IT’S THE MANAGEMENT, STUPID (OR THE STUPID MANAGEMENT): How GE Went From American Icon to Astonishing Mess.

Since Donald Trump’s election in November 2016, during a stock market boom in which the Dow is up 41 percent, GE has lost 46 percent of its value, or $120 billion. A few months after Immelt retired as chief executive last summer, the company shocked Wall Street by announcing earnings that were barely half of analysts’ already lowered estimates. Soon after, GE said it would halve its once-sacrosanct stock dividend because it was short on cash. It also said it would sell or spin off $20 billion in businesses, including its lightbulb division. (The appliance business was sold to the Chinese manufacturer Haier Group in 2016, along with a license to use the GE brand.)
Then in January came news of a $6.2 billion charge related to costs incurred more than a decade ago by GE’s financial-services business, an announcement that triggered a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission investigation. GE’s new CEO, John Flannery, has grimly promised that “all options are on the table,” including the once-unthinkable option of dismembering the company entirely.

And yet, little of this has to do with the stuff GE makes. Its jet engines still dominate the global market. Its turbines, whether in gas, coal, or nuclear power plants, still provide a third of the world’s electricity. Its CT scanners and MRI machines are still the state of the art. So what happened?

And:

Immelt also publicly pledged to return GE to its industrial roots (with a new concern for environmental impact) and reversed the deep cuts Welch had made to research and development. Still, under Immelt GE Capital only grew. Its profits quadrupled as it gobbled up credit card companies, subprime lenders, and commercial real estate. These weren’t businesses GE had much experience in, but the company had long taught its young executives that they could manage anything.

The 2008 financial crisis revealed this not to be the case.

The company engaged in risky speculation in the finance field far away from its core competencies, while embracing progressive values in its fabled industrial divisions.

In other words, they got woke and went broke.

Related (From Ed): Speaking of the stupid management, back in 2007, then-CEO Jeff Immelt was flying around with his emergency backup spare private jet when GE still owned MSNBC and NBC, which frequently hectored (and still does) its viewers on global warming. Including this infamous moment in 2007, when a GE-owned company advised its viewers to turn off their GE-made light bulbs, while the klieg lights were blazing at Philadelphia’s Lincoln Financial Stadium:

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Paging Professor Kingsfield.

HUGH HEWITT IN THE WAPO: The Nunes memo revealed a damning omission. “Having reviewed hundreds and hundreds of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant applications as the final stop between the FBI and the desks of Attorneys General William French Smith and Edwin Meese III, I read the Nunes memo as revealing one major fact that stands out above all other revelations: The FISA warrant for surveillance on Carter Page (and the three subsequent renewals of the warrant) omitted a material fact. While the FBI admitted that the information came from a politically motivated source, the bureau did not disclose that the source had been financed by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. That is a damning omission.”

NOTHING GOOD FOR CHINA’S NEIGHBORS: What Happens When China Eclipses the U.S. in Asia.

The U.S. strategic position is eroding so quickly that even sharing the region with China isn’t really a valid option any longer, argues Hugh White, a professor at the Australian National University in Canberra. America’s allies in Southeast Asia and Australia say they don’t want to choose between the U.S. and China, but underneath those platitudes, nobody in the region wants to make an enemy of Beijing. All the more so because officials increasingly doubt the U.S. will be there in the end, according to White.

White put these thoughts to paper and pixel with a much-debated essay in the Australian publication Quarterly Essay. “Without America” envisions a Situation Room scene where a fictitious U.S. president decides that, even with America’s superior conventional military, the risk of a confrontation with China just isn’t worth it. Even if the U.S. prevailed, all China would need to do would be to inflict a couple of glancing blows and it would, politically, have triumphed.

That’s what Japan thought in 1941, too.

WEIRD, 8 YEARS OF OBAMA SHOULD HAVE FIXED THIS: Many older Americans are living a desperate, nomadic life.

I THINK HE’S VERY PRO LEGAL-IMMIGRANT: Boston Mayor Says ‘Deep Down’ Trump is ‘Very Pro-Immigrant.’

This report is from Bridget Johnson, whose unexplained and unacknowledged Twitter banishment remains unexplained and unacknowledged by Twitter management.

AMERICA’S LOST DECADE:

Many negative consequences flow reliably from a financial crisis, including unemployment, political turmoil, and piles of sovereign debt. Since the 2008 financial meltdown, however, we’ve seen none of the good consequences—and there are supposed to be good ones. Crashes and severe recessions often are followed by bursts of innovation that lay the groundwork for several decades of future growth and productivity increases. Severe economic downturns can perform a vital cleansing for the economy, toppling unchallengeable market positions and clearing a path for newcomers with disruptive ideas. The economic transformations that followed major worldwide crashes prior to 2008—in 1873, 1929, and 1973—were breathtaking. Indeed, the 1870s, 1930s, and 1970s were among the most innovative decades in history. The 1930s, for example, remembered mostly for the Great Depression, were also a time of great technological progress, in areas such as jet engines, synthetic materials, television, and computers. The 1970s saw enormous advances in personal computing, the digital camera, the Internet and e-mail (via the ARPANET), automotive technology (such as antilock brakes), phones that were truly mobile (even if you weren’t in a car), CAT and MRI scans, recombinant DNA, and IVF.

Yet here we are, nearly a decade after the worst financial crisis in modern memory, and we’ve seen few of these kinds of benefits. Don’t let heady stock prices, record corporate profits, and low unemployment fool you. America is only now emerging from a lost decade. Instead of renewal, the last ten years were blighted by slow growth, stagnant productivity, limited social mobility, long-term unemployment and underemployment, and despair.

Unexpectedly:

UGH: Nursing homes sedate residents with dementia by misusing antipsychotic drugs, report finds.

Children complained about parents who were robbed of their personalities and turned into zombies. Residents remembered slurring their words and being unable to think or stay awake. Former administrators admitted doling out drugs without having appropriate diagnoses, securing informed consent or divulging risks.

The 157-page report, released Monday, estimates that each week more than 179,000 people living in US nursing facilities are given antipsychotic medications, even though they don’t have the approved psychiatric diagnoses — like schizophrenia — to warrant use of the drugs. Most of these residents are older and have dementia, and researchers say the antipsychotic medications are administered as a cost-effective “chemical restraint” to suppress behaviors and ease the load on overwhelmed staff.

I’m not sure there are any humane treatments for certain dementia-related behaviors, even without the (likely permanent) understaffing of nursing homes. Although the field might be promising for builders of lifelike “carebots” to fill in for overworked humans without threatening the patients.

INTERVIEW: Rupert Darwall on the Alarming Roots of Environmentalism.

If you look at what the Nazis were doing in the 1930s, in their environmental policies, virtually every theme you see in the modern environmental movement, the Nazis were doing. It happens to be historical fact that the Nazis were the first political party in the world to have a wind power program. It also happens to be a fact that they were against meat eating, and they considered…it…terribly wasteful that so much grain went to feed livestock rather than to make bread. It’s also the case that they had the equivalent of fuel economy rules because they had the most expensive gasoline in Europe and so they basically had very few people driving cars…I think actually the most extraordinary thing that I came across was this quote from Adolf Hitler where he told an aide once, “I’m not interested in politics. I’m interested in changing people’s lifestyles.” Well, that could be…That’s extraordinarily contemporary. That is what the modern environmental movement is all about. It’s about changing people’s lifestyles.

That intro should be familiar ground for readers of Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, but there’s much more to chew on in the rest of the conversation.

QUESTION ASKED: Why Aren’t Libertarians Screaming At The Dems Over Nunes Memo?

GREEN WAVE: Democratic cash swamps House Republicans.

More than 40 House Republican incumbents were outraised in the final quarter of 2017 by one — or several — of their Democratic opponents, according to the latest round of fundraising numbers. And of that group, more than a dozen had less cash on hand than their Democratic challengers.

For the GOP, here’s the really disturbing part: The trendline is getting worse, not better. Despite the myriad advantages of incumbency and control of Congress, there are more House members with less cash on hand than their Democratic challengers than the quarter before.

“Those numbers should be concerning for all Republicans,” said Mike DuHaime, a GOP consultant based in New Jersey. “This is going to be the most challenging political environment since 2006, so you have to be ready. And lot of these members came in after 2006, so for many, this will be the most challenging environment they’ve ever run in. And that’s going to prove difficult.”

A flood of Democratic money poured into House races across the country in 2017, provided in large part by small-dollar, online contributors animated by opposition to President Donald Trump and the Republican majorities in Congress. More than 80 Democratic challengers in Republican-held districts have at least $250,000 in cash on hand at the end of the year — a sign that the House battlefield may be wider than previously thought.

I’m getting the feeling that this is going to be a long, hard slog.

MICHAEL BARONE: Are Democrats Destroying Their Own Credibility?

You can’t expect a political party to be rigorously intellectually honest on any consistent basis. They’re trying to win elections—and to achieve policy results they genuinely believe to be desirable, and rigorous honesty sometimes has to take the back seat. And anyway, their embarrassed members will argue, the other side does it, and you can’t unilaterally disarm.

That said, it strikes me that the Democratic Party has been taken this to a self-harming extreme. For if the voters catch you stretching the truth and exaggerating the other side’s misdeeds, your credibility will suffer. Even when you state plain truths or make reasonable arguments, many people won’t, or will be reluctant to, believe you.

He gives numerous examples, and observes:

This looks very much like those who live in an anti-Trump cocoon have such utter contempt for their fellow citizens outside that cocoon that they expect them to fall for unsustainable arguments. They have the excuse of knowing that most of the mainstream media will do so, but they seem not to have learned that a very large part of the American electorate no longer has respect for or pays heed to the mainstream media.

Political debate requires understanding how persuasive—or unpersuasive—arguments are and will prove over time. I’m surprised that Democrats aren’t doing a better job at this, and I suspect they’re reducing their credibility with many voters they have been taking for granted.

One of Trump’s greatest assets is his ability to drive his opponents — among both Democrats and Republicans — stark, raving mad.

KATIE ROIPHE: How Twitter Feminism Is Bad For Women.

AN ICE CREAM 500 TIMES HOTTER THAN TABASCO SAUCE?   This ice cream is so spicy you have to sign a disclaimer to eat it.

WHO SHAVES THE BARBER:  The Recursive Custard Problem.

CLEAN MY DESK? THAT’S CRAZY TALK!  The easy trick to be more productive at work.

VERDICT FIRST, TRIAL AFTERWARD (IF AT ALL):  Comic sues Upright Citizens Brigade for reverse gender discrimination.

FORBES: Biased FBI and DOJ Officials Broke The Law And Tried To Decide The Election – an Annotated Timeline.

FEMINISTS’ CLASS WAR: That’s right, sack the poor grid girls — only the rich are entitled to flaunt their bits.

OPEN THREAD: Talk about what interests you.

FASTER, PLEASE: This tiny robot could be the future of medication.

1968: IN 50 YEARS WE’LL HAVE FLYING CARS!

2018: More men are asking for breast-reduction surgery.

AT AMAZON, save on Office Supplies.

Plus, deals in Kitchen and Housewares.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Second Amendment law lessons: Look beyond the courts for freedom.