History
The Roundtable was founded in 1972 by John Harper, the head of ALCOA Aluminum, and Fred Borch, CEO of General Electric, who were concerned about growing public hostility toward corporations as evidenced by support for government regulation of the workplace environment, and about the power of unions to squeeze corporate profits in an increasingly competitive international market. The two CEOs talked with John Connally, President Nixon's Secretary of Treasury, and Arthur Bums, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, who advised them to set up a lobbying organization that would specifically represent large banks and corporations. Harper was the first president, followed by Thomas Murphy of General Motors, Irving Shapiro of Du Pont, and Clifford Garvin of Exxon.
The group was formed through the merger of three existing organizations: the March Group, consisting of chief executive officers who met informally to consider public policy issues; the Construction Users Anti-Inflation Roundtable, a group devoted to containing construction costs; and, the Labor Law Study Committee, largely made up of labor relations executives of major companies. The group is called President Obama's "closest ally in the business community."
Read more about this topic: Business Roundtable
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A country grows in history not only because of the heroism of its troops on the field of battle, it grows also when it turns to justice and to right for the conservation of its interests.”
—Aristide Briand (1862–1932)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Let it suffice that in the light of these two facts, namely, that the mind is One, and that nature is its correlative, history is to be read and written.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)