When Democrats took huge losses in the midterms, White House officials interpreted it as a sign of the need to bolster business confidence in the administration. More consequential than corporate campaign donations was the fact that business was still withholding so much money from the economy, impeding the recovery and contributing to voter disaffection with the Democrats. Noting that unemployment was still “stubbornly high” and that there was “little likelihood” of renewed government stimulus, the Wall Street Journal argued in early 2011 that “the key to economic growth—and Mr. Obama’s re-election prospects—could lie in corporate treasuries. U.S. non-financial businesses are sitting on nearly $2 trillion in cash and liquid assets, the most since World War II, and Mr. Obama wants them to use it to create more U.S. jobs.”9 This approach was not the only logical one: many outside observers attributed the Democrats’ midterm losses to the shortage of progressive reform in Obama’s first two years. But the backgrounds of Geithner, Summers, and Obama’s other top advisers virtually ensured that the midterm defeat would be attributed to business discontent. Following election day, Obama buckled down in an effort to boost executives’ “confidence” in his administration. On the legislative front, Obama’s efforts to “repair relations with corporate America,” as the Journal wrote, took the form of bills that cut taxes for business and amplified investor privileges overseas via free-trade agreements.10 According to the Journal, Obama was proposing a deal with corporate leaders in which they would “stop hoarding cash and start hiring in return for tax breaks and other government support,” including free-trade deals and deregulation.11
None of these reforms would directly address the economic roots of the crisis. They would do little to boost the low level of domestic demand, which was the main economic cause of continued recession. Doing so would have required putting more money into the hands of consumers and/or greatly increasing government spending. Rather, the reforms sought to address the political nature of the economic recession. By granting concessions to business in unrelated realms of policy, the administration hoped to cajole banks into making new loans and employers into hiring new workers. The reforms did not make economic sense, but they had a compelling political logic. They were concessions designed to get business to cease its capital strike.
Corporate leaders were often explicit about their political demands. In November 2010, Emerson Electric CEO David Farr told the Journal that “he would expand more in the U.S. only ‘if I felt the government was going to get out of the way’” by overhauling the tax code and streamlining “environmental and hiring rules.”12 Taxes and regulation, not the lack of demand, were also key themes in a meeting between CEOs and Obama later that month. Barclays CEO Robert Diamond said that US corporations “don’t have the confidence to hire in the United States of America until we can believe that the government, the private sector and financial institutions are working together and connected again.” Bausch & Lomb CEO Brent Saunders warned that “we’re being a little more tentative on whether or not you want to move a plant, or invest,” due to disagreements with the administration over rules governing profit repatriation.13 A few months later, Joseph Czyzyk, the chairman of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, said that “the thing that bothers us the most is regulatory reform.” To unlock the trillions of dollars that businesses were hoarding, Czyzyk said, the administration would have to get serious about dismantling regulations: “It can’t be lip service and blue ribbon commissions on that, it’s got to be sacred cows.”14
Obama listened. On tax policy, he agreed in December 2010 to renew the tax cuts for the wealthy originally passed under George W. Bush, which he had previously vowed to end. Although he did sign several measures, such as the ACA, that modestly increased taxes on the wealthy, he left the rate on capital-gains income (income from stock market holdings) lower than it had been two decades earlier. Many tax policy experts also argued that Obama could have ended the tax loophole on “carried interest,” which benefits hedge funds and private equity managers, but he did not.15 Most important for business confidence was the tax rate on corporations. In February 2012 the White House released the “President’s Framework for Business Tax Reform,” which proposed to reduce the top corporate rate from 35 percent to 28 percent, and 25 percent for manufacturing companies.16 Obama made the quid pro quos explicit. In exchange for his efforts “to give businesses a better deal” through new legislation, he was hoping to cajole new business investments. He also asked congressional Republicans to fund a small fiscal stimulus “to create jobs through education, training, and public works projects.”17
The most aggressive administration initiatives involved promoting exports and overseas investments by US corporations. Obama’s first secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, effectively became “the government’s highest-ranking business lobbyist,” as the business press noted, directly negotiating foreign deals for Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Electric, and other companies. She pushed countries to embrace fracking for natural gas and Monsanto’s genetically modified seeds. Clinton also reoriented the State Department itself, converting it “into a machine for promoting U.S. business.” She created the new position of chief economist, hired a former Wall Street banker for the job, and promoted “the embassy economic officers who act as State’s liaisons to business.” She directed department employees to embrace what she called the “Ambassador-as-CEO” approach to diplomacy, ordering “embassies to make it a priority to help U.S. businesses win contracts.”18
As Clinton cleared the path for specific companies, the administration responded to the 2010 midterm defeat by trying to open up new markets for all US corporations. Obama had already appointed a delegation of government and corporate leaders to negotiate bilateral trade treaties that would “open up markets so that American businesses can prosper.” By the end of the year, passing new trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama became a priority, with the goal that these actions would restore corporate confidence and unlock investment. In Obama’s words, these initiatives were intended to “make clear to the business community, as well as to the country, that the most important thing we can do is boost and encourage our business sector and make sure that they’re hiring.”19 Business loved it, though the public was less enthused. The Wall Street Journal reported in January 2011 that “the administration is relying on business groups to take a lead role in passing the trade deals, countering opposition from unions and a skeptical public.”20
Following the successful passage of these laws in Congress later that year, Obama moved on to the behemoth Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). The deal was designed to extend the privileges granted to corporations under other free-trade agreements to twelve Pacific countries. The administration’s pursuit of the TPP was a multiyear campaign involving a “war room” of top officials in the West Wing and the targeting of dozens of individual congressional Democrats
who were on the fence. The administration also took the inclusion of corporate leaders to new levels. It gave nearly six hundred business representatives direct access to the draft text, which it refused to release to the public or Congress, and recruited CEOs to lobby Congress.21
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