Maggie's Farm

Why Connecticut Lost GE

GE recently finalized it's purchase of Alstom in Europe. Now 6,500 jobs are about to go away over here including 765 in France and 1,300 in Switzerland and will include shutting the plant in Mannheim, Germany. It will be interesting to see how GE is going to provide the promised 1,000 jobs in France that were part of the Alstom deal.

In fairness to GE, Alstom would have gone out of business (at least the gas turbine division) if GE hadn't offered to buy Alstom. Which is why Pat Kron went hat-in-hand to GE and then lied about it to the French officials.

The truth is GE actually saved hundreds, if not thousands of jobs in Europe, but the European media will most likely play the Americans like the bad guys.

Keep in mind Alstom only held 3% of the entire gas turbine market world wide, so their days were numbered even after the 2004 bailout by the French to the tune of €3.2-billion.

The other side of the coin is the fact these cuts come on top of reductions elsewhere in the energy industry. BP will eliminate 4,000 jobs in crude production. World wide, the oil industry has already cut about 250,000 jobs in the past 18 months.

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In fairness to the Brits, most of the "immigrants" are from former UK colonies as is the case with the Netherlands and France. All three were major colonial powers so their colonial subjects simply returned to the "mother ship" in hopes of a better life.

The fiasco in Germany and Scandinavia is a completly different story since these countries never seriously colonized much of anything in their past 300-year history. This is simply the stupidity of the liberal-left trying to prove how multi-cultural they are even if it requires throwing their own citizens under the multi-culti bus.

But despite our social democratic facade, the roots of German nationalism are very, very deep. We Germans have a 2,000 year history of keeping foreigners out. Just like we did to the Romans in the Teutoburg forest, we can still do to these new invaders.

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