Writes Richard Salsman at his blog on Forbes on Bravo For George Buckley, A Righteous CEO:
Since his party’s failure in the mid-term elections, President Barack Obama has been posing as “pro-business” and a “centrist.” There’s not a single reason to believe it. Obama is a phony — on this and many other issues — just as he was during his 2008 campaign. If Obama is “pro-business” in any way, like most politicians today he claims to be so only to extract tax revenues and campaign funding. That’s the sole extent of it. Business is a mere host to his political parasitism. Yet his hostile attitude isn’t much different from that seen in the GOP.
[…] That Obama is being disingenuous is clear from the avalanche of new regulations, controls and dictates now piling atop America’s businessmen, whether due to ObamaCare’s further socialization of the health care sector, or to Dodd-Frank’s scheme to further invade the financial sector, or to the EPA’s latest crusade against nearly every sector by calling CO2 a “pollutant.” […] In his essay on regulation Obama also conceded that many “unreasonable burdens on business” have “stifled innovation and have had a chilling effect on growth and jobs,” yet he refused to call for the repeal of any set of regulations, or the abolition of a single regulatory agency. He keeps sponsoring and signing laws that impose still more burdens.
[…] For an alternative assessment — i.e., with refreshing honesty and candor — consider a recent interview of a courageous business executive who dares to describe Obama’s actual policy toward business: legalized looting. According to George Buckley, CEO of 3M Corp. since 2005, “We know what [Obama’s] instincts are: they are Robin Hood-esque. He is anti-business.”
Buckley further explains that “there is a sense among companies that the U.S. is a difficult place to do business,” and “it is about regulation, taxation, seemingly anti-business policies in Washington, attitudes towards science.” He adds that “politicians forget that business has choice. We’re not indentured servants and we will do business where it’s good and friendly. If it’s hostile, incrementally, things will slip away. We’ve got a real choice between …
Read the rest of Richard Salsman’s article at his blog on Forbes: Bravo For George Buckley, A Righteous CEO.