GE’s ‘moral fabric’ Has a Legacy of Family Economic Destruction

[der Hoaxster]

Trick Blame, I believe you. The thing to consider is that laying off Americans and replacing them with immigrants is the liberal dream.

Richard Blaine [rblain...@aol.com] I'm going to bring into this discussion of corporate (im)morality something many of you are unfamiliar with, and that is the topic of large companies bringing in cheap/docile foreign workers on TEMPORARY / NON-IMMIGRANT visas (H-1B) to replace American workers. Remember, these workers are NOT immigrants, their status is only for 3 years, and brought to America in pseudo-indentured servitude status because their visa is tied DIRECTLY to the employer, which in this case is General Electric.

This "business strategy" was seen most recently in the Disney scandal where they announced layoffs of American workers and then informed them they were to train their foreign replacements AND that if they refused they'd receive no severance package. This has been done in other companies (i.e. Siemens, Lake Mary FL) and so the practice is well known in the IT world.

To document my claim I will be posting visa data for General Electric over several years, to not only show a steady PATTERN of this injustice, but also the NUMBERS involved. Keep in mind that for every worker laid off their may be a spouse and one or more children. You don't layoff just the worker, you layoff the entire family.

http://www.myvisajobs.com/H1B-Visa/Search.aspx

VISAS FOR 2016: 45

VISAS FOR 2015: 179

VISAS FOR 2014: 178

VISAS FOR 2013: 209

VISAS FOR 2012: 202

VISAS FOR 2013: 253


Is it really necessary to say there is immorality in corporate layoffs? Is if necessary to point out it destroys livelihoods? Does anyone actually believe that all those people laid off ended up in 'better' jobs? Hell, some of them work fast food jobs.


About 13 years ago a programmer named Kevin Flannagan worked for Bank of America and was laid off. He then employed a "2nd amendment solution" by shotting himself in the head in the BoA parking lot. His venture into "The Great American Dream" ended on that day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyQ1RoEotPk
They don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That's against their interests.

That's right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that!

(POSTER'S NOTE: See Trump cultists for details)

You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money.

They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fucking place! It's a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club.

By the way, it's the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care! Good honest hard-working people; white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means, continue to elect these rich cock suckers who don’t give a fuck about you….they don’t give a fuck about you… they don’t give a FUCK about you.

They don’t care about you at all… at all… AT ALL. And nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Thats what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick thats being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth.

It's called the American Dream,because you have to be asleep to believe it.

-- George Carllin


-----Original Message-----
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Sent: Tue, Apr 19, 2016 7:08 pm
Subject: GE’s ‘moral fabric’ and its forgotten socialist wizard
GE’s ‘moral fabric’ and its forgotten socialist wizard
By http://www.workers.org/articles/author/stevem/ posted on April 15, 2016
http://www.workers.org/#facebookhttp://www.workers.org/#twitterhttps://www.addtoany.com/share#url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.workers.org%2Farticles%2F2016%2F04%2F15%2Fges-moral-fabric-and-its-forgotten-socialist-wizard%2F&title=GE%E2%80%99s%20%E2%80%98moral%20fabric%E2%80%99%20and%20its%20forgotten%20socialist%20wizard&description=Is%20General%20Electric%20one%20of%20the%20corporations%20%E2%80%9Cdestroying%20the%20moral%20fabric%E2%80%9D%20of%20the%20United%20States%3F%20That%E2%80%99s%20what%20Bernie%20Sanders%20told%20the%20New%20York%20Daily%20News%20editorial%20board%20on%20April%204.
Is General Electric one of the corporations “destroying the moral fabric” of the United States? That’s what Bernie Sanders told the New York Daily News editorial board on April 4.
GE’s CEO, Jeffrey Immelt, got so angry that two days later he attacked the presidential candidate in the Washington Post.
Judge for yourself whether GE is a corporate criminal.
Immelt bragged about jobs at GE facilities in Sanders’ home state of Vermont. He didn’t mention that Jack Welch — his predecessor as GE’s CEO — fired 112,000 workers.
Since 1978, the company has gotten rid of 22,000 jobs in GE’s hometown of Schenectady, N.Y., alone. That’s according to Thomas F. O’Boyle, author of “At Any Cost: Jack Welch, General Electric, and the Pursuit of Profit.”
GE workers called Welch “Neutron Jack” because he destroyed people’s jobs while leaving the factories intact, just as the neutron bomb was supposed to kill people with radiation while leaving cities’ infrastructure intact. Welch argued that, “ideally you’d have every plant you own on a barge,” so it could move to where the lowest wages were.
In Massachusetts alone, according to O’Boyle, GE fired 7,000 workers in Lynn and 8,000 in Pittsfield. Erie, Pa., saw 6,000 GE jobs evaporate while Fort Wayne, Ind., lost 4,000.
Nobody works at the 77-acre GE factory in Bridgeport, Conn., anymore. This factory employed 12,000 workers during World War II. The factory still employed 3,000 in the late 1970s, but the last 70 workers were let go in 2007. (Connecticut Post, March 23, 2010)
No wonder census statistics reveal that nearly a quarter of Bridgeport’s population lives in dire poverty.
Polluter and nuclear menace
Immelt also didn’t mention that GE’s two aviation plants in Vermont released 60,000 pounds of toxins in 2011, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
GE fought for decades against any EPA-imposed cleanup after dumping more than 1.3 million pounds of cancer-causing chemicals into the Hudson River. (http://cleanup.org) The company also poisoned Connecticut’s Housatonic River and, from another plant, the Coosa River Basin in Georgia.
Japan’s nuclear disaster at Fukushima, which started with a 2011 earthquake, involves five GE Mark 1 reactors. Three GE engineers — Gregory C. Minor, Richard B. Hubbard and Dale G. Bridenbaugh — quit in 1976 to protest the reactor’s unsafe design. (ABC News, March 15, 2011)
There are 23 Mark 1 reactors in the United States.
Tax havens and pension rip-offs
Immelt claimed that GE pays “billions in taxes.” But in 2010, GE paid zilch in taxes after making $14.2 billion in profits. It actually got $3.2 billion back in refunds from Uncle Sam that year. (New York Times, March 24, 2011)
Last year, GE held $119 billion in offshore profits in 18 overseas tax havens. (International Business Times, Oct. 6, 2015)
GE is moving its headquarters from Fairfield, Conn., to Boston after getting promises of $25 million in property tax breaks over 20 years. Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker also wants to provide GE with $120 million in new roads, parking and utility improvements. (http://boston.com, April 8)
At the same time, Boston is threatening new public school cutbacks.
Immelt didn’t reveal in his Post article that GE will be slashing medical benefits for retirees, allowing the company to save $3.3 billion. (http://thestreet.com, Aug. 4)
In 2014, Immelt got $37.2 million in total compensation, more than $100,000 per day. Nearly half of this package is because of a big increase in his pension. (Reuters, March 10, 2015)
http://d1wt38iupfck3u.cloudfront.net/articles/wp-content/uploads/CharlesSteinmetz2.jpg
Charles Steinmetz
The socialist founder of GE labs
GE also tried to destroy UE, the Electrical Workers union, with red-baiting attacks and helped propel Ronald Reagan’s political career.
With this record, is it any surprise that GE has “never been a big hit with socialists,” as Immelt wrote in the Washington Post?
Yet the founder of the GE Research Labs was the socialist Charles Steinmetz. The first industrial research facility in the U.S. started in Steinmetz’s Schenectady, N.Y., garage in 1900.
Charles Steinmetz was born in the German empire in 1865. As a university student he was forced to flee the country because of Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws.
Attempting to enter the U.S. in 1889, he was initially turned away by immigration officials. Steinmetz had kyphosis, a curvature of the spine, and only $10 in his pocket. Donald Trump would have deported him.
A gifted mathematician, Steinmetz worked out “Steinmetz’s Law,” which figured out the heat loss, “hysteresis,” in electric motors. This paved the way for developing alternating current power. Steinmetz, along with others, created the first commercial three-phase power system.
By 1900, Steinmetz was the most famous electrical engineer in the world and was known as “the Wizard of Schenectady.” Helping to protect Steinmetz’s 200 patents at GE was the African-American engineer and inventor Lewis Latimer.
Steinmetz helped elect George R. Lunn as Schenectady’s socialist mayor in both 1911 and 1915. Another GE town, Bridgeport Conn., also had a socialist mayor — Jasper McLevy — from 1933 to 1957.
Charles Steinmetz became president of the city’s school board, where he provided free meals for hungry students. Judging from his other positions, Steinmetz would have been thrilled by the Black Panther Party’s Breakfast for Children programs.
A supporter of unions, Steinmetz changed cigar brands when cigar makers went on strike. In 1922, Steinmetz got 291,000 votes when he ran for state engineer and surveyor on the Socialist Party/Farmer-Labor ticket in the New York state election.
A. Philip Randolph got 129,000 votes running for secretary of state on the same ticket. Randolph later led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and initiated the 1963 March on Washington.
Steinmetz welcomed the socialist revolution in Russia. He wrote the introduction to “The Industrial Revival in Soviet Russia,” by A .A. Heller.
On Feb. 16, 1922, Steinmetz wrote Soviet leader V.I. Lenin of his “admiration of the wonderful work of social and industrial regeneration which Russia is accomplishing under such terrible difficulties.
“I wish you the fullest success and have every confidence that you will succeed. … If in technical, and more particularly in electrical engineering matters, I can assist Russia in any manner with advice, suggestions, or consultation, I shall always be very pleased to do so, as far as I am able.”
Lenin wrote two warm letters to Steinmetz in response. But before Steinmetz could help, he died on Oct. 26, 1923.