Well, the editors have one thing right: If there’s anything Jack Welch knows, it’s American job loss (“Mr. Welch’s warning,” editorial, Nov. 7). Welch may well be “widely regarded as one of the sages of U.S. business” in the rarified quarters of Newport yacht clubs, but most working folks in the state will remember Welch as “Neutron Jack,” who like a neutron bomb eliminated the people while leaving the buildings intact.

For those with memories as short as those of our friends on Fountain Street, since 1986 GE has slashed its American workforce by one-half, shifting production to low-wage countries and encouraging its suppliers to do the same. Welch offers not a prescription for change, but more of the same bad advice that has already destroyed many of the blue-collar jobs that created the American middle-class. The same editors advocate major port development for the state. What better way to lure back a man who once said “ideally, you’d have every plant you own on a barge?” Say, what does a worker in Bangladesh make anyway?

RUSSELL CONWAY

Providence