Here's One for the Birthers: Is GE's Jeffrey Immelt Really an American?

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/dave-lindorff/33832/heres-one-for-the-birthers-is-ges-jeffrey-immelt-really-an-american

If President Barack Obama had announced this week that he was appointing Japan's Takanobu Ito, president and CEO of Honda, to head his new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, one can imagine the shock wave that would go through the American body politic. A foreigner!--and one from one of America's major competitors--to head a White House advisory panel on jobs and competitiveness?

And yet, at least the president could argue that Ito represents a company that earns the bulk of its revenues from its operations in the US.

But what are we to make of the actual announcement, that the president has named Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and CEO of GE Corp., to chair the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness?

Immelt heads a company that has for years topped the list of transnational corporations as ranked by the size of their foreign asset holdings. More significantly, GE is a company that for years has also received more of its revenues and its profits from abroad than from its US operations, that has far more of its 304,000 employees overseas than in the US, and that has more assets abroad than at "home," where its headquarters offices are located.

More at the link --

[Hannah Bell]

1. +100. how are multinational corps american "persons" as well?

[Brickbat]

2. Proving once again that it's all about the corporate interests, and not the people's.

Isn't anyone getting tired of this?

[truedelphi]

3. Did you evercatch the Wondrous Tim Geithner basically spitting at

Michelle Bachman that "your government" doesn't have the ability to do this, that and the other thing.

And it is important to remember that at that moment she was asking a rather astute question of Geithner, one that Grayson had asked earlier. And when Geithner sneers at a member of Congress, he sneers at us all.

(Geithner's bio indicates he spent only six months of his childhood actually inside
the United States.)