"We Bring Good Things To Life" with LOTS of atomic bombs

A rise to SUPER POWER:

General Electric is the largest corporation in the world and has an unparalleled role in twentieth-century history. GE electrified the Soviet Union in the 1920s and 1930s, and fulfilled for the Soviets Lenin's dictum that "Socialism = electrification."

A plan created by General Electric's president Gerard Swope, became Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal (first called the Swope Deal) .  The Roosevelt family was one of the largest stockholders in the General Electric Company.  Swope pushed for the New Deal to become complete National Socialism in America.

General Electric helped finance the rise of Hitlerism and the suppression of German democracy.  They built many of Hitler's bombs that destroyed the rest of Europe. 

In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower delivered his now-famous "Atoms for Peace" speech to the United Nations. That marked the beginning of a public relations campaign to transform the image of nuclear technology.

By 1962, nuclear power was still more expensive than energy generated by conventional means, but General Electric had spent billions of dollars in research and development.  They were anxious to see a return on their investment. With great fanfare, GE announced in 1962 that it had contracted to build a nuclear plant at Oyster Creek, New Jersey, for $91 million, entirely without federal subsidy.

The Oyster Creek reactor was a "loss leader." General Electric built it at a bargain-basement price, accepting a loss on the deal so it could position itself to dominate the reactor market. Orders for new reactors began rolling in from utility companies convinced that they needed nuclear power to remain on the cutting edge of "America's energy future."

As the orders came in GE jacked up its prices until utility companies were paying more for the privilege of "buying into the future" than if they had stayed with conventional generators.

The rhetoric of power "too cheap to meter" faded.  It was WAY too expense.  And the technology had another major problem: safety.

At a conventional power plant, an accident or sabotage might kill a few dozen people - a couple of hundred in a worst-case scenario. By contrast, a 1957 study by the Brookhaven National Laboratory estimated that a "worst case" accident at a small, 150-megawatt nuclear reactor 30 miles upwind of a major city would kill 3,400 people, injure another 43,000, and cause $7 billion in property damage. An accident at a larger, 1,000-megawatt reactor could kill as many as 45,000 people, cause property damage of nearly $300 billion, and radioactively contaminate an area the size of the state of Pennsylvania.

In 1985, GE was ranked number four in Department Of Defense contracts with $5,890,670,000. GE operated a plant in Florida that made thousands of neutron generators for thousands of nuclear bombs.  Each one could erase a large city.

In the early 90s a movie was made called Deadly Deception.   It juxtaposed GE's rosy "We Bring Good Things To Life" commercials with the true stories of workers and neighbors whose lives have been devastated by the company's involvement in building and testing nuclear bombs.

There was a GE Boycott.  A grassroots campaign was run by corporate accountability organization, Corporate Accountability International, to pressure GE out of the nuclear weapons industry. Nine months after this powerful movie won an Oscar in 1992, the corporate giant pulled out of the deadliest business of all.

The infamous cutthroat CEO Jack Welch.
 

Through the 1980s, Welch worked to streamline GE and make it the number one international company.  He shut down factories, reduced payrolls and benefits to his workers, and cut lackluster old-line units. Each year, Welch would fire the 10% of his managers that were the least successful. During the early 1980s he was dubbed "Neutron Jack" (in reference to the neutron bomb) for eliminating large numbers of people (employees) while leaving buildings intact.

Jack Welch and GE made a multi-billion dollar investment in modernizing the industry of China.

Welch has much received criticism over the years for his vocal lack of compassion for the economic woes of the working class. Welch has publicly stated that he is not concerned with the discrepancy between the salaries of CEOs and those of average workers. When asked about the issue of excessive CEO pay, Welch has stated that such allegations are "outrageous" and has vehemently opposed reforms affecting executive compensation that include backdating stock options, golden parachutes for nonperformance, and extravagant multi-million dollar retirement packages.