At a recent cocktail party, in a lightning strike occurrence, I brushed up to a real, live CEO.
He’s a member of the Business Roundtable, so I said “glad to see you guys speaking out on Obama’s policies”.
He said “yeah, we figured he’s going to screw us any way, so we might as well speak out”.
He also said Obama sent some communications flunky to address the group – she said “you gotta understand, it’s good politics for us to beat up on you guys.”
She should have added “now, go out there and save or create some jobs for us.”
Might work …
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Excerpted from FT: Obama needs to stop baiting business, Mort Zuckerman, July 26 2010
The growing tension between the Obama administration and business is a cause for national concern.
The president has lost the confidence of employers, whose worries over taxes and the increased costs of new regulation are holding back investment and growth. The government must appreciate that confidence is an imperative if business is to invest, take risks and put the millions of unemployed back to productive work.
One unfortunate pattern that has emerged in the past 18 months is to lay all the blame for our difficulties on the business community and the financial world. This quite ignores the role of Congress in many areas, most glaringly in forcing Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration to make loans to people who could not afford them. Then there is the Securities and Exchange Commission, which raised acceptable levels of leverage for financial institutions.
The predilection to blame business was manifest in one of President Barack Obama’s recent speeches.
He was supposed to be seeking the support of the business community for a doubling of exports over the next five years. Instead he lashed out at “unscrupulous and underhanded businesses, who are unencumbered by any restriction on activities that might harm the environment, take advantage of middle-class families, or, as we’ve seen, threaten to bring down the entire financial system.”
This kind of gratuitous and overstated demonization – widely seen in the business community as a resort to economic populism on the part of Mr Obama to shore up the growing weakness in his political standing – is exactly the wrong approach.
It ignores his disappointing stimulus program, which was ill-designed to produce the jobs the president promised. It also undermines the confidence that business needs to find if it is to invest in the face of a new generation of regulations, increased bureaucracy and higher taxes.
Disillusion has spread to the Business Roundtable, the US Chamber of Commerce and the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents small businesses.
The chief economist of the NFIB recently wrote: “Business owners do not trust the economic policies in place or proposed … the US economy faces hurricane-force headwinds and the government is at the center of the storm, making an economic recovery very difficult.”
Full article:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a18bd9a2-98e6-11df-9418-00144feab49a.html
The Homa Files 