Salon.com > Jack Welch

Six 1 percenters desperate to elect Mitt

Thu, 11 Oct 2012 13:23:00 +0000

The following 1 percent wonders are doing just fine under Obama, but since their worldview is largely restricted to an obsession with their marginal tax rate, they can’t refrain from denouncing the president and thinking of new ways to thwart his re-election bid. The Romney men desperately want to see the first financier president, a man after their own cold hearts.

1. David Siegel, the Bitching Billionaire

Thanks to folks over at Gawker, we’ve gotten a look at the noxious activities of David Siegel, founder and CEO of national timeshare giant Westgate Resorts. Siegel is filthy rich and wants you to know it, building himself the largest (and possibly the tackiest) house in America. The documentary The Queen of Versailles follows Siegel and his wife Jackie in pursuit of obscene excess in the form of a 90,000-square-foot homage to bad taste, complete with a 20-car garage, a two-story wine cellar, and a 30-foot stained glass dome.

Jack Welch’s Gallup problem

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 21:05:00 +0000

Explain this, Jack Welch. On Wednesday, reports Gallup, the unemployment rate in the United States fell to an amazing 7.3 percent. That's lower, by a large margin, than the 7.8 percent mark announced by the government on Friday -- and greeted with such suspicion by conservatives and former chief executives of General Electric.

Gallup's number is a different beast than the figure produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It's a rolling average of the last 30 days, updated every day. Over the past year, Gallup's survey has occasionally indicated higher unemployment than the BLS -- in fact, back in March, some conservatives jumped on a Gallup report that unemployment was rising as evidence that the BLS was playing numbers games.

Jack Welch leaves Fortune and Reuters

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 19:02:00 +0000

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch said he would stop writing for Fortune magazine and Reuters after he generated controversy for questioning government unemployment figures, Fortune.com reported.

On Friday, the retired executive tweeted that the jobs numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics were "unbelievable" and suggested that "these Chicago guys" had somehow altered the figures. Later on MSNBC he refused to back down despite his lack of evidence. President Obama's reelection campaign is based in Chicago.

Reuters, Fortune.com and Fortune.com sibling CNNMoney have all run critical coverage of Welch since Friday. A Fortune.com article highlighted that GE had lost 100,000 jobs during Welch's tenure, roughly a quarter of its workforce. On Friday Reuters quoted Barry Ritholtz, CEO and director of equity research at Fusion IQ, a firm which manages about $300 million, saying, "This guy is the guy that's telling me the books are cooked? That's hilarious."

Must-see morning clip

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 12:12:00 +0000

Former General Electric CEO Jack Welch and Fox News think the government (or hey, Obama himself!) may have cooked the books to reflect promising unemployment numbers. Watch "The Daily Show's" epic takedown of these "conspiracy theorists:"

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Right-wingers’ hilarious excuses for the jobs report

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 13:00:00 +0000

This month's jobs numbers are out, showing the unemployment rate to have fallen to 7.8 percent, robbing Republicans of a favorite talking point. That number is a 44-month low, according to the Associated Press , which reports the unemployment number fell from 8.1 percent because "the number of people who said they were employed soared by 873,000." Predictably, right-wing Republicans are crying foul , insisting, based on nothing, that the career civil servants at the Bureau of Labor Statistics must be cooking the books.

Is Jack Welch working for Karl Rove?

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 01:15:00 +0000

Is former GE chairman Jack Welch doing Karl Rove’s bidding?

After his devastatingly weak debate performance against Mitt Romney, Barack Obama got a bit of a reprieve when the Bureau of Labor Statistics released figures showing that 873, 000 more people had jobs in America than the previous month—the most jobs created since 1983—and that the unemployment rate had declined to 7.8 percent.

As everybody now knows, Jack Welch, the former chairman General Electric instantly tweeted, “Unbelievable jobs numbers...these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers.” Welch has 1.3 million followers on Twitter, and, as Media Matters reported later in the day, Welch’s unsubstantiated charges were echoed by Rush Limbaugh at least seven conservative reporters on Fox News and elsewhere.

So why was one of the most iconic CEOs in American history alleging that the Obama administration had conspired to falsify the numbers just before the election?

Jack Welch still thinks the government did some fuzzy math

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 22:27:00 +0000

Prodigious firer of employees and former captain of industry Jack Welch ended his day with some conspiracy-mongering on "Hardball."