“I want you to root for me. Look, every one in Germany roots for Siemens, everyone in Japan roots for Toshiba, everyone in China roots for China South Rail, I want you to say, win GE.”
~General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt
This sounds pretty brazen to the American ear. Liberal New York Times economics writer Paul Krugman calls it “Awesome cluelessness,” points out that corporate profits do not track societal wealth (I would add, especially in finance-heavy companies like GE), and that GE is only partly “an American company.”
Krugman asks, “And this is the head of a job-creation task force in a Democratic administration?”
Yes. And he fits in perfectly with this Democratic administration.
Listen to Obama talk about how “we can compete,” in solar panels, or some other field. Listen to Obama say “We need to outinnovate, outeducate and outbuild the rest of the world.” Consider Obama’s talk of “winning the future.”
The premise of all this talk is that the United States is almost one big business, Americans are all shareholders in U.S.A., Inc., and that China, Inc., and Spain, Inc., are our competitors.
I call it “National Greatness Liberalism.” You expect liberals to give us the “we’re all in this together talk.” But today, this isn’t about feeding the poor or defending the homeland — it’s about boosting GDP and helping “our” corporations.
This way of talking — which Immelt has long echoed, only more explicitly (“Germany is the model”) — helps us import European-style national industrial policy, but wrapped in patriotic garb: We can’t let China build more solar panels than we do!
The result of this government effort to steer the economy, of course, is that the biggest guys with the biggest lobbying budgets and the closest connections to power — for instance, GE — come out ahead.
Disclosure: GE owns 49% of NBC Universal, parent of MSNBC, where I have recently become a paid contributor.
