02 Jun 2010 Free Enterprise Project Launches Petition Calling for GE CEO Jeff Immelt to Resign

Washington, D.C. – Today the Free Enterprise Project released an online petition calling for Jeff Immelt to resign as Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of General Electric.

The petition can found at http://www.bigbusinesswatch.org.

“In a desperate attempt to find revenue, Immelt is seeking to profit from President Obama’s big government agenda,” said Tom Borelli, Ph.D., director of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Free Enterprise Project. “Immelt successfully lobbied for Obama’s failed $787 billion economic stimulus plan and now he is actively lobbying for the president’s cap-and-trade policy. Immelt’s actions are responsible for putting our nation in deeper debt and looting future generations of their economic liberty.”

“Immelt has positioned GE to depend on government spending and public policy initiatives such as cap-and-trade to boost the company’s revenue. For instance, Obama’s cap-and-trade policy would mandate the purchase of renewable energy products such as wind turbines which GE manufactures,” added Borelli.

“Our tax dollars are being laundered to bailout GE via Obama’s big government policies. Under the Obama – Immelt partnership, our progressive president significantly increases the role of government in our lives, Immelt gets much needed revenue and Americans pay for it all in terms of higher taxes, higher national debt and suffer from reduced liberty,” said Tom Borelli.

“When you think of it, Immelt poses more risk to liberty than a progressive Senator. Immelt’s ability to affect public policy has no checks and balances and he is using the vast resources of GE to promote Obama’s agenda. It’s time ‘we the people’ hold Immelt accountable for undermining America’s economic sustainability and our free enterprise system,” added Tom Borelli.

GE’s NBC Universal media empire, especially MSNBC, frequently supports Obama’s policy agenda and its news coverage of patriotic Americans participating in the Tea Party movement has been particularly harsh.

“Immelt has transformed MSNBC from a news network to Obama’s personal public relations agency. It’s outrageous that Immelt allows Keith Olbermann and other talking heads to tarnish the image of liberty loving Tea Party activists as racists. “‘We the people’ have had enough of Obama’s government gone wild spending programs and CEOs such as Immelt that are seeking to profit from taxpayers,” said Deneen Borelli, full-time fellow with the National Center’s Project 21.

“The time has come for Tea Party activists to recognize the threat to liberty posed by CEOs such as Immelt. If GE’s board of directors will not address Immelt’s failed leadership, Tea Party members and other political activists must,” added Deneen Borelli.

The National Center For Public Policy Research is a conservative, free-market non-profit think-tank established in 1982. It is supported by the voluntary gifts of over 100,000 individual recent supporters, and receives less than one percent of its revenue from corporate sources.