GE’s Immelt? Not the Job Change We Can Believe In

[Geee]

Pajamas Media:

Contrary to appearances, President Barack Obama’s appointment of General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt to lead the White House’s new President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness is not a sign of the president’s new openness to the business community.

Nor does it indicate the president is taking a new direction either on job creation or innovation.

Rather, by renaming the panel from the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board and selecting Immelt as its head, Obama is slapping whitewash on the same team and policies that failed to stimulate job growth during the first two years of his administration.

Immelt, in fact, was already a member of the original economic advisory group. “My hope,” he wrote, in a January 21 commentary in the Washington Post, “is that the council will be a sounding board for ideas and a catalyst for action on jobs and competitiveness. It will include large businesses, small businesses, labor, economists and government.”

While introducing the panel, Obama said it will “focus its work on finding new ways to encourage the private sector to hire and invest in American competitiveness.”

Strip away the corporate and political jargon of new ways and sounding boards, and you’ll find the “green economy” as the major platform that unites both Obama and Immelt.

Obama’s State of the Union speech, in which the president promoted green technologies and called for the elimination of tax breaks for oil companies, only further signals that the new jobs panel will be used to promote the president’s green dream.

Obama and Immelt have made huge, billion-dollar bets on clean energy technology. Any suggestion that they will have an open mind to abandon their previous commitments or put them on the back burner is unrealistic.