It’s hard to imagine a bigger waste of time than yesterday’s meeting between President Obama and the leaders of the nation’s biggest corporations on how best to deal with the country’s economic woes including the looming fiscal cliff.
But that’s what went down, as a group of CEOs led by General Electric’s Jeff Immelt and Honeywell’s Dave Cote trouped down to the White House for a little face time with the president.
Yes, we got a lot of happy talk afterward about the exchange of ideas on taxes, spending and the economy.
Fine: More than a few CEOs explained to the president that the country needs a deal before the end of the year to prevent the “fiscal cliff” of deep budget cuts and massive tax hikes, which would likely cripple our already weak economy. Also fine: The president (as always) said any deal with the Republicans will have to be “fair” — meaning higher taxes for small businesses and entrepreneurs.
But the meeting was private for a reason, and it had nothing to do with both sides seeking an honest discussion away from the media spotlight: It’s because nothing substantively was accomplished, and both sides knew going in that that’s how it would be.
And that underscores one of the many tragedies of a second Obama term: This president is totally unserious about substantive matters about the economy — but the nation’s top business leaders are so dependent on his crony capitalism that they’re impotent to call him out.
Immelt, and another of yesterday’s attendees, Amex chief Ken Chenault, know all of this first hand. They sit on the White House’s Jobs Council — which is supposed to come up with innovative ways to deal with the country’s continued massive unemployment.
But the president hasn’t met with the council since last January — and that time, he just read some prepared remarks about the need to create jobs, then listened to some equally-scripted input from the others on the council before calling it a day. (At least Obama didn’t read from a TelePrompTer, then refuse to take questions — as I’m told he did in speaking to another elite group, the Business Roundtable, about the nation’s economic woes.)
Why don’t business leaders like Immelt or Chenault call the president out on his lack of attention to such an important issue? Keep in mind, both GE and Amex got bailout money in the wake of the 2008 meltdown. And GE is one of the nation’s biggest recipients of corporate welfare, benefitting from the tax breaks and handouts that Obamanomics showers on companies that promote green energy and other “socially responsible” boondoggles.
So while Immelt in private tells friends he voted for Mitt Romney because he disagreed with the president’s handling of the economy, that doesn’t stop him from publicly embracing the president and his economic policies.
If the president were serious about listening to what the real business community had to say — that is, on hearing from the small and midsize businesses, which actually do most hiring here in America — he would’ve invited one or two folks from those companies to the meeting.
Of course, if any small-business voices had been at the White House yesterday, the meeting would’ve taken a less cordial tone. For starters, they would’ve told Obama that his plan to soak anyone who makes more than $250,000 a year takes aim directly at them, since many small businesses file as individuals.
They’d also have said small businesses aren’t shipping jobs overseas, at least not at the rate of GE and others in that room. They’d say that he and his flacks are lying when they say 97 percent of small businesses aren’t hit by his tax increases because those small businesses that actually produce most of the nation’s jobs fall well within its reach.
In fact, they’d say that, when he takes aim at them, the president is actually taking aim at the working class — who will face layoffs if he has his way. Yes, we’ll be looking more like Spain, unemployment and all.
But you can’t count on Immelt or Chenault sharing those sentiments; they’re stuck in the role of photo props for the president and his bizarre economic agenda.
Charles Gasparino is a Fox Business Network senior correspondent.