Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers
— @jack_welch via Twitterrific
Rich assholes and Twitter don't mix.
Oh tragedy of tragedies—it looks like we won't have former GE head and current conspiracy nut Jack Welch to kick around anymore. Well,
Fortune won't, anyway:
Welch said he will no longer contribute to Fortune following critical coverage of the former CEO of General Electric, saying he would get better "traction" elsewhere. On Friday, Welch suggested that the Obama administration, calling them "these Chicago guys," had manipulated the monthly jobs report in order to make the economy look better than it actually is just weeks before the election. Welch has been battered by criticism since making the suggestion on Twitter.
Monday morning on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer said there were a number of things wrong with Welch's tweet, the biggest of which was that the economy doesn't back up the former executive's claim that the numbers were faked.
Jack Welch didn't like that someone from
Fortune disagreed with
his conspiracy theory, so he's doing what any good American CEO might do—firing them and instead surrounding himself with people who better support his stupid ideas. (In this case, that probably means Fox News or similar.) Heaven forfend he be subjected to people who
disagree with him. The outrage! The indignity! The crabby, crabby pouting!
Indeed, it took no time at all for Welch to head for a more favorable pro-conspiracy-theory climate, in this case the Wall Street Journal editorial pages, to complain about how people laughing at him is just like Soviet Russia:
Imagine a country where challenging the ruling authorities—questioning, say, a piece of data released by central headquarters—would result in mobs of administration sympathizers claiming you should feel "embarrassed" and labeling you a fool, or worse.
Soviet Russia perhaps? Communist China? Nope, that would be the United States right now, when a person (like me, for instance) suggests that a certain government datum (like the September unemployment rate of 7.8%) doesn't make sense.
Well, except for the part where people were mocking you for being so obviously wrong and ignorant about how the BLS numbers are arrived at, not about you "questioning authority" or the like. Every conspiracy theorist considers scorn for their theory to be part of a plot against them; most then grumble that they are "just asking questions" and wonder why their "questions," say, about how perhaps Obama operatives visited tens of thousands of American homes and forced citizens to claim they had jobs when they really didn't, are not being treated more seriously. Few of them have access to the
Wall Street Journal to write their subsequent I-was-just-misunderstood pouts, but that's because they do not have enough money.
Have our wealthy Americans been getting dumber lately, or just louder? Trump, Cain, that Murray Energy jackass, Jack Welch; there's no shortage of rich people who seem to have made it their special mission to demonstrate just how dimwitted our captains of finance and industry actually are. Conspiracy theories, an inability to do math, and a deep conviction that America is oppressing them by not giving them more bailouts and other free stuff … I wonder about these people. Maybe the newest country club trend is to chew lead paint off the windowsills.
And yet, they run our world. Or at least our politics.