General Electric: Trading With The Enemy, Killing Our Troops And Screwing Us

When I was a kid, my father—who founded among other things the Electrical Engineering school at Bradley University—was a big fan of General Electric.

Back then—years before we ever heard of “eco-imagination” or “GE brings good things to life”—GE made things like TV sets, generators, medical equipment and light bulbs.

I specifically remember how they reached out to people like my father because he was training the next generation of engineers who would help them continue to make the United States a leader in technology.

That GE is dead and gone.

In fact, today’s GE only recently stopped supporting the people in Iran who are responsible for killing American troops in Iraq and then only because Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly single-handedly launched a jihad against Jeff Immelt, GE’s CEO and pinhead-in-chief.

Given the way the economy works, GE pretty much got a pass on Wall Street for acting like a character in Catch 22 because its sins were deemed more financial than moral. And as we now all know from Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s recent testimony, morals have no place on Wall Street. GE had invested in bad commercial real estate deals under Immelt which cut the value of its stock in half. That’s bad. Doing business with thugs who are directly responsible for killing American troops? Not so much.

Well, those same people—and yes, I’m tarring with a deservedly broad brush— are also ruining American companies which they do business with as well.

It happens that GE doesn’t make television sets any more.

They make money on credit cards.

The new thinking at GE and a lot of other banks is that it doesn’t matter whether or not you have paid your bills on a particular account for 40 years. They look at your credit report in a bad environment and cut your credit limit on the off chance that you might not pay your bills in the future.

Last week, I got home to a letter which had J.C. Penney Card in very large type on the top and GE Money Bank is fairly small type on the inside.

They said that for a number of reasons—even though the account had a zero balance—they were cutting the credit limit to $100.

I called the executive at J.C. Penney who spends most of his day trying to get people like me to spend a lot of money there and he had their person who handles the relationship with GE look into it. She told me there was nothing she could do because GE didn’t want to make any exceptions.

Well, there is something I can do.

My wife and I will never set foot in a J.C. Penney store again.

Over the last 40 years, I probably spent well in excess of $100,000 at Penney. I’ve furnished several houses there, bought thousands of dollars worth of clothes and sent plenty of gift cards to people for graduations, bar mitzvahs, Christmas, Hanukah and, christenings and other happy occasions.

WalMart and Macy’s here we come.

I’m not mad at Penney’s.

But they did sell their credit card portfolio to the pinheads at GE and the only pressure I can bring to bear on GE is to make Penney’s suffer the loss of my business. And my goodwill. Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

Eventually, they may tell GE where to stick their plastic and either get back into the credit card business themselves or find another vendor who understands that pissing off customers is not good business.

By the way, GE tried this crap with my Sam’s Club card several years ago, but Wal Mart apparently had more stroke than does Penney’s and cut GE off at the pass.

Say what you will about the largest retailer in the world, but they understand who their customer is and are perfectly willing to tell GE how to treat their customers.

I do believe in a free market. But a company like GE who is willing to trade with people who kill our troops and screw us should be made to hurt until they learn how to behave as a good corporate citizen of this country. And if they can’t?

No bail outs. Even though their pinhead in chief started sucking up to Barack Obama way before 2008.

FRED WEINBERG – THE PENNY PRESS