The Ultimate Crony Capitalist

This is an adaptation of chapter 10 from Hunter Lewis’s book Crony Capitalism in America: 2008-2012.

During the presidential campaign of 2012, an online commentator observed that President Obama had not met with his Jobs Council for six months. How could this be, the commentator asked, when jobs were foremost on the president’s agenda? The answer was not hard to discover.

The Council was headed by General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt, a noted Obama political backer. Other members included Penny Pritzker, an heiress who served as Obama’s finance chairwoman in 2008, and Richard Trumpka, president of the AFL-CIO, one of the largest Obama campaign contributors. The group was established after the 2010 mid-term election losses as a device to emphasize the administration’s focus on jobs but, more importantly, to recognize political allies and campaign donors and prepare for the 2012 presidential election. This was more or less acknowledged when, after the president’s re-election, it was disbanded, despite the persistence of high unemployment.

Why had the president chosen General Electric’s Immelt in particular as the head of this campaign arm? For one reason, Immelt was sympathetic to the president’s brand of state-led capitalism. He had gone so far as to say of China in a television interview: “The one thing that actually works, state run communism, may not be your cup of tea, but their government works.”[1]

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