Forensic Accountant and Bernie Madoff whistleblower Harry Markopolos discusses his 175-page report claiming General Electric committed $38 billion in accounting fraud.
General Electric (GE) executives, at the behest of voracious shareholders and Wall Street hedge fund managers, announced Monday that they had made the “difficult decision” to freeze the pension benefits belonging to 20,000 GE employees beginning January 1, 2021: here.
In 1971, General Electric designed, built and delivered the first, now-exploded, Mark 1 reactor at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant and that design was also used for four of the other five reactors.
Whistleblower Dale Bridenbaugh, a former engineer for GE, exposed a critical flaw in the reactor design that was so bad, he recommended all Mark 1 reactors be shut down to repair them. This didn’t happen. Then, as now, profits and protection of nuclear business were put ahead of safety and the protection of people.
A group of Japanese businesses and doctors sued General Electric Co. in Boston federal court on Friday, claiming the industrial giant was reckless and negligent in its design of the reactors and related systems at the core of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.
The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status for businesses in the area that suffered economic damage as a result of the disaster, which displaced as many as 150,000 people.
Among other things, the lawsuit claims GE and its partners lowered a protective cliff by more than 60 feet, placing the plant and all six of its GE-designed reactors closer to the Pacific Ocean and in the path of the severe tsunami that struck on March 11, 2011.
Afte the tsunami hit, three GE-designed reactors suffered from “entirely foreseeable flooding and resulting nuclear meltdowns”, causing the release of radioactive matter into the area surrounding the plant, according to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs are essentially blaming GE for defective reactor design as well as for not putting in place enough safeguards to prevent the spread of radiation once the Fukushima plant was breached.
Six years after Fukushima, robots finally find reactors’ melted uranium fuel — The New York Times: here.
Fears of another Fukushima as Tepco plans to restart world’s biggest nuclear plant — The Guardian: here.
UPDATE: The Shelter-in-Place order around GE Appliance Park has been expanded from a half-mile radius to a two-mile radius, according to Metrosafe.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Hundreds of firefighters spent several hours early Friday battling a massive six-alarm fire at GE’s Appliance Park in Buechel.
Harrods Creek Fire Chief Kevin Tyler told WDRB it was a six-alarm fire, and Louisville Fire & Rescue was called in to help. According to Tyler, more than 200 firefighters battled the blaze. There have been no firefighter injuries reported so far.
One should hope there won’t be any firefighter, or other, injuries.
“We have no indication as to what caused that fire,” said Louisville Fire spokesman Sal Melendez, during a press conference on Friday.
A shelter-in-place order was originally in place for a half-mile radius around the park, but that has been expanded to a two-mile radius.
Tyler says it has been a challenge fighting the massive fire and conduct numerous water rescues.
Most of Building 6, which is mainly used for storage and finance offices, collapsed sometime before 8:30 a.m.
We talked to an employee who says a couple hundred people work in Building 6, but it was closed for Good Friday, a company holiday, and he doesn’t believe anyone was inside.
The flames and smoke were visible for miles, and was still burning out of control several hours after it started, and fire officials expected to deal with for the rest of the day.
“The fire itself is confined to that area (Building 6),” said Capt. Sal Melendez with Louisville Fire & Rescue. “However, it’s not still under control. So units are expected to be there for the remainder of the day and through the night.”
“There is some curious information on Fukushima Unit 1, the first one to fail,” Gundersen says. “It was built by an American company, General Electric, and an American architect/engineer. It’s hard for the Japanese to blame themselves when this was an all-American design … I’m concerned that the nuclear industry in the United States will say it’s a Japanese problem, and it’s not.”
GE executive to be paid $89,000 a month for not working
7 August 2012
General Electric (GE) executive John Krenicki is leaving the giant firm at the end of 2012, bound up with the company’s decision to break up his energy division, where he functions as chief executive and president, into three separate operations.
In return for agreeing not to go to work for any of GE’s rivals for three years, Krenicki will be paid a “retirement allowance” of $89,000 a month for ten years, or some $10.7 million. The allowance is a portion of an exit package worth at least $28.3 million, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Krenicki’s deal also includes nearly $15 million worth of stock options and restricted stock units, and a bonus for 2012 equal to last year’s $2.8 million.
These obscene amounts have become entirely standard in America’s boardrooms. If the media treats the issue in more than a passing fashion, the tone tends to be one of awe or jealousy, rather than outrage. This is the narrow world of the American aristocracy.
The wealthiest New Zealanders have not suffered from the austerity drive being imposed on the working class: here.
In a deal between the head of GE (the owner of MSNBC) and Murdoch‘s FOX News reported in the New York Times, it was agreed that Olbermann would back off his chronic lacerating caricatures of Bill O’Reilly (although it can still be expected that he will go after O’Reilly and FOX, but much less frequently).
The Creeping Signs of GE Intervention in MSNBC’s Progressive Programming: The Party May be Over: here. And here.
Dave Lindorff, This Can’t Be Happening: “What are we to make of the actual announcement, that the president has named Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and CEO of GE Corp., to chair the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness? Immelt heads a company that has for years topped the list of transnational corporations as ranked by the size of their foreign asset holdings. More significantly, GE is a company that for years has also received more of its revenues and its profits from abroad than from its US operations…. What this means is that in very real terms, GE is not an American company. It is a foreign company that happens to be headquartered in the US, and that happens to have a chairman/CEO who was born in the US, and holds a US passport”: here.
DID BILL O’REILLY LIE ABOUT HIS WAR EXPERIENCE?Mother Jones thinks so. [Here]
NEW BILL O’REILLY ALLEGATIONS SURFACE Former co-workers are refuting the embattled Fox host’s claims that he heard George de Mohrenschildt, a friend of JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, commit suicide. They say such claims are impossible, as he was in another city at the time of the incident. [HuffPost’s Gabriel Arana]
Dear Kitty. Some blog 