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If it had been revealed that Jeffrey Immelt once hired an undocumented nanny, or defaulted on his mortgage, he would be forced to resign as head of President Barack Obama's "Council on Jobs and Competitiveness." But the fact that General Electric, where Immelt is CEO, didn't pay taxes on its $14.5 billion profit last year-and indeed is asking for a $3.2 billion tax rebate-has not produced a word of criticism from the president, who in January praised Immelt as a business leader who "understands what it takes for America to compete in the global economy." What it takes, evidently, is shifting profit and jobs abroad: As of last year only 134,000 of GE's total workforce of 304,000 was based in the U.S. and, according to The New York Times, for the past three years 82 percent of the company's profit was sheltered abroad. Thanks to changes in the tax law engineered when another avowedly pro-business Democrat, Bill Clinton, was president, U.S. multinational financial companies can avoid taxes on their international scams. And financial scams are what GE excelled in for decades, when GE Capital, its financial unit, which specialized in credit card, consumer loan and housing mortgage debt, accounted for most of GE's profits. That's right, GE, along with General Motors with its toxic GMAC financial unit, came to look more like an investment bank than a traditional industrial manufacturing giant that once propelled this economy and ultimately it ran into the same sort of difficulties as the Wall Street hustlers. As The New York Times' David Kocieniewski, who broke the GE profit story, put it: "Because its lending division, GE Capital, has provided more than half of the company's profit in some recent years, many Wall Street analysts view G.E. not as a manufacturer but as an unregulated lender that also makes dishwashers and M.R.I. machines." Maximizing corporate profits at the taxpayer's expense is what top CEOs are good at, and after all it

Michael Moore's comments today delivered and relayed at the "We Are One" rally at the State Capitol in Honolulu: Greetings! I want to thank you for turning out today to make your voices heard -- and they ARE heard, even across ocean and land. Today, hundreds of thousands of Americans are joining with you to honor Dr. King by standing up for working people all over America. It was what he was doing in Memphis when he was killed 43 years ago today, supporting sanitation workers on strike.   Today everywhere is Memphis, and it's not just sanitation workers being attacked. It's teachers and firefighters and social workers -- yes, all those greedy public workers who caused the Great Recession we are in! It was the greedy teachers who caused the crash on Wall Street! It was the greedy firefighters who sent millions of jobs overseas! It was the greedy social workers who insisted that GE pay no taxes and that CEOs should make 500 times what the average employee makes! No, my friends, it wasn't! It was the top 1% of the country who did this. THEY brought on the mortgage crisis. THEY made off with billions of dollars from our economy. THEY have systematically destroyed the middle class. And THEY have bought and sold the very people elected to represent us! America is not broke! It's just that the wealthy have absconded with the money! They've removed it from circulation and left us begging for school supplies and fire trucks and libraries. Even the Wall Street Journal admits that the uber-rich are currently just sitting on almost $2 trillion of cash. They're not creating jobs with it. They're not re-circulating it. They're just hanging on to it hoping to make more money off it by continuing their casino games in the stock market, the derivatives market, the credit default swaps market and any other crazy scheme they can invent. This has to stop. But it won't stop unless we make it stop. 400 wealthy Americansnow have more wealth than 150 million Americans COMBINED!  But what