The Sad Story of Jack Welch in Retirement: Opinion

I guess there's a final irony here: Welch is leveling such an incendiary accusation at Obama, the very president who came to the rescue of his company, and by extension his legacy, with the continuation of the federal bailout of Wall Street and the subsequent federal stimulus spending and tax-cut package that certainly played a role in bringing GE's still-stagnant stock price out of the root cellar.

The point of this is not to make any political comment. I certainly think Obama's handling of the economy is worthy of criticism, and it comes as no surprise to anyone that partisan media propagandists and their useful-idiot followers would try to discredit a rare bit of good economic news by lashing out at their opposition with absurd accusations of corruption.

However, to hear such noise coming from a prominent business leader like Welch seems to be a sad comment on the woeful state of discourse in America from the highest echelons of society.

But there's another point to all this, which is that the shine has long been removed from the once-stellar reputations of corporate captains from the 1980s and 1990s, such as Welch.

He looks more like a quack now than a leader, and when you combine that with the terrible performance of his company after his departure it becomes clear that dumb luck probably had as much to do with Welch's business success as anything that he wrote in his book.

In retrospect, Welch is probably one of the most overrated -- and overpaid -- CEOs in U.S. corporate history. Despite all the claims from industry that exorbitant compensation packages for CEOs are necessary to preserve talent, the truth is that in many cases, people who could do the job far better than these clowns are probably a dime a dozen.

That brings us back to Welch, whose unseemly divorce proceedings in 2001 revealed his "stealth" compensation. Unbeknownst to them, shareholders were paying Welch a retirement stipend of $734,000 per month. His other retirement benefits, valued at $2 million per year, included a New York apartment with daily flower deliveries and wine, along with unlimited use of the corporate jet.

Ah, if we could only go back to the good ol' days.

At the time of publication the author had a position in GE.

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