The business community finds the President to be confrontational. He has viciously criticized them. They don’t think he’s really devoted to free markets. They’re worried.

This is incredible. President Obama barely touched them. His anti-business talk was so limited it barely existed. This is their reaction to the small amount of criticism they got from the President.

This is from Politico –

And business leaders, even the few who continue to be Obama-friendly, say they are convinced he is hostile to free markets and the private sector. Some of these executives have balance sheets flush with cash but are reluctant to add jobs or expand in part because they don’t trust Obama’s instincts for growth.

“He used anti-corporate, confrontational rhetoric too for legislative gain, and kept doing it after folks found it gratuitous,” a top executive said. “During health reform it was the bad, evil hospitals. . . Same with financial regulation: It was fat cats, greed, corruption.”

They can’t take even the mildest criticism. Is this pitiful or what? The President cuts deals on health care with the industry. The President declines to prosecute or go after the banks politically. The President protects British Petroleum. The President guts financial reform. The President refuses to create a foreclosure moratorium or to change his HAMP program to get more people out of foreclosure.

And this is their response! He’s confrontational. When?

These guys live in an alternate world. Any criticism is just totally unacceptable in their minds. In spite of all that has happened over the last decade, the great corporations are guiltless. In spite of bonuses, in spite of the destruction of millions of American jobs, in spite of regular defiance of the law ranging from the environment to playing the stock market, in spite of acting as if their duty to their country, their states and their communities was non-existent and in spite of a level of patriotism, Aaron Burr would have found acceptable, their feelings are hurt.

What is this? Are they the political equivalent of a 12-year old girl at her first cotillion?

What do I draw from this?

First, their contact with the vast majority of Americans is about non-existent.

Second, they’re political wimps. They can’t take it.

Third and the main point, they live in fear of those great unwashed masses. You know, the ones they have mercilessly exploited, them guys. They realize that there could be accountability

They realize that they are one step away from being cut, from people walking over to the other side of the street, from criticism in the press, from being named as what they are. They’re cowards, closer to cartoon villains.

They should be made to watch the movie, “They Live,” once a year.

Part science fiction thriller and part dark comedy, the film echoed contemporary fears of a declining economy, within a culture of greed and conspicuous consumption common among Americans in the 1980s. In They Live, the ruling class within the moneyed elite are in fact aliens managing human social affairs through the use of a signal on top of the TV broadcast that is concealing their appearance and subliminal messages in mass media.

Maybe twice.

James Pilant