On January 7, 2021, Jay Timmons, the President of the National Association of Manufacturers, wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Post titled – It’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment. Trump needs to be held accountable.

“We cannot trust the arsonist to pretend to be the firefighter any longer,” Timmons wrote. “For that reason, I have called on Vice President Pence to seriously consider working with the Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment. President Trump needs to be held accountable.”

Fast forward four years, Trump is back in the White House and Jay Timmons is still President at the NAM. 

But today, in the face of a constitutional crisis, what are we hearing from corporate America?

Crickets.

Bennett Freeman is an unusual breed in American politics – an activist who straddles the public interest/corporate divide. 

Early in his career, Freeman worked at General Electric under Jack Welch. But he’s also been affiliated with public interest groups around the world, prodding big multinational corporations to do the right thing.

Earlier this year, he gave a speech at UC Berkeley’s Institute of International Studies titled –  So You Want to Change the World: Building an Activist Career Amidst Disruption and Opportunity.

“I’ve crossed sectors, but I’d like to think that I’ve been consistent in my intentions and objectives throughout my career in challenging corporate power,” Freeman told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “What makes me different, I guess, is that I’ve done so both from the inside and the outside, beginning with the eight years I spent in the belly of the beast of corporate America with GE and then doing consulting for companies on a very selective basis, intermittently over the years.” 

“But yes, I view my whole career as an activist career, working both from the inside and the outside, and working across sectors – corporate investment, NGO and government. And I guess I’m one of the few people who’s crossed those sectors from the inside, particularly in the human rights and labor rights arena.”

Let’s start out at GE. David Gelles at the New York Times wrote a book recently on Jack Welch titled – The Man Who Broke Capitalism, How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America, and How to Undo His Legacy. 

“I bought and read the book almost immediately after its publication, and I read a couple of other books about the demise of GE in the Jeff Immelt era. But the Gelles book was absolutely fascinating for me, given my eight years inside GE.” 

“I had a pretty panoramic perspective at the top of the company working directly with Welch, but especially with his senior, then executive vice president, Frank Doyle, who was responsible for government relations, public relations, employee and union relations. And I was basically Frank’s policy advisor, aide de camp and speechwriter.” 

“I think that the David Gelles argument is essentially right. It’s overstated, perhaps in some respects. I think it probably misses some nuances.”

“But Welch was the self appointed apostle of shareholder value uber alles in the 1980s and 1990s. He was charged and convicted, at least by David Gelles in the book, of having really focused, despite his chemical engineering background, more on financial engineering than manufacturing and engineering. He generated so much of GE’s net income from GE Capital and overly relied on that part of the company. And of course, Jeff Immelt and GE shareholders reaped the whirlwind of that when GE Capital more or less collapsed in the financial crisis of 2008.”

“A couple of corrections to Gelles’ view, and again, I largely agree with it. But first, Welch recanted somewhat himself the shareholder value uber alles doctrine in about 2013 or 2014. I remember doing a recorded speech for an EU Parliament event then, and of course, channeling the then current, now former CEO of Unilever Paul Pullman, who was the big critic of shareholder value of uber alles.” 

“And Welch actually was on the record at that point saying that maybe he had overemphasized that being the sole determinant of corporate motivation.” 

“I don’t want to give him too much credit for recanting it. It was too little too late. The other point, though, that I would make about Welch is that GE was an early mover in restructuring and downsizing, and laying off a lot of corporate staff in a number of hourly manufacturing unionized workers, but still maintaining a heavily unionized workforce.” 

“And what Frank Doyle convinced Jack Welch of was that in order to really have the social license to operate, in effect of doing that downsizing in the early to mid 1980s through the 1980s, that people needed to be treated decently and fairly. And that didn’t mean not laying off people, but it meant giving white collar corporate staff fairly generous early retirement packages.” 

“And more significantly, it meant giving hourly workers early notice of layoffs, plant closings and more than generous for the time, Income support and retraining opportunities, to the point where Frank personally supported a Ted Kennedy bill from early Bush one, I believe it was in ‘89 or ‘90, supporting early plant closing notification and layoff. And Frank sent me as a 31 year old manager of corporate affairs into the lion’s den at a US Chamber of Commerce meeting in Washington to say that GE supported the Kennedy bill and therefore opposed the Chamber’s efforts to gut it.” 

“And I was met with derision in the room, but Frank gave me the mandate to do that. And he really made that case successfully to Jack Welch.”

“So I’m not trying to excuse the excesses of the Welch era, but I am trying to explain, I think factually, based on my inside experience over those eight years, the unusual degree to which GE tried, thanks to Frank Doyle, to treat people humanely and to support public policy that was ahead of its time, and in contrast to our competitors and peer companies in corporate America. 

Was GE involved in the creation of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act? 

“I got to GE in early 1995. The Foreign Corrupt Practices Act was enacted in 1976. There was one of the senior lawyers in the 1970s – a man named Fritz Heimann. Fritz was a co-founder, along with the primary founder, Peter Eigen, of Transparency International. The motivation was to level the playing field. GE was concerned about corruption on the part of Japanese and British and other European competitors. I left GE in April 1993 to become chief speechwriter for the Secretary of State Warren Christopher. I drafted for Christopher his first speech about our foreign policy priorities nine months into the new Democratic administration.” 

“I put into the speech a couple of paragraphs saying we would support an anti-corruption convention through the OECD. I learned that issue at GE because GE was losing billion dollar power plant contracts to our European and Japanese competitors in countries like Indonesia and India. I was aware of what Fritz Heimann was doing.” 

“So yes, there was an anti-corruption culture at GE. GE played a role in the early foundation of Transparency International. Heimann helped set up the U.S. chapter of Transparency International. He helped bring GE and other U.S. corporate support to an international anti-corruption effort.”

Who are the major players representing corporations in Washington?

“Companies have had their own corporate lobbying offices in Washington. I know it well, having been parked physically part time in the GE corporate relations office in Washington in my last two years there – 1991 to 1993. On some issues they will be out front on their own. On other issues, they will work behind the scenes.” 

“The big three business organizations for corporate America writ large – and I’m talking about the Fortune 100 companies – are the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers.” 

“There are plenty of very important industry specific associations. But the BRT, the Chamber and the NAM, are the three that have the broadest based memberships and that pack the most punch in the policy and lobbying game in Washington.” 

“In the second Trump administration, they are representing their members in the big areas of concern – trade and tariffs, taxation and regulation or deregulation.” 

Isn’t the reason they are not speaking about Trump excesses is because they are getting what they want?

“They are getting what they want in terms of lower levels of corporate taxation. They are getting what they want in terms of deregulation. The tech companies are getting what they want in terms of any plausible regulation of artificial intelligence.” 

“But I’m among those who feel strongly that they need to be careful of what they are asking for. They need to think more broadly and fundamentally about not just short term gain, but long term rules of the road that have governed, however inconsistently and ineffectively, the global economy and the international community for decades.” 

“I deplore the silence from corporate America on the erosion of the rule of law in the first six months of this administration through the overexertion of executive power, the silence in the face of the erosion of constitutional norms that we’ve seen, overriding Congress, the DOGE catastrophe that shredded an apolitical civil service and summarily ended the careers of tens of thousands of apolitical civil servants.”

“We’ve heard next to nothing from corporate America about this. We’ve heard next to nothing from corporate America over the summary arrests of undocumented  workers, often harshly and cruelly.” 

“We’ve finally heard some major voices in corporate America to speak up in defense of the independence of the Federal Reserve, specifically defending Chairman Powell. While that’s commendable, it’s a nothingburger compared to the erosion of the rule of law and constitutional norms.”

“In all my years working with and against corporate America, I’d like to think that business understands that it depends on the rule of law, it depends on constitutional norms and institutions. But they have lost that narrative. Those basic foundations are being eroded by the week, if not by the day. And I think that corporate America will pay a price.”

Not only did they stay silent, they were actively cheerleading Trump at the inauguration. There was that famous picture of the tech bros standing behind Trump at his inauguration.

“The Financial Times was kind enough to publish an opinion piece of mine on November 2, the Saturday before the Tuesday election. The title is – US business leaders must voice their fears about Trump.” 

“It called on the Business Roundtable, the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers to overcome their fears of retribution from Trump and to speak clearly about the stakes in the election for the rule of law and the continuity of Constitutional democracy and American leadership in the international community, all of which are fundamental underpinnings of both the U.S. and the global economy.”

“Before and after the election of 2020, the same three business groups did speak out for the peaceful transfer of power. I started in early 2024 privately making the case of what a statement could look like coming from the Business Roundtable. I tried and failed though a couple of very high level channels, about the highest level you could reasonably get to in Washington. I’m sorry to say that despite the support of a couple of very prominent, well connected people, including an extremely prominent conservative Republican, who to his immense credit, is a fervent believer in American Constitutional democracy and the rule of law – despite those efforts, they were too skittish.” 

“We only heard from former CEOs. We heard from Kenneth Chenault, the former CEO of American Express, Kenneth Frazier, the former CEO of Merck, and Bob Rubin, the former Secretary of the Treasury, former managing partner at Goldman Sachs. But current leaders in corporate America,, the BRT, the Chamber, and the NAM were shamefully silent. And they had not been silent in 2020, at least on the peaceful transfer of power.”

“Most people don’t remember this but on the evening of January 6, 2021, the National Association of Manufacturers called publicly on then still Vice President Mike Pence to go to the White House, convene the cabinet and invoke the 25th amendment of the Constitution, remove Trump from office. The National Association of Manufacturers did that. There was an op-ed by Jay Timmons, the President of the National Association of Manufacturers, in the Washington Post on January 7, 2021 titled – It’s time to invoke the 25th Amendment. Trump needs to be held accountable.”

“The NAM has fallen a terrible and tragic and unforgivable distance since then to their mute silence in the face of the degradation of our constitutional democracy.”

[For the complete q/a format Interview with Bennett Freeman, see 39 Corporate Crime Reporter 31(12), August 4, 2025, print edition only.]