From: dougm@kuhub.cc.ukans.edu
Newsgroups: alt.activism,talk.politics.misc
Subject: Citizen GE
Date: 6 Apr 92 16:22:23 CDT
Organization: University of Kansas Academic Computing Services

There is an excellent article in the April 16th, 1992 issue of the Rolling
Stone magazine titled Citizen GE.  It is subtitled "How Multinationals Like
General Electric Have Seized Power in the United States."  A few excerpts
follow:

        ...Its [GE's] tax burden went from $330 million a year to
        negative $90 million a year -- money the government owed GE.
        From 1981 through 1983, GE had profits of $6.5 billion and,
        astonishingly, received tax rebates of @283 million from the
        federal government.

        Despite GE's argument that whatever's good for the company
        is good for the country too, this windfall did not create
        any new jobs for Americans.  On the contrary, the company
        was in the process of drastically shrinking its American
        work force in the early Eighties -- eliminating nearly
        50,000 people from its payroll through layoffs, attrition
        and the sell-off of subsidiaries.  The tax windfall,
        however, did help GE finance its aggressive campaign of
        corporate acquisitions, as it bought such domestic companies
        as Employers Reinsurance Corporation and RCA (including
        NBC), as well as numerous foreign companies.  American
        taxpayers, in other words, have unwittingly been subsidizing
        the restructuring and globalizatin of the country's
        industrial infrastructure.

        GE isn't the worst corporate criminal in the land, but it
        has accumulated an impressive rap sheet.  After a
        fourteen-week trial in 1990, a jury in Philadelphia
        convicted GE of criminal fraud for cheating the U.S. Army on
        a $254 million contract for battlefield computers.  Rather
        than appeal, GE paid $16.1 million in criminal and civil
        fines, including $11.7 million to settle government
        complaints that it had padded its bids on 200 other military
        and space contracts.  In Cincinnati in 1989, GE agreed to
        pay the government $3.5 million to settle five civil
        lawsuits, including one that alleged contractor fraud at the
        Evendale, Ohio, jet-engine plant. ...

        Also in 1989, GE paid $900,000 to settle allegations that it
        overcharged the army for electronic adapters used in the M-1
        tank and the Bradley fighting vehicle.  In 1988 it settled a
        similar complaint for cheating the U.S. Navy on components
        for guided-missile frigates.  In 1985 it pleaded guilty to
        108 charges of making false claims to the U.S. Air Force on
        a contract to refurbish the Minuteman intercontinental
        missile.  In that case a manager at GE's Re-Entry Systems
        Division pleaded guilty to perjury; the company paid a fine
        of $1 million.

        GE has offended the law in other areas as well.  It was
        convicted in 1981 on charges of creating a $1.25 million
        slush fund with which to bribe a Puerto Rican official on a
        $92 million power-plant contract.  Three GE executives were
        sentenced to prison terms in that case.  Kidder, Peabody,
        GE's stockbrokerage, paid $25.3 million to settle a
        Securities and Exchange Commission complaint of insider
        trading in 1987.  GE Capital paid $275,000 in civil
        penalties in 1989 for discriminating against low-income
        consumers, the largest fine collected under the Equal Credit
        Opportunity Act.  The corporation itself settled an
        employment-discrimination complaint in 1978 for $32 million
        in compensation to women and minorities.  Two years earlier
        GE's Canadian subsidiary was convicted (along with other
        companies) of conspiracy to fix prices on light bulbs.  And
        so on.

        To reassure the public after its Pentagon fraud cases, GE
        spearheaded a defense-industry-wide program to teach ethics
        to employees.  The training was evidently insufficient,
        because in August 1991 GE  was again accused of defrauding
        the federal government -- this time for $68 million.  The
        Justice Department filed civil fraud charges that accused
        the company of collaborating with Israeli military officials
        on false billings between 1983 and 1988 for jet engines
        built at Evendale for Israel but paid for by the Pentagon.

        GE is implicated in a harrowing list of places ruined by
        pollution. Four of GE's factories are on the Environmental
        Protection Agency's list of the most dangerous industrial
        sources of air pollution.  As noted above, the company has
        been identified as "potentially responsible" for
        contributing to the damage at fifty-one Superfund sites.

I recommend the article to anyone intrested in issues of corporate
citizenship and corporate involvement in the political process.  The
above quotations are only a sample of the information in the story.


Doug M.
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