Word: welching
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...devoted himself to bringing down the agency for its alleged complicity with repressive Third World regimes. Engaging in what he termed "guerrilla journalism," Agee wrote a 1975 memoir, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, featuring a 24-page appendix made up of agents' names and operations. Later that year Richard Welch, a CIA station officer in Athens, was assassinated. Welch was not one of the agents outed in Agee's book (and his identity was not a well-kept secret), but the proximity of events sparked a push for legislation to protect the identities of all agents...
...what also gets Immelt pumped is talking about the environment in a way no GE chief has before, certainly not his predecessor, "Neutron Jack" Welch, who ran the company with a brass-knuckles approach to the bottom line. Welch had a testy relationship with greens, notably over cleaning the Hudson River of PCBs, a toxic chemical GE dumped, legally, for decades before the practice was banned in 1977. Since Welch retired in 2001, however, Immelt has been remaking GE. He recently announced a restructuring, paring 11 operating divisions to six. He has pruned slow-growth businesses like insurance and loaded...
...greenhouse-gas emissions 1% by 2012 as the company grows at a projected 8% average annual rate (emissions would rise 40% if left unchecked). GE will issue annual "citizenship" reports on its environmental progress. With a new ad campaign and new slogan, "ecomagination," Immelt seems intent on shedding Welch's combative stance on environmental issues. One TV ad shows alluring young women in a coal mine. Even a dirty fossil fuel, the ad suggests, can be sexy if cleaned up the GE way. "When it comes to energy efficiency, environmental technology, water solutions, I want to lead forever," says Immelt...
...Welch had his own way with similes: he described people "like bottles walking; their heads as inexpressive as round stoppers. What if some god or giant should bend down and take several of the stoppers out? I thought. Inside there would be black churning depths like bile, or bitter medicine." But it is his wary view of the adult world that lingers. Even a Punch and Judy show has an ominous significance: when Punch "began hitting the baby with hard wooden thuds I felt its skull crack and knew that none of us were safe while grown-ups thought that...
Rediscovered, Welch is more likely to be influential than popular. His undeceived tone, coupled with wide-eyed looks backward, gives him the air of a boy in the costume of a judge. That sort of grotesquerie is not to everyone's taste. But there has been no one like that boy before or since, and adults who hope to understand children ought to be on reading terms with their strange, stunted laureate. --By Stefan Kanfer