Perhaps it is time to quit buying GE products? |
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| By: KarenM Friday April 1, 2011 10:16 am | |
After reading about GE’s outrageous good luck with their 2010 taxes, I decided to google for products manufactured by GE and I found two links, one summarizing their products, and another one that has more detail.
Does anyone else here feel similarly about not buying any GE products?
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21 Comments
As a sad reminder of the time when GE was a business that manufactured fine products instead of juggling financial instruments, I have an old GE refrigerator that is so old it is avocado, and so dependable it’s been in my house since the 50′s. Like auto makers, our manufacturing firms have turned from producing really fine quality goods to finagling money. It’s a hollowing out of value, and has made this economy as messy as it is now.
Smashing idea!
No more GE light bulbs. No more nuclear reactors.
Of course, we would need to spread this idea beyond Firedoglake’s posters and commenters.
Maybe a petition, asking people to swear of GE products?
Mods, is this a possibility?
It is too, too bad that all of those “smartest” guys in the room decided to go into Finance instead of Academia.
It’s really a very sad commentary on the concentration of our economy that if we boycott both GE and Koch products, we’d be very hard pressed to meet our basic needs.
Thanks for provoking some thought, Karen.
Looked for a new stove. GE moved their profitable mid-west plant to Mexico for yet cheaper labor (and increased offshore tax evasion). Refused then and there to buy GE.
Which company makes stoves and refrigerators IN AMERICA anymore?
Okay I’m in.
You mean while also not buying Sony Ericsson of course. They’re the company that hires only people who are not currently unemployed. Oh, and they’re part of Sony, which rode the Sony Playstation 2 to profitability — which was made with provable conflict minerals from the Democratic Republic of Congo.
That said, it’s getting hard to do the right thing. I tried to buy shirts from countries in the third world and not support the Chinese knock-off monopolies. Come to find out that the Egyptian shirts, in particular, were a completely Shock Doctrine foreign-owned business creation set up by friends of Gamal Mubarak that hired zero Egyptian workers even though the factories were in Egypt.
I think we’d need to boycott the entire Fortune 500.
All the big corporations dodge taxes on a massive scale. A lot of it is even legal, thanks to our congresscritters.
You’d need to shut down the nation to have an effective boycott against corporate tax dodgers. Mebbe it’ll come to that.
I quit buying GE products years ago.
Profit is their most important product.
yup! quit that a long time ago but they keep coming up with new things and market it by their buddies. So we gotta learn all over again!
thanx for the lists!
Pretty easy to boycott GE consumer goods. They don’t make many any more.
Perhaps Maytag?
Appliances Made In America
Global commerce is just too interconnected as the recent earthquake in Japan demonstrated (supply chain disruptions from automobiles to iPads). There is no way to separate one company or product from another. Any attempt to avoid, for instance, products produced using child labor is unverifiable and therefore futile. You can’t even eat fruits and vegetables grown in your own garden because nearly every modern variety is a product of hybridization or genetic optimization, which somewhere along the line depends on something loathsome. I don’t think it is possible today to become completely independent of technology. You would have to eat untainted wild varieties of unpopular foods (because if they where popular, then they would have already been optimized), find a remote location in a temperate climate (because you will start out naked), and then raise children with no outside contact. Only your children can actually claim to be completely cleansed of supporting the global oligarchy; but they will point upward and ask about the thin white clouds slowly piercing the deep blue of the sky; and they will discover fizzy sugar water and space-foam mattresses, and the last pure humans will disappear forever.
I decided there was a benefit in trying because the process forced me to raise my consciousness, and, the others that elected to participate with me in that process said they felt the same result for them as well. My objective was to become clear that I really did have some better choices that meant less suffering not only for me but for others.
So, I tried an experiment. Folks gave me used clothes and shoes that fit, so I wore those. The only new clothes I bought turned out to be the new replacement for the worn out pair of underwear so I wore those with gratitude. I decided to see what it was like to live with only what I needed so giving the other stuff away worked out well as others needed it, they were happy to have it and it got put to use. As I am mechanically inclined, if I needed to replace something I tried salvage parts. If I purchased something, if was possible I first opted for locally grown or made by someone in a small, locally-owned business. This made people in my immediate community really happy as it helped them support themselves and their families. So far so good and I am really liking the results.
Isn’t it more important to get trade barrier laws passed? We need domestic content laws + stiff tariffs, possibly with exceptions for other countries that have our level of wages and environmental protection laws. Can any American worker compete with a foreigner who makes 2-20 cents on the dollar, that they do?
Trade barriers should be intelligently applied. During the 1970′s, American cars used to rust through in 3 years. I see no reason to protect such a callous industry, even if it means not protecting the workers they employed. Barriers could be reinstated after unworthy manufacturers got their acts together.
Actually, I think it might be a good idea to focus on one, well thought out target.
I don’t know if it’s possible to hurt GE, but I’ll bet one of these corporations is vulnerable.
Putting the hurt on one of them would scare the bejebus out of the rest.
Eventually, one of our automakers, the ones we bailed out is going to try selling us a car made in China.
I say, if we can’t arrange to leave them sitting in port, on the boat, we might still manage to leave them on the showfloor.
Protectionism, btw, is very American. See the link for Thom Hartmann reading from a 200 year old book written be a Boston Tea Party participant. The Tea Party was as much about being against a tax cut being given to the “trans national” East India company as against any taxes levied on Americans.
Oops. Here’s the link:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=385×568977
Sorry but I am just *not* buying it: “Airport body scanners not a health risk: study” (by Agence France-Presse, Mar. 29th, 2011)
Meanwhile here at The Lake we’ve had extensive discussion of prior corporate negligence and conflict-of-interest with regard to the machinery’s manufacturers including offshore tax-havened, US corporate tax deadbeat, General Electric. Also, there is a big push by the rich-sters to force international public to acceptance to any and all biometric scanning and tracking and this is a large first step in that program as the system could be created to be one-stop-shopping for the gathering, sharing and examination of changes in biometric data.
Maybe, but they are pretty well insulated.
CEO’s change companies every 3 years or so. And get paid the big bucks regardless of performance.
Most of the big businesses amount to cartels which are ultimately owned by the same set of folks.
And, it’s a global market place. You’d have to pick something which cannot be easily dumped on a different market.