Monday, May 9, 2011

General Electric Whores Its Way to Fortune 500 Top 10



Fortune 500 Magazine listed its annual top rankings for American businesses.  General Electric came in at #6.  If you take a look at the top 10, you will see that 4 of those companies have something in common.
General Electric, probably one of the most shameless whores in the modern era, has made an art out of scamming the American taxpayer out of their hard earned money; when the federal government implemented TARP, G.E. was right there cashing in:

General Electric said Wednesday that the federal government had agreed to insure as much as $139 billion in debt for its lending subsidiary, GE Capital. This is the second time in a month that G.E. has turned to a federal program aimed at helping companies during the global credit crisis.

GE Capital is not a bank, but granting it access to a new program from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation may reassure investors and help the lender compete with banks that already have government-protected debt, a G.E. spokesman, Russell Wilkerson, told Bloomberg News

And when the Stimulus Program was announced, they were right there slobbering all over themselves:

GE was the primary recipient of 14 stimulus grants, a spokeswoman for Recovery.gov confirmed to CNSNews.com. These 14 grants provided GE with $24.9 million in tax dollars. On four additional stimulus grants, the primary recipient of the federal money hired GE as a contractor. Recovery.gov is the administration’s website that tracks stimulus expenditures.

And it was just recently revealed that with their army of tax accountants and lawyers, they didn’t pay a dime in taxes:

General Electric paid no tax at all in America last year and even managed to get a $3.2billion ‘rebate’ from the government.

The utilities giant allocated just 7.4 per cent of its $5.1billion U.S. profits in tax - around a third of what others companies its size are paying.

But through a complex series of measures GE, which is America's largest company, will not even have to hand that over.

It makes you want to go out and buy a General Electric product doesn’t it.



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1370001/General-Electric-avoids-paying-tax-entirely-dodges-incentives.html#ixzz1LuId6VBC

Source:  http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500/2011/full_list/index.html

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/fdic-to-back-139-billion-in-ge-capital-debt/

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/obama-administration-gave-general-electr

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