Hillary Clinton isn’t the only one taking flak from the Bernie Sanders campaign these days.
Sanders and his surrogates are also getting into it with General Electric(GE), after Sanders named the conglomerate as a firm that is “destroying the fabric of America,” in an interview with the editorial board of the New York Daily News published Monday.
General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt fired back in a Washington Post op-ed on Wednesday. “GE has been in business for 124 years, and we’ve never been a big hit with socialists,” he wrote. “We create wealth and jobs, instead of just calling for them in speeches. We take risks, invest, innovate and produce in ways that today sustain 125,000 U.S. Jobs.”
The Sanders campaign responded on Thursday, when in an interview with CNN, campaign chair Warren Gunnels said, “If the CEO of General Electric (GE) wants to know how his company is destroying the fabric of America, he should take a good look in the mirror.”
He pointed to Immelt’s generous pay and retirement package at a time when most Americans are struggling to make ends meet and fund their retirement. General Electric, Gunnels said, is a part of “a business group lobbying Congress to slash Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” referring to Immelt and GE’s involvement with the advocacy group Fix the Debt, which aims to shrink budget deficits in part by cutting spending on entitlements.