ericbarbour wrote: ↑Sat Dec 28, 2019 10:52 pm
I've said before that it AMAZES me that GE has managed to survive Jack Welch. He destroyed their consumer appliance and electronics divisions and nearly killed the locomotive division. GE once dominated the electrical-power equipment business and now that's hanging by a thread. Jury's still out on jet engines and military hardware. (Bet he LOVED military contracting, it can have a built-in "invisible massive profit margin".)
If his "acolytes" are spreading thru American business as they did at Boeing, some other major corporations might be crashing soon.
The allowance for US heavy industry building military equipment is an offshoot of our fetish for corporations, because when the rubber met the road after Woodrow Wilson declared war on the Central Powers, we had state-run airplane factories making seaplane trainers for the Navy, but that was
"kamma'nism" after the October/November Russian Revolution. I think we also had state-run shipyards, munitions works, and helmet factories and all of it went private by 1921. If they had allowed for state defense works with no allowance for these factories building aircraft designed by Curtiss or Boeing or Grumman or Vought, the Chinese Guomindang (Kuomintang) government would have had to lean heavier on the Germans (Heinkel and Junkers) and Soviet aviation (Sukhoi, Polikarpov, and Tupolev) instead of Boeing, Curtiss, et. al. And never forget all the outfits the Spanish Republic bought planes from during the Spanish Civil War - American, British, and French aircraft firms came off well from that fiasco. The US government pissed blood and shat molten iron after Seversky (later Republic Aviation) sold a single AT-12 "Guardsman" trainer to the Soviets in 1940, even though Seversky's barrel-like aircraft were obsolete by that point (and we had bought hundreds of the related P-35 fighter type, aircraft that were sliced to ribbons by the far more nimble Mitsubishi Zeros in the skies over the Philippines during the 1941-42 winter). The Count lost his firm over that, even though Alexander de Seversky was a one-legged White Russian WWI ace and not a fan of Uncle Joe.
I second Jack Welch being a total bag of dogshit.....how do you wreck a locomotive division? You have to be mentally damaged to the level of severe retardation to screw that up. That fucking Ayn Rand fanboy who ran Sears into the ground is another should-have-been-institutionalized "like a bawws" dumbshit and I blame Donald John Trump for that idiocy - he is still in "business" after a string
of bankruptcies that should have have ended him. Dummies think that is
a good thing. Also, look up Malcolm Bricklin, the guy who gave America the Yugo - he's still trying to import cheapo Chinese cars (Chery - the Lada of Red China) for the US market. Unlike Trump, he fails constantly, but he is quiet about it and you don't know he is still out there (unless you read the auto press).