It was bad enough when Bernie Sanders dared to criticize GE earlier this week for not paying its taxes. What audacity for stupid Bernie to say that GE’s massive tax avoidance schemes are, you know, wrong.
GE’s CEO Jeffrey Immelt was quick to step to the plate and explain from among his piles of offshored billions that it was Sanders who had it all wrong.
Wealth creators, red-baiting, innovators, serving their employees, hard work, many buzzwords were there. After a good deal of huffing and spluttering, Immelt finally gets around to kinda sorta denying Bernie’s accusation that GE engages in tax avoidance by saying well, we pay some taxes.
Right on, Jeff!
It only got worse this morning when Bernie joined a picket line in solidarity with striking Verizon workers. Speaking to enthusiastic workers outside Verizon’s Brooklyn office, Sanders praised their effort to push Verizon to end the off-shoring of jobs and the stripping away of wages and benefits for those jobs left in America.
Once again, another CEO was quick to respond to Bernie’s pointed critique.
In a LinkedIn rant later this afternoon, Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam spluttered forth in similar fashion to GE CEO Immelt’s spluttering, which of course he “read with interest”.
Along the same lines, McAdam opined that Verizon indeed pays some taxes (not an issue Sanders raised on the picket line, but OK). Then he rambled on about how Verizon reinvests in America. When he finally did get around to addressing Sanders’s critique Verizon off-shores jobs and strips American jobs of wages and benefits, the CEO offered a weak and weasel-worded denial:
Contrary to Sen. Sanders’s contention, our proposals do not call for mass layoffs or shipping jobs overseas. Rather, we’ve asked for more flexibility in routing calls and consolidating some of our call centers, some of which employ a handful of people.
Oh is that all? Sounds great!
Oh, and Verizon workers are just whiners, because Verizon only wants to cut their health benefits just a little:
We would continue to provide health insurance for active and retired associates and their dependents, but we have proposed some common-sense reforms to rein in the cost of these plans...
CEO McAdam takes care in closing to remind us who the real victims in today’s economy are — big companies and their CEOs:
I understand that rhetoric gets heated in a Presidential campaign. I also get that big companies are an easy target for candidates looking for convenient villains for the economic distress felt by many of our citizens.
Before the spluttering subsided under the healing pitter-patter of a massage imparted by the sweet, soft, dulcet webbed feet of 27 endangered live Malaysian spoonbills, McAdam worked in the dagger:
The senator’s uninformed views are, in a word, contemptible.
And after careful reflection, Bernie Sanders issued Mr. McAdam just the response his blathering deserved:
xI don’t want the support of McAdam, Immelt and their friends in the billionaire class. I welcome their contempt. https://t.co/OIiykGeHQT
— Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 13, 2016No word yet on how much GE CEO Immelt and Verizon CEO McAdam are being paid for their tremendous services rendered to the Bernie Sanders campaign.