Jeffrey Immelt, General Electric’s (GE) CEO attacked other business leaders in a speech at West Point, saying that his generation “had succumbed to ‘meanness and greed’ that had harmed the US economy and increased the gap between the rich and the poor.”
Immelt neglected to mention, however, that he took home $14,100,000 in compensation last year. Guess he was talking about all those other greedy execs.
“We are at the end of a difficult generation of business leadership … tough-mindedness, a good trait, was replaced by meanness and greed, both terrible traits,” Immelt said, “Rewards became perverted. The richest people made the most mistakes with the least accountability.”
Immelt’s didn’t stop there. According to the Financial Times, he also linked bad leadership to growing inequality.
“The bottom 25 per cent of the American population is poorer than they were 25 years ago. That is just wrong,” he said. “Ethically, leaders do share a common responsibility to narrow the gap between the weak and the strong.”
Two problems with Immelt’s attack. First, he’s one of the highest paid U.S. executives. And second, although GE took $80 billion in TARP funds, Immelt somehow used his connections to the Obama administration to get GE exempted from executive pay cuts that hit similar firms.
Here’s how Business Week spells out Immelt’s 2008 income:
TOTAL COMPENSATION in 2008
Total Annual Cash Compensation $3,300,000
Total Short Term Compensation $3,300,000
Other Long Term Compensation $7,233,137
Total Calculated Compensation $14,096,603
Contributing to Immelt’s pot calling the kettle black syndrome, the non-greedy CEO somehow got GE and himself exempted from pay restricitions imposed on other companies by Obama’s pay czar.
The Lonely Conservative reports:
This week Kenneth R. Feinberg, popularly known as the White House Pay CZAR, announced his plan to cut the pay for the top 25 earners at seven companies that received federal government help. On average cut total these executives had their compensation cut by about 50 percent. The companies are Citigroup, Bank of America, American International Group, General Motors, Chrysler and the financing arms of the two automakers.
One company was mysteriously missing from the list, General Electric. GE has been regularly protected from the TARP rules. By taking advantage of its ownership of two tiny banks in Utah, GE was able to issue $80 Billion dollars worth of federally backed loans about one out of every four dollars available in the federal loan guarantee program.
And true to being a friend of the President, General Electric didn’t have to go through any of the burdens other participants had to go through like the financial stress test. And now it seems they wont have to worry about any those pesky salary/compensation limits so Jeffrey Immelt and the senior management don’t have to worry about the 14-18 Million in annual compensation they get with help from Uncle Sam.
As reported by the Washington Post back in June, GE was the number one recipient of the TARP guaranteed loan program…
So you just keep giving those speeches, Jeff. We know can depend on your for the truth. Or at least a perverted distortion of the truth.
Source: Financial Times, Business Week, Lonely Conservative
