President Obama calls Apple CEO Tim Cook and other CEOs to discuss fiscal cliff and economic growth

Jordan Kahn

CNN reported a White House official confirmed President Barack Obama spoke with CEOs of four Fortune 500 companies over the weekend to “discuss the so-called fiscal cliff and economic growth.” The discussions with the select group of CEOs follow a larger meeting of a dozen American companies at the White House last week. One of the four CEOs invited to join the discussions was Apple’s Tim Cook.

According to the White House, the conversations were part of the President’s “outreach on the need to find a balanced deficit-reduction solution that protects the middle class and continues to move our economy forward.”

The official said Obama spoke with the CEOs of four Fortune 500 companies over the weekend after gathering a dozen CEOs of other major American companies at the White House on Wednesday

The other CEOs included in the discussions were Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Costco’s Craig Jelinek, and Jim McNerney of Boeing. Read more

Apple’s manufacturing jobs in China comes up in US presidential debates, both candidates give their opinion [Video]

Seth Weintraub

One of the last questions in the debate concerned how to bring Apple’s manufacturing jobs ‘back’ to the United States.

Mitt Romney went first and said China is stealing intellectual property, designs, cheating on currency, hacking into computers, and isn’t playing fair to U.S. workers: “We can compete with anyone in the world as long as the playing field is level.”

Obama went second and said the U.S. doesn’t necessarily want the low-skill, low-wage jobs and education and skills will bring higher-paying jobs home: “There are some jobs that are not going to come back. [...] I want high-wage, high-skill jobs. That’s why we have to invest in advanced manufacturing [...] make sure that we have the best science and research in the world.”

And the President should know: Steve Jobs told Obama in February 2011, according to Walter Isaacson, “If you could educate these [30,000] engineers, we could move more manufacturing plants here.”

The New York Times dived deep on this and probably has better answers than either politician.

[UPDATED with full transcript below]

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Jobs to Obama: “You’re headed for a one-term presidency” because the US can’t build factories

Seth Weintraub

The Huffington Post pulls some words that Steve Jobs had for president Obama from Isaacson’s Steve Jobs bio.  On the meeting, Jobs insisted that Obama himself ask for a personal invitation.  They met in the Westin Airport hotel in San Francisco. It sounds like like Jobs is more of a Conservative than “hippy Liberal” in his incredibly blunt words to President Obama:

“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for them.

Jobs also criticized America’s education system, saying it was “crippled by union work rules,” noted Isaacson. “Until the teachers’ unions were broken, there was almost no hope for education reform.” Jobs proposed allowing principals to hire and fire teachers based on merit, that schools stay open until 6 p.m. and that they be open 11 months a year.

That said, Jobs was still willing to help Obama’s re-election campaign…
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