will help match veterans with jobs....

By Kirk Myers, Seminole County Environmental News Examiner This article, the second in a series, focuses on the misleading performance claims surrounding the “more energy efficient” compact fluorescent light (CFL) bulbs now replacing traditional incandescent bulbs. These potentially harmful mercury-filled lamps (see my previous column describing the dangers) are being forced on consumers by the U.S. congress with support from the Green Lobby and light-bulb manufacturers like GE, Sylvania and Phillips. These and other manufacturers stand to make huge profits selling the more expensive CFLs (more on that issue in my next column). There is a growing body of evidence...

General Electric Co.’s health care unit, the world’s biggest maker of medical imaging machines, is moving the headquarters of its 115-year-old X-ray business to Beijing. The headquarters will move from Wisconsin amid a broader plan to invest about $2 billion across China, including opening six “customer innovation’’ and development centers. The division should have “double-digit’’ growth rates as the country converts from film and analog to digital X-ray technology, LeGrand said

Whether through sound bites or live audio, “The Donald” has been making the rounds on all the news talk shows this morning in response to GOP presidential candidates Texas Rep. Ron Paul and former Utah Governor Jon Huntsman electing to skip the debate that Donald Trump will moderate on December 27. It’s been a war of words to say the least. During his second NBC interview of the morning, Trump got heated with “Daily Rundown” host Chuck Todd, at one point saying, “I didn’t call you, you called me.” That was in response to Todd saying that Trump wanted to...

UPDATE 1-GE, Rolls Royce drop effort to build F35 engines Dec 2 (Reuters) - General Electric Co and Rolls Royce are dropping their effort to build an alternate engine for Lockheed Martin Corp's F-35 joint strike fighter, giving up on what they said could be a $100 billion market. The decision to end their funding of the project beyond 2011, which the companies announced on Friday, is a boost for United Technologies Corp's Pratt & Whitney unit, which builds the engine used in F-35's early production models. The Defense Department earlier this year canceled funding for the second engine. That...

Crony Capitalism: As the president embraces Occupy Wall Street, his favorite corporation paid no taxes in 2010 on $14 billion in profits, much of it overseas. Meanwhile, 20,000 jobs for the 99% go unfilled. At a recent town hall meeting, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, reminded constituents of a story that broke earlier in the year — that General Electric paid no taxes on profit of $14 billion, $9 billion of which was earned overseas. Ryan related how he had asked a GE tax officer the length of GE's tax filing. The tax guy said...

With the rise of independent media, the secrets of the American nomenklatura are coming into clearer focus, the shameless exploitation of the good will and treasure of the people increasingly put on view for all to see. 1. The media and the Democrats are joined at the hip and have created a "hereditary celebrity class" One of the fastest ways to celebrity and fortune (besides perhaps going on Dancing with the Stars, being adopted into the Hilton or Kardashian families and making a porn video) is to be the child of a politician or a well connected political operative. If...

General Electric, one of the largest corporations in America, filed a whopping 57,000-page federal tax return earlier this year but didn't pay taxes on $14 billion in profits. The return, which was filed electronically, would have been 19 feet high if printed out and stacked.

Yet again, evidence of impropriety surrounds the issuance of federal Department of Energy “green” loan guarantees — in this instance, loans were granted to a foreign company with Democratic Party ties. Over the last two years, DOE Secretary Steven Chu has awarded Spain-based Abengoa — a sprawling, multi-national industrial firm operating in 70 countries — loan guarantees worth a staggering $2.78 billion for solar and ethanol plants. Abengoa is a Madrid-based conglomerate that operates throughout Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and Asia. It is not starved for cash: according to its 2009 annual report, the firm was valued at...

1. Alabama is a wonderfully free "right-to-work" state, which simply means it prevents unions from extracting dues from workers who do not wish to join. 2. General Electric's CEO Jeff Immelt is the poster-boy for crony capitalism, having backed Obama's rush to socialized medicine and green energy to benefit various of its business units. 3. It turns out that GE's Aviation division is breaking ground on a new factory in Alabama. And, unlike Boeing, which tried to build a factory in a right-to-work-state, the National Labor Relations Board hasn't uttered a peep. But I'm sure that's just a coincidence. Remember...

NEW CANAAN, Conn. – Daisy Franklin of Norwalk was among the nearly 100 protestors who came to the New Canaan home of General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt Saturday to take part in the first known Occupy Wall Street rally in Fairfield County. "I worked in a small Norwalk manufacturing company for 15 years until it was forced to shut down a year ago," Franklin, 55, told the crowd, using a bullhorn. "Now, I get by on less than $200 a week of unemployment for me and my daughter. When you run out of money, you run out of options. So,...

Noting that we’re celebrating the Reagan centennial, he praised President Reagan for being both “tough-minded and hopeful,” and also “willing to work with his detractors.” That approach, said Immelt, should also be a model of leadership in the 21st century, which “is about building bigger and diverse teams; teams that accomplish tough missions with a culture of respect.”

On Friday NLPC reported that the Department of Energy may have made a bad bet on Ecotality, the car-charging company that is heavily dependent on $115 million in government grants to deploy stations for electric vehicles through its EV Project. It turns out that DOE may not only be gambling taxpayer funds on a shaky company, but may also have dumped a bunch of money into a technology with a questionable future. Last week seven automotive companies – General Motors, Ford, BMW, Audi, Daimler, Porsche, and Volkswagen – announced they would adopt a single standard , established by the...

JOE SCARBOROUGH: What's wrong with a political party that Michele Bachmann takes the lead and Herman Cain takes the lead and we could go through all the other people that have taken the lead? ... I don't mean to insult anybody here, but it's very obvious watching Herman Cain or Michele Bachmann-- not Michele Bachmann quite as much as Sarah Palin-- and others that have gone to the top of this race. They don't even understand basic policy, basic economics, basic foreign policy. You watch them in the debate and you can figure that out. But, they're in first place....

Big Journalism has learned that the Occupy Washington DC movement is working with well-known media members to craft its demands and messaging while these media members report on the movement. Someone has made the emails from the Occupy D.C. email distro public and searchable. The names in the list are a veritable who’s who in media. Journolist 2.0 includes well known names such as MSNBC’s Dylan Ratigan, Rolling Stone’s Matt Tiabbi who both are actively participating; involvement from other listers such as Bill Moyers and Glenn Greenwald plus well-known radicals like Noam Chomsky, remains unclear.

Senate Republicans Tuesday may have blocked President Obama's jobs bill, but a new poll suggests that's not what a majority of Americans want. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents to a survey from NBC/Wall Street Journal voiced their approval when pollsters were told them the details of the president's "American Jobs Act"-- including that it would cut payroll taxes, fund new road construction, and extend unemployment benefits. NBC reports that 63 percent of respondents said they favored the bill, with just 32 percent opposing it.

The more people know about the wind-energy business, the less they like it. And when it comes to lousy wind deals, General Electric’s Shepherds Flat project in northern Oregon is a real stinker. I’ll come back to the GE project momentarily. Before getting to that, please ponder that first sentence. It sounds like a claim made by an anti-renewable-energy campaigner. It’s not. Instead, that rather astounding admission was made by a communications strategist during a March 23 webinar sponsored by the American Council on Renewable Energy called “Speaking Out on Renewable Energy: Communications Strategies for the Renewable Energy Industry.”

Many reports have surfaced recently confirming the "bait and switch" strategy of General Motors whereby consumers are lured into showrooms to view the much-hyped Chevy Volt only to be switched to a Chevy Cruze. Edmunds' Insideline quotes GM North American President, Mark Reuss, as stating that the Volt's "technical halo" is a more important benefit to GM than sales of the vehicle itself. The article goes on to confirm that Reuss believes that production of a Cadillac version of the Volt will spur sales of conventional Caddy vehicles as well. None of the articles that I have read on the...

You knew it was coming. The Kamp Alinsky Kids are taking a sight-seeing tour today. After a month of trashing Zuccotti Park at a public cost of $2 million per day, the riff-raff is marching uptown to occupy…wealthy people’s private homes. According to the NY Daily News: “A ‘Millionaires March’ will visit the homes – or, more realistically, the gleaming marble lobbies – of five of the city’s wealthiest residents, including News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon and conservative billionaire David Koch.” Some millionaires and billionaires and their homes get protected, of course. Billionaire NYC Mayor...

It was literally a show stopper. At the end of his "60 Minutes" interview with Lesley Stahl, GE CEO Jeff Immelt asked her: "I don't know why you don't" root for GE, and by extension for American business, the way company employees do? Did Immelt leave Stahl speechless? Rather than providing an answer, 60 Minutes could only cut to its tick-tick-tick stopwatch. View video here.

One of the most important battlefields of the Revolutionary War is going to be excavated by archaeologists ahead of an EPA cleanup. Back in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, General Electric dumped polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) into the Hudson River near Saratoga, New York. The dumping was banned in 1977 due to risks to public health, and the EPA has ordered GE to dredge up the affected silt from the river. Dredging destroys archaeological sites, though, and has already damaged Fort Edward, a British fort in the area dating to the mid 18th century. Archaeologists are working to excavate the stretch...

Since Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 there have been several major scandals in which his Administration has been involved, principally, Operation Fast and Furious the government sponsored sale of guns to small time gun sellers along our border with Mexico; the failed ‘Stimulus’ loan of multi-millions to Solyndra and LightSquared, two small businesses that were Obama preferred for loans. All three of these Obama Administration ventures were major failures involving scandalous behavior. ...Is the entire communications arm of our country becoming beholden to Obama and his scandal ridden administration peopled by socialist, communists who break our laws with impunity and...

Professional subsidy-sucking General Motors, which seems content to marinate in its taxpayer "investment" indefinitely, is getting ambitious. No, not in the sense of paying backthe $50 billion U.S. government bailout, or in producing vehicles people actually want to buy, but instead in finding other governments to subsidize its products. Not surprisingly the new partner - in a 50-50 joint venture with the state-run auto industry - is China. And also unsurprisingly, General Electric will join GM in a related partnership in the communist nation. And you probably already guessed the agreements surround the development and sales of electric vehicles....

-The Internet has risen to its all-time high as a primary source of news for Americans with 43 percent now saying they get most of their news on national and international issues from the web, according to a survey published Thursday by the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press.Meanwhile, television sits at an all-time low as a primary source of news for Americans with only 66 percent now saying they get most of their national and international news from TV--a nadir television also hit in December 2010. Since 1991, Pew has periodically asked Americans: “How do you...

DALIAN, Liaoning - General Electric Co (GE), a world leading technology and infrastructure company, aims to double its revenues in China over the next three years, said Mark Hutchinson, president and chief executive officer of GE China. GE's global revenues were $150.2 billion in 2010, to which GE in China contributed $5 billion. "GE is truly a global company and operates in more than 100 countries. Compared with other countries except for the United States, we still have a big base in China," said Hutchinson. "I agree. It (the figure) should be a lot bigger. So my job is to...

Barack Obama has spared no effort attempting to shove the US towards a so-called "green economy." The same green economy nearly bankrupted Spain and has been nothing but a miserable failure here. China is now in the process of changing the sticker price of Obama's green economy and they are sending it skyward. They are tightening control of rare Earth metals.The kind used in pretty much everything Obama is trying shove down our throats. BEIJING — In the name of fighting pollution, China has sent the price of compact fluorescent light bulbs soaring in the United States. By closing or...

Maybe President Obama should have called it the Chinese Jobs Act. That way he could have given his good friend Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and chief executive of General Electric, a shout-out, or asked him to take a bow. Immelt, who was sitting in the gallery of the House of Representatives as Obama's guest during Obama's American Jobs Act speech to a joint session of Congress last week, had the face of a man looking well pleased with himself. And why not? He is a man who has created more jobs than anyone else in Washington, including Obama. The jobs just...

General Electric, with a larger lobbying budget than any other company in America, has long lobbied for and profited from Big Government. Since Obama tapped GE CEO Jeffrey Immelt as Job Czar, this critique has spread throughout the Right. When it came out that GE's U.S. corporate income tax bill for 2010 was $0, anti-GE sentiment grew on the Left and Right. Finally, at the latest Republican debate Newt Gingrich attacked GE for profiting from Obama-style green-energy loopholes. So today, GE responds: "There has been a lot of talk lately about GE and what some call crony capitalism. Unfortunately, those...

Sarah Palin has joined the manic bashing of General Electric, calling the conglomerate "the poster child of corporate welfare and crony capitalism." One day after Elizabeth Warren said that GE "pays nothing in taxes" as part of her announcement that she would run for the U.S. Senate to represent her home state of Massachusetts, Palin -- the former half-term governor of Alaska, cable stalwart and perennial fence-sitting would-be presidential candidate -- said that the company "pays virtually no corporate income taxes." Palin said nothing about reforming the tax code to address the tax credits claimed by General Electric. Palin quickly...

Crony Capitalism on Steroids from GE to Solyndra .by Sarah Palin on Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at 10:25pm.In my recent speech in Iowa, some eyebrows were raised when I took on our government’s enormous economic problems caused by crony capitalism. As if on cue, just days later President Obama selected someone who exemplifies a major crony capitalism problem to sit next to the First Lady when he delivered his “jobs plan” speech before Congress. He selected General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt as his honored guest. Having grown up with great respect for GE thanks to stories my grandfather shared with...

*snip* General Electric [GE 15.41 0.40 (+2.66%) ^ 0.40 (+2.66%) ] officially notified Berkshire Hathaway [BRK.A 103460.00 -340.00 (-0.33%) ] on Tuesday it intends next month to repurchase the $3 billion of preferred stock it sold him in October 2008.GE has flagged the move for a while. Under terms of the deal it struck with Buffett when all hell was breaking loose, the company led by Jeff Immelt was obliged to wait three years to call the bonds. It also needed to give at least 30 days notice—hence this week's letter from Fairfield, Connecticut, to Omaha. Buffett's money doesn't come...

Since Texas Gov. Rick Perry entered the contest for the Republican presidential nomination one month ago, he has rocketed to the lead in the polls. But that doesn’t impress MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough in the least. On Tuesday’s broadcast of “Morning Joe,” Scarborough offered his analysis on why Rick Perry won’t be viable in six months, starting with his stance on Social Security. “[A]fter listening to him talk last night in detail, I do not know how many levels there are to Rick Perry,” Scarborough said. “But I do know this… The phrase ‘Ponzi scheme’ is not Rick Perry’s biggest problem....

General Electric, the U.S.-based industrial giant and leading manufacturer of wind-power turbines, is scaling back efforts to expand its presence in the offshore wind power market. The rationale: there is no meaningful offshore wind market to speak of – at least not yet. Given slower-than-expected industry growth, the offshore market may not mature as rapidly as many wind boosters once believed.

General Electric sees China as the world’s fastest growing market and will depend on cheap labor to keep its technological edge. They are able to work with the Chinese state run companies without the restrictions being placed on them by the EPA, OSHA and dealing with labor unions Not only are they selling out American workers they are helping a foreign military to catch up with the U.S. aerospace industry. This is the same company who’s Chairman and CEO Jeffrey Immelt told American companies they need to hire more people. Dual use technologies “Dual use” is a term referring to...

The White House's invited guests who will hear President Obama speak to Congress tonight about creating jobs for the common man include a CEO under fire for moving jobs to China and a mayor who recently built a six-foot wall around his mansion. Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of GE and head of the president's jobs council, tops the list of invited guests who will listen to Mr. Obama's speech from the first lady's box in the House chamber. Mr. Immelt has been criticized for GE's plan to move the headquarters of its x-ray business to Beijing; Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich, Ohio...

The White House just put out the list for President Obama's jobs-focused address this evening. Those who will be in the gallery with first lady Michelle Obama include: — Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric. He's chairman of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. So look for Obama to again stress the importance of technology, research and development. — Steve Case, who co-founded America Online and is, the White House says, "one of America's most accomplished entrepreneurs and philanthropists." He fills the "American can-do/entrepreneurial spirit" slot. — Darline Miller, CEO of Permac Industries, a Minnesota company that makes "precision...

Kucinich to Immelt: ResignBy Dan Freed 08/26/11 - 01:22 PM EDT NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- General Electric chief Jeffrey Immelt should resign from his position as head of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness because many of his company's goals conflict with the council's goal of boosting U.S. employment and economic output, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) argued Wednesday in a little-noticed press release. "If he does not resign, the White House should remove him," Kucinich said in the statement. Kucinich's statements came in response to a story in the Washington Post describing General Electric's transfer of sophisticated aviation technologies...

The media is still showing the love for Obama. Not only does the fawning coverage continue but media executives are putting their money where their collective mouths are, by showering the Obama campaign with money. Comcast, the nation's largest cable operator and the new owner of NBC (and MSNBC) is the company that tops out the list of executives giving money to the Obama Victory Fund. Abby Phillip writes in Politico: President Obama raised eyebrows this weekend when he visited Comcast CEO Brian Roberts' Martha's Vineyard home on Sunday. Comcast, beyond being a telecommunications giant, is also the parent company...

GE Healthcare Ltd. is reducing its workforce at its Milwaukee and Waukesha facilities by nearly 1.5% or almost 100 positions, the medical technologies division of the General Electric Co. said Tuesday. In response to questions, a GE spokesman said notifications were sent out on Friday and that GE is reducing staff in response to the economic uncertainty in the U.S. and Europe. GE, which employs about 6,500 in Southeastern Wisconsin, provided few other details. GE's medical technology operations in southeastern Wisconsin, most of them in Waukesha and Wauwatosa, manufacture diagnostic imaging and X-ray equipment; computed tomography; magnetic resonance; ultrasound; molecular...

Scientists have long sought easier ways to make the costly material known as enriched uranium — the fuel of nuclear reactors and bombs, now produced only in giant industrial plants. One idea, a half-century old, has been to do it with nothing more substantial than lasers and their rays of concentrated light. This futuristic approach has always proved too expensive and difficult for anything but laboratory experimentation. Until now. In a little-known effort, General Electric has successfully tested laser enrichment for two years and is seeking federal permission to build a $1 billion plant that would make reactor fuel by...

To say that America is on an unsustainable fiscal path is to overstate the obvious. If the writers at The Big Picture blog are right, then America’s fiscal house will soon collapse as the percentage of income for the federal treasury coming from corporations has shrunk precipitously from 1955 to 2010, while the burden carried by individuals has increased greatly.

Jeffrey Immelt, the head of Barack Obama's highly touted "Jobs Council", is moving even more GE infrastructure to China. GE makes more medical-imaging machines than anyone else in the world, and now GE has announced that it "is moving the headquarters of its 115-year-old X-ray business to Beijing". Apparently, this is all part of a "plan to invest about $2 billion across China" over the next few years. But moving core pieces of its business overseas is nothing new for GE. Under Immelt, GE has shipped tens of thousands of good jobs out of the United States. Perhaps GE...

ELLISVILLE — A world-leading producer of commercial and military jet engines and components, as well as integrated digital, electric power and mechanical systems for aircraft, will open a plant in Ellisville. Gov. Haley Barbour made the announcement in Ellisville Wednesday in a press conference at Jones County Junior College’s Whitehead Advanced Technology Center located in Howard Technology Park. GE Aviation CEO David Joyce said Ellisville beat out two other Mississippi cities as the site of the plant.

Jobs Czar Moves US Jobs to China By Mark Wachtler, Independent Examiner July 27, 2011. Beijing. In an attempt to capture a larger share of the booming Chinese market, General Electric announced that it was moving its X-Ray technology headquarters from Wisconsin to China. While GE is one of the largest military suppliers in the world, it is also the parent of the NBC broadcasting group of companies. Ironically enough, GE’s CEO is Jeff Immelt, the same man President Obama anointed as America’s Jobs Czar.

General Electric Co.’s health care unit, the world’s biggest maker of medical imaging machines, is moving the headquarters of its 115-year-old X-ray business to Beijing. Tweet 14 people Tweeted this.ShareThis .“A handful’’ of top managers will move to the Chinese capital and there won’t be any job cuts, said Anne LeGrand, general manager of X-ray for GE Healthcare. The headquarters will move from Wisconsin amid a broader plan to invest about $2 billion across China, including opening six “customer innovation’’ and development centers. The division should have “double-digit’’ growth rates as the country converts from film and analog to digital...

Rumor has it that Bloomberg published an article that was posted on FR but pulled due to copyright concerns. Without actually giving Bloomberg the hits, one could speculate on whether the rumor is true, and on the implications of GE, who received bailouts and avoided taxes, and whose CEO Jeffery Immelt is also the chair of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness moving operations to a hostile communist power.

General Electric, considered to be a bellwether for the industrial sector, reported second-quarter earnings Friday that topped analyst estimates. The Fairfield, Conn.-based industrial conglomerate logged earnings of $3.7 billion, or 34 cents per share, up 17% from a year earlier. Analysts polled by Thompson Reuters had been expecting GE (GE, Fortune 500) to report earnings per share of 32 cents. "With our fifth consecutive quarter of double-digit earnings growth, we continue to execute in a volatile environment," GE CEO Jeff Immelt said in a statement. Immelt attributed the growth to strong results from GE Capital, as well as the company's...

Former MSNBC host Cenk Uygur’s departure from the network earlier today was fairly quiet for a close-to-primetime host, and the network made it clear it was his choice to leave. It didn’t take long for the newly liberated Uygur to address his fans. In the end, he explained, it boils down to this: Cenk Uygur is a tiger, and MSNBC tried to cage him. “They offered, honestly, a lot of money,” Uygur explains in his message, where he also says the role would have been a smaller one– “contributor, etc.”– instead of the alternate program the MSNBC statement suggested. He...

The parent company of Fox News — News Corp. — paid the U.S. government $4.8 billion in taxes over the last four tax years (2007-2010). GE, which owned most of MSNBC until late last year, paid zero taxes in 2010.In fact, GE received a $3.2 billion welfare check from Uncle Sam.From Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston: (Reuters) — Readers, I apologize. The premise of my debut column for Reuters, on News Corp’s taxes, was wrong, 100 percent dead wrong.Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp did not get a $4.8 billion tax refund for the past four years, as I reported. Instead,...