From the blog gristmill:
http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2008/3/13/0145/56590
"I came because I was invited," says the man on stage heatedly, squaring off his shoulders to the packed crowd. "I don't need to be lectured by anybody in this room about how to compete!"
From another speaker it might sound defensive, but in this case it is the CEO of GE, the second largest company in the world. Jeff Immelt knows whereof he speaks.
Immelt's outburst came toward the end of a Q&A session that saw him repeatedly assailed by ideological conservatives angry over his involvement in the U.S. Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of large businesses lobbying for a carbon cap-and-trade system, and his leadership role in pushing the business world to embrace clean energy and sustainability.
....
What put him over the top was Terry Anderson of the Property and Environment Research Center, a right-wing think tank. Anderson asked what real entrepreneurs -- the ones who don't have the resources to lobby for favorable treatment from government -- are supposed to do when a carbon cap cripples the economy.Real entrepreneurs. That set Immelt off. "We compete our asses off," he snapped. "We're No. 1 at what we do!"
.... At the end of one exchange, he protested, "I've never voted for a Democrat!" adding with a mutter, "until tonight, maybe ..."
Click on over to read the entire article. Fascinating.
Comments
A textbook case of what is wrong with America......
..........these
TitansPygmies of Industry are walking dead men. The days when Industry could extract from and pollute the commons are coming to an end. Either progressive government will stop them or we will see an economic collapse due to Peak Oil or other abuses of the commons. Yet these fools sit there agitating for 18th Century economic solutions.The fact that the 'free market' give rise to an income distribution modeled on the power function rather than the convenient fiction perpetrated by the dumb asses in Traditional Economics that it is a bell-curve is now becoming common knowledge and folks....
The citizenry will not be amuse to find out that they can never, ever get rich. Can never be other than poor as wealth inexorably accumulates on the right as the function soars to incredible values. Unless they win the Lottery....
Nope it's going to be ugly as Sara Robinson's essay: When Change Is Not Enough: Seven Steps to Revolution grimly outlines.
One interesting factoid I ran across in: The Origin of Wealth by Eric Beinhocker is that GE, established in 1878, is the oldest continuous operating business entity researchers have yet found.
Interesting is it not that the oldest business in the world is less than half as old as the U.S. government yet feels quite comfortable in dictating what is and what is not true about the relationship between government and business.
Perhaps these johnny-come-lately folks should shut up and listen for a change.
They might learn something.
'When you see a rattlesnake poised to strike, you do not wait until he has struck to crush him.'