*Sigh*

“President Obama will host a roundtable with about 20 corporate chiefs on Wednesday, according to the White House, part of an attempt to ease strained relations with business.

Expected for the session at the Blair House, across the street from the White House, are executives from a range of industries, including American Express, Cisco Systems, Dow Chemical, Google, Motorola, Intel, UPS and PepsiCo, according to people involved in the planning. But the White House said it would not divulge attendees until the meeting.

With the mood for the meeting already lightened by his recent announcements of a trade deal with South Korea and a compromise on tax cuts with Congressional Republicans, Mr. Obama and the executives will discuss a variety of issues, said Jen Psaki, the White House deputy director of communications. Among the topics will be deficit reduction, an overhaul of the tax code, government regulation, export promotion, public-private investments in areas like technology and clean energy, and efforts to improve education and job skills, Ms. Psaki said.”

How about this “roundtable” Mr. President. How about meeting with the long-term unemployed—the 99ers—asking them how they intend to get by on the big, fat zero your “compromise” did for them? What about meeting with the firefighters and police who have been laid off due to state budget cuts, like in Camden, NJ where half of the police and a third of the firefighters are headed out the door.

What about meeting with the Social Security recipients who haven’t had a COLA increase in two years, and the federal workers whose pay you propose to freeze? Ask them how they’re going to handle rising gasoline prices, which could reach $3.50 a gallon by spring, and home heating oil prices, which are 13% more than last winter, brought on by Fed Chairman Bernanke’s “quantitative easing.” I guess they’ll have frozen homes to go along with their frozen pay. Ask the victims of foreclosure fraud how they feel about being denied legal aid by Treasury Secretary Geithner.

What about “easing strained relations” with these people? Or don’t they matter? Probably not. The unemployed, the laid off firefighters and police, Social Security recipients, and those facing foreclosure don’t write the checks with enough zeroes on them to finance that billion dollar re-election campaign like the CEOs do.