President Obama’s decision to appoint Jeffrey Immelt, the chairman and chief executive officer of GE, as chairman of the new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness will remind long-suffering Knicks fans of James Dolan’s choice, seven years ago, of Isiah Thomas as president of basketball operations and then coach of the hapless New York franchise.
Like Thomas, Immelt has a long record of failure. In succeeding Jack Welch as head of GE, Immelt has succeeded mostly in the business of decline and dismemberment. The market capitalization of GE is half of what it was before Immelt took over.
Once a classic widows’ and orphans’ stock, GE has joined the Dogs of the Dow. Here’s how GE’s stock has fared over the past five years, compared to the Dow (chart generated by Yahoo Finance):
In 2008, GE had to ask the FDIC for $139 billion to insure the debt of its floundering GE Capital Corp. During Immelt’s tenure, GE has cut thousands of jobs from its financial services, aviation, and health care units — as well as 200 workers in Winchester, VA, home of the last major GE plant in America manufacturing the incandescent light bulbs that tied the company to its founding under Thomas Alva Edison.
In 1976 GE invented the spiral CFL (compact fluorescent lamp) as a successor to the incandescent bulb, and energy-saving lighting such as CFLs will be required in 2012 by the Energy Independence and Security Act. But today most CFLs are manufactured in China.
And Immelt is Obama’s choice to help the country restore jobs and competitiveness?
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