President Barack Obama said corporate America has done well under his economic policies, telling the Economist magazine that CEOs should stop complaining about regulations and show greater social responsibility. "If you look at what's happened over the last four or five years, the folks who don't have a right to complain are the folks at the top," Obama said in an interview conducted last week and posted on the magazine's website late on Saturday. Businesses have complained that Obama's health care law and the Dodd-Frank financial reforms have hiked their costs. Business groups are lobbying against his new plan to curb climate-changing carbon emissions from power plants. "I would take the complaints of the corporate community with a grain of salt," Obama said, arguing that his policies have been friendly to business. "They always complain about regulation. That's their job." Obama has increasingly promoted populist economic measures such as raising the minimum wage to motivate Democratic voters ahead of critical November congressional elections, in which his Democrats face the prospect of losing control of the Senate. Obama had a frosty relationship with business in his first term, famously telling an interviewer: "I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street.”The White House toned down that rhetoric, and in Obama's second term has rallied corporate America for support to advance executive actions to hire the long-term unemployed, get better technology in schools and provide more opportunities for young African American men. But in the interview, Obama chided business for a lack of social responsibility, citing a "general view" that "the only responsibility that a corporate CEO has is to his shareholders". "There's a huge gap between the professed values and visions of corporate CEOs and how their lobbyists operate in Washington," he said. "My challenge to them consistently is, 'Is your lobbyist working as hard on those issues as he or she is on preserving that tax break that you've got?' And if the answer is no, then you don't care about it as much as you say.” The gLAWcal Team POREEN project Saturday, 2 August 2014 (Source: The Economist)