 Did
G.E.'s Welch lie to
'60 Minutes'?
Sitting there attentively on-camera and with the
videotape machine running, G.E.'s stellar, most convincing performer, chairman
John F. (Jack) Welch looked straight into the eyes of ‘60 Minutes'
correspondent Lesley Stahl.
When she asked about G.E. polluting the Hudson River, Dr. Welch insisted,
"We
didn't dump. We had a permit from the U.S. Government and the State of
New York to do exactly what we did. Do you think I'd come
to work in a company that would do that, or condone that? I wouldn't
do it, Lesley! This is nuts!"
Well, it turns out that maybe it wasn't so nuts after all for
G.E.'s critics to use the 'D' word, and maybe Dr. Welch would work
in a company that would do just exactly that -- dump.
Permit sought 27 years after the fact
According to the office of New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer,
General Electric Company began discharging PCB's into the Hudson River
in 1947, yet the firm did not seek nor receive specific permission for
such discharges until 1974, twenty-seven years after G.E.
first began discharging those heavier-than-oil toxins into the river.
G.E. violated terms of 1974 permit
Not only that, but less than one year later, in 1975, a New York State
administrative law judge ruled that G.E.'s PCB discharges violated G.E.'s
1974 permit and New York State law.
G.E.'s spokesmen mute
G.E.'s Hudson River spokesmen Mark Behan and John G. Haggard,
and G.E.'s corporate communications spokesman Gary Sheffer all failed to
respond to repeated requests from HudsonWatch.net for copies of
G.E.'s federal and state Hudson River discharge permits, the ones Dr. Welch
was so insistent about to '60 Minutes'.
©2000
HudsonWatch.net/Hudson-Voice.com®/™
Read the
related story:
Setting the record straight
about legality of G.E.'s PCB discharges
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