Free Republic

<p>Jeffrey Immelt is stepping down as chairman and chief executive of General Electric Co., bringing to an end a tumultuous 16-year tenure in which he dramatically reshaped the manufacturing powerhouse but failed to win over Wall Street.</p> <p>Amid mounting pressure from activist investor Trian Fund Management, GE said Monday that Immelt will be replaced by John Flannery, a 30-year company veteran who oversaw a jump in profits at the health-care unit. In a sign of just how great opposition to Immelt had become in the investing community, the stock soared the most in more than a year and a half after the announcement was made.</p>

They say that "life imitates art"...or is it the other way around...the lines are getting so blurred. In any event, we thought we would take this opportunity to highlight some of the most startling discoveries we found so far in Doug Stamper's...sorry, John Podesta's emails. You have to admit there are some similarities there and they even have the same position...hopefully the Clinton Foundation is receiving royalties from HBO... Yesterday we pointed out the many amazing one-liners offered up by Hillary as she was out collecting millions of dollars for her "Wall Street speeches." Here is an expanded sample: Hillary...

GE’s challenges are multiple but consistent, Chief Financial Officer Jeffrey Bornstein said, borne out of slow global economic growth and turbulent geopolitical times—everything from the U.K. vote to leave the European Union to Middle East turmoil and currency shifts. “All this uncertainty generally limits growth,” Mr. Bornstein said. The company forecasts revenue will improve over the remainder of the year, helped by an anticipated surge in power turbine shipments. “Bottom line, we are seeing organic growth accelerating in the second half,” Chief Executive Jeff Immelt said on a conference call Friday. While the company’s oil and gas and transportation businesses...

The CEOs of two of the largest U.S companies — Microsoft and GE — pushed back strongly against a political tide that threatens to weaken America's ties to the global economy. Monday on CNBC's " Squawk on the Street ," Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Satya Nadella took aim at U.S. trade policies that would prevent the country from remaining a "beacon of progress" on the world stage. "Right now what I'm looking for is the politics in our country to get to a place where people can win elections by making a case for both globalization and addressing the inequities that...

Annual pay raises don't work. The salary increase serves two purposes: to motivate workers and to keep employees from leaving for a better-paying job. In its current form, the traditional raise does neither of those things very well. "You can't really do a lot with the annual raise," said Evren Esen, director of survey programs at the Society for Human Resource Management. When the economy is decent, annual pay adjustments come in at 1 percentage point or 2 percentage points ahead of inflation for a given year. That doesn't go far. Employees expect to get at least the cost of...

SEOUL— General Electric Co. has clinched a deal to supply engines for South Korea’s next-generation fighter jets. The U.S. conglomerate beat Eurojet Turbo GmbH, a European engine maker, to provide the F414-GE-400 engines, South Korea’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration said Thursday. A final contract will be signed next month, it said. The agency didn’t disclose the deal value, but a person familiar with the matter estimated it at $3.5 billion. The deal is part of one of South Korea’s most ambitious weapons-development programs. The project, Korean Fighter Experimental, or KF-X, is part of Seoul’s plans to replace its decades-old fleet...

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who has been praising anti-GOP establishment for more than a year, called Texas Sen. Ted Cruz a "sure bet" on his Twitter page over the weekend.

General Electric’s big move to Boston this summer could mean much more than leaving an empty corporate campus behind. Residents and small business owners in the tony town of Fairfield, Conn. – home to GE’s global headquarters for more than four decades – are bracing themselves for the collateral damage after the company announced last month it would be moving to Massachusetts and taking 800 jobs, millions in grants and opportunities for expansion with them. But that’s not even the half of it. The trickle-down devastation triggered by GE’s move is predicted to spare no sector. The real estate market...

"Abe Lincoln may have freed all men, but Sam Colt made them equal." It's an interesting idea to ponder. President Lincoln is praised universally today, across the aisle, and around the world, but what of Samuel Colt? Who is Samuel Colt? ...The region reminds me of New York's former boomtowns like Kingston and Binghamton, and Connecticut's Waterbury and Hartford. These once vibrant communities and buildings were gutted by the twin blades of time and politicians, their facades decaying and cadaverous, lining streets and throughways like architectural tombstones. Where is everyone? Kingston and Binghamton were home to IBM and Singer Link....

By the end of the year, GE will cease production and sales of compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), the manufacturer announced this morning. Moving forward, the company's focus will fall entirely on halogen incandescents and on high-efficiency LEDs. "CFL's kind of been the light bulb that everybody loves to hate," explained John Strainic, chief operating officer of GE Lighting, citing the history of complaints about CFL dimmer compatibility, brightness delay, and quality of light. Strainic says that the industry has come a long way, but admits that the perception of inferior performance lingers. "Ultimately, LED offers a better solution at a...

My review: This book is fascinating on so many levels but one of the most interesting, and unexpected, is the government-science collusion in the study and manipulation of WEATHER and climate. Bernard Vonnegut, Kurt's brother was a scientist at GE. Kurt worked there in the public relations department (as did later Ronald Reagan). The author herself never claims this however, it is not hard to see the connection to this early government manipulation and hold over climate science and the origins of "climate change" came from government funded studies of weather by GE (General Electric) in the post war years....

Elizabeth Warren must have been asleep. Otherwise General Electric, her arch enemy, would never have dared come into Warren's backyard, let alone announce that it was planning to transfer its headquarters to Boston. What a windfall for Boston. What an embarrassment for Warren.

General Electric has sold its appliance business to Haier for $5.4 billion, a deal that will greatly expand the Chinese firm's footprint in the U.S. Haier is best known as a manufacturer of household goods including washing machines, refrigerators and microwaves. In recent years, it has sought to expand into new international markets, including the U.S.

The state of Massachusetts offered diversified manufacturer General Electric Co $120 million in grants and other financial incentives to persuade it to move to Boston, with the city kicking in another $25 million in tax relief, officials said on Wednesday. City and state officials regard the move as the linchpin of an effort to redevelop the city's southern waterfront, which has transformed from acres of parking lots to a massive construction site with about a dozen office and apartment towers under construction. "In addition to adding hundreds of high-paying jobs to our state, we look forward to partnering with GE...

GE finished a historic year of massive deals with one more win before the ball dropped in New York’s Times Square. On the last day of the year, the company announced a landmark power contract with the Saudi Electric Company valued at nearly $1 billion.

The company began looking to leave Fairfield, Conn., last year after state legislators threatened to raise corporate taxes. GE’s quest for a new global headquarters can be traced back to a decision by Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy and Connecticut lawmakers last spring to significantly change business tax policies, to help fill a big state budget gap. The package, among other things, altered how multistate companies collect corporate taxes and how losses can be used to reduce tax bills over a period of years.

In 2011, Democrat Gov. Dan Malloy claimed to have exacted "painful" concessions from state employees. Here's how the employees' lead negotiator, Dan Livingston, described the deal: * On retirement benefits: "Now we have an 11-year pension and health care agreement ... that no other state worker in the country has." * On job security: "Four years' job security. Nowhere else in the country will you find four years' job security." * On wage increases: "Giving up the raise next year (3%) .. . to get three threes in a row in the three out years. ... Arbitrators around the country...

The real news in this story probably isn’t the subject of the Ex-Im Bank (which has some Republicans sneaking around with Democrats in an effort to reopen it) or even General Electric. This is a case study in how the media reports on relatively wonky subjects in an effort to bend public opinion in a progressive direction. In a very lengthy article at the New York Times we learn about the sad closing of yet another GE plant, this one located in Waukesha, Wisconsin. They manufacture huge industrial engines there which can sell for more than a million dollars.The...

You just got hired by GE. Why isn't anybody happy for you? That's the perplexing question facing a college graduate in BBDO New York's amusing new campaign, breaking Tuesday on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. The problem, it turns out, is that the graduate, Owen, has been hired as a programmer—but everyone from his classmates to his parents thinks GE is still only a manufacturing company. This makes for some comically awkward ads, in which Owen tries to explain why people should be impressed by his new job—not giving him condolences or baffled stares.

Back in June we covered the story of General Electric throwing a fit of pique over the demise of the Export-Import Bank and threatening to ship their jobs overseas if the cookie jar wasn’t opened back up. The amount of sympathy which GE received from our readers and the conservative community in general was… muted to say the least. It seemed like a cheap, tawdry move which was designed to try to hold American workers hostage in exchange for getting what they wanted from the feds.That story took a rather odd twist this week when some new information came...