Macy's CEO Terry Lundgren and Doug Oberhelman, CEO of Caterpillar will be among the top executives meeting with President Barack Obama on Wednesday as he tries to sell his fiscal cliff agenda to the business community.
The White House hasn't officially released a list of those attending the meeting, but spokespeople from both companies confirmed the meeting with The Huffington Post.
UPDATE 12:07AM EST 11/28/12: Bloomberg has obtained a full list of the 13 CEOs scheduled to attend Wednesday's fiscal cliff meeting with the president. It can be found here.
Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein Wednesday will also be in attendance on Wednesday, Bloomberg reports. The White House will also host Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, according to the San Jose Business Journal.
The meeting is the second of its kind this month. The first gathering didn’t include any CEOs from Wall Street, according to Forbes, though Obama did speak to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon about the fiscal cliff at a separate time.
Blankfein is part of a council of CEOs, called the Campaign to Fix the Debt, spending millions in a push to reduce the deficit through cutting back social safety net programs like Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. Many of those same CEOs oversee companies that have received trillions in subsidies and bailouts.
And those same CEOs who have advocated for cutting the retirement programs that many poor and elderly rely on -- Blankfein pushed for changing the retirement age in a recent interview -- have accumulated more than $649 million in their retirement funds, according to a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies.
Blankfein has said he’s willing to make some sacrifices to avoid the fiscal cliff. He wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal earlier this month that tax hikes for America’s super-rich “are appropriate” if they accompany cuts in spending and entitlement programs. Still, it's not surprising Blankfein is willing to give up his personal tax breaks, given that the sacrifice could come in exchange for corporate tax breaks, according to the IPS report.
"If their companies save billions in tax dollars, corporate profits will soar — and CEO pay will skyrocket too," the authors of the report wrote. "The small amount of additional personal income tax they might pay would be more than offset by higher bonuses and stock option gains."
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