Dear Commons Community,

The NY Times in its editorial today congratulated the leadership of General Electric for finally agreeing to take responsibility for cleaning up the Hudson River of PCBs.   This has been a decades long saga of how America’s most profitable company legally fought local, state and federal governments attempt to clean up one of New York State’s great natural treasures.  While we congratulate the present G.E.’s leadership for agreeing to clean-up the contamination,  we should not forget that Jack Welsh, corporate America’s poster boy, refused throughout his tenure to do so.  The Nation in 2001 in an article on this topic stated that “for twenty-five years Welch worked overtime to dodge GE’s responsibility for cleaning up the upper Hudson River, the biggest toxic site on the Superfund list of the Environmental Protection Agency.”   While Jack Welsh continues to play the talk-show circuit for his business acumen and leadership skills, we should also remember that he was one of America’s worst polluters.

Tony

G.E. Plant on Upper Hudson

Dead Sturgeon