Jeffrey Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric, former owner of the NBC networks, lectured America’s Businessmen at a jobs summit at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Monday that businesses needed to take the lead on job creation.

Immelt’s lecture came at a conference filled with comments about all the government red tape and unneeded regulations that were preventing them from hiring Americans.

While Immelt was forced to admit that there needed to be some policy changes by Congress and the Obama administration, he fired back at those assembled, saying that the responsibility for hiring lay with businesses:

The people who are part of the business sector, the people in this room, have got to stop complaining about government and get some action underway.There’s no excuse today for lack of leadership. The truth is we all need to be part of the solution.

Immelt just happens to be the chairman of President Barack Hussein Obama’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. According to him, the council has made a number of recommendations for changes in government policies that are supposed to help create jobs, such as the executive order announced Monday asking independent agencies to rid their books of old and outdated regulations.

Immelt told the Chamber Meeting that he is committed to working with Obama on other moves that can help hiring, and that he expects to have proposals by the end of the year that should help to create up to 1 million jobs.

However, after announcing how much he and the president truly care about America’s business owners, Immelt then scolded those assembled, lecturing them that it’s important that businesses take action — like taking some risks, and thinking about bringing back jobs that had been moved overseas.

Immelt said that if companies would examine the changing economics of some of those jobs, they would find it is beneficial to bring jobs back home, boasting that GE is in the process of moving some jobs back to Kentucky and Michigan.

Why did you move those jobs in the first place, Jeffrey? Too much Corporate Tax, even for you, Huh?

According to the president’s personal adviser, arguing between business groups and the government isn’t in the best interest of the nation’s economy:

We can’t always be fighting. We need to act, and the private sector can do more.

In other words:

SHUT UP AND EAT YOUR PEAS!

Questions have been raised concerning Immelt being appointed by Obama to head this influential Committee. Those questions concern whether or not the head of GE is using the position to “shill” for GE’s expansive business interests. Tory Newmeyer, in an article posted on fortune.cnn.com, on July 6, 2011, explains how those concerns are well-founded:

The charge from labor-friendly liberals and free-market conservatives has been the same: the appointment represents pure crony capitalism. The leaders of the largest U.S. multinationals are hardly the best suited to give advice on domestic job creation, the line goes, when they spent the last decade eliminating 2.9 million jobs at home and adding 2.4 million overseas. And in particular, the chief of GE, No. 6 on the Fortune 500, shouldn’t be charged with heading that effort, considering the company’s sprawling lobbying agenda in Washington.

The company spent more than $39 million on lobbying efforts last year alone, making it the third-biggest spender in the city, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. And its advocacy reaches into just about every conceivable policy debate, from the narrow — the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, the Iran Sanctions Enabling Act — to the sweeping, including the fights over health care and financial reform and a multibillion-dollar battle with Pratt & Whitney over a military jet engine.

Immelt himself has made clear that his part-time, volunteer work for the council won’t distract him from his day job. “This is my passion, I’m committed,” he told analysts on an earnings call in January. But he’s been more equivocal about how GE’s interests would inform his participation on the panel, officially known as the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

At a shareholder meeting in April, Immelt was confronted by an activist from a right-wing group behind an online campaign urging GE to fire him for cozying up to the Obama administration. David Ridenour, a vice president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, asked Immelt to explain whether he is representing shareholders or the broader American public on the council. The GE (GE) chief responded that he is representing his “best judgment, and frequently because of my point of reference, they’ll be associated with GE, but not all the time.” And he demurred on whether he’d oppose a council recommendation that hurts his shareholders. “I just don’t want to give this kind of black and white philosophy,” he said.

GE provides for Immelt’s travel to and from jobs council activities, company spokesman Andrew Williams says, noting that Immelt uses the trips to conduct company business. After a meeting in Durham, North Carolina last month, for example, Immelt visited a GE plant that assembles jet engines. And while Treasury provides most of the staff for the council’s work, GE has detailed one person to work on council business with Immelt.

Of course, Monday’s chamber meeting came on the heels of a truly horrendous monthly jobs report, which showed that only 18,000 Americans were hired nationally in June, raising America’s unemployment figures to 9.2 per cent, causing Immelt to proclaim:

We have a lot of work to do.

Ya think, DiNozzo?

Earlier in the meeting, Chamber President and CEO Thomas Donohue laid out his group’s broad plans to improve hiring, with the bulk of the Chamber’s focus on changes in government policies. Donohue called for the passage of pending free trade agreements, reform of visa rules to allow companies to hire skilled workers and recent graduates from overseas and to boost spending by foreign visitors. He also called for easier permitting of new projects and reform of government regulations.

Donohue said:

Can you blame these businesses? They don’t know what’s going to hit them next, and that’s what worries them the most.

Their employees aren’t too happy about Obama’s Economy, either.