Poor choice to lead Obama’s jobs panel

Poor choice to lead Obama’s jobs panel

Recently President Obama appointed Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, to head his newly created Council On Jobs and Competitiveness. This was apparently his latest attempt to restore confidence in the business community by indicating his newly discovered affinity with the movers and shakers of the corporate world. Perhaps a little math will add some transparency to this appointment.

On Sept. 10, 2001, the day before an attack on our country, the torch at GE was passed from Robert Welsch to Jeff Immelt. On that day, GE stock closed at $38.95 and the Dow ended at 9,604. On Jan. 21, almost 10 years later with Immelt still at the helm, the stock closed at $19.25, a 50.5 percent loss to shareholders combined with thousands of jobs either destroyed or sent to foreign lands. At the same time the Dow closed at 11,871, a 23 percent increase.

So we have a former community organizer who never created a single job appointing the CEO of a once-great corporation whose poor decisions have decimated thousands of employees’ and investors’ futures. I suspect that this appointment is a reward to Immelt for allowing his subsidiaries, NBC and MSNBC, to act as virtual shills for Obama during the presidential campaign.

At any rate, far from restoring confidence, this decision leaves me asking the same question I asked when Obama was nominated as the president and virtual CEO of the United States: “Is this the best we can do?”

Gerald Wester

Mount Prospect