By John Cronin

Author Kurt Vonnegut mercilessly lampooned General Electric in his 1952 novel Player Piano. The story’s antagonist was the Ilium Works in Ilium, New York on the Iroquois River, Vonnegut’s stand-in for the GE factory in Schenectady on the Mohawk, where he once worked. The Ilium Works was corporate America run amok in a post World War III, automated nation. It manufactured vacuum tubes, the now-quaint forerunner of microchips and nanotech. The spread of vacuum tubes by the Ilium Works dehumanized society and caused a commensurate spread of drug addiction, alcoholism and crime.

The reputation of the real GE fares little better with today’s environmentalists. In New York’s Hudson River Valley, home of The Blue Times, the company has been a punching bag for almost four decades. Its discharges of polychlorinated biphenyls into the river, which began in 1947 and ended in 1977, caused the Hudson to be declared a federal Superfund site. GE is conducting an EPA-supervised remedial dredging of the upper river, a clean-up that has received widespread praise as one of the most ambitious, and sophisticated, ever undertaken. But GE bashing is still a popular sport on the Hudson, and this old habit is dying too hard. 21st century environmentalism needs companies like GE, and for more than environmental clean-ups.  =>   More…