After General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt gave President Obama a tour of one of his company’s plants in Schenectady, N.Y., the town where the legendary American company was founded, Obama promised a bright future for U.S. businesses and officially named Immelt chairman of the new Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. The appointment marks a major shift in the administration’s economic strategy from stabilization to job creation.
The council will replace the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which was was tasked with fixing the financial markets and restoring the economy to equilibrium during the first two years of Obama’s administration. That board – chaired by leading economist and former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker – will be dissolved in early February. The administration will formally announce Volcker’s resignation tonight.
“The past two years were about pulling our economy back from the brink. Our job now is putting our economy into overdrive,” the president said in remarks that were widely seen as previewing Tuesday night's State of the Union address. “Our job is to do everything we can to ensure that businesses can take root and folks can find good jobs and we are leading the global competition that is leading to success in the 21st century.”
Obama called Immelt “one of the nation’s most respected and admired business leaders,” adding that that he selected him to chair the new council in part because of his success at G.E., which the president believes can be a model for other businesses.
Immelt waxed sympatico with Obama about the importance of innovation. “We know in G.E. the future is given to no one,” he said when introducing the president. “We have to compete. We have to win.”
The plant that Obama toured houses the company’s largest energy division, manufacturing steam turbines, generators, and wind and solar equipment, and it is the future home of an advanced-battery manufacturing facility. The plant will be producing wind turbines that will generate power in a plant in India, part of a deal that was announced while Obama was traveling abroad in November.
“We want an economy that’s fueled by what we invent and what we build. We’re going back to Thomas Edison’s principles. We’re going to build stuff and invent stuff,” Obama told a cheering crowd at the plant. He added that business success in the U.S. will be determined not by what companies can produce in New York, but rather what they can sell abroad – because “that’s where the customers are.”
The Obama administration has been good to G.E. The financial bailout, begun under President Bush, helped the company's huge financial division. G.E. has also benefited from Obama's aggressive promotion of green energy. And just this week, the Federal Communications Commission and the Justice Department gave the green light for G.E. to sell its NBC Universal division to Comcast, the cable giant.
Obama finished on a high note, as befitting a president who has won several victories since his party was crushed in the midterm elections and has seen an encouraging rise in his poll numbers in recent weeks.
“This is America. We still have that spirit of innovation and that sense of optimism, that belief that if we work hard and give it our all, then anything is possible in the country.”
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