Marketplace Magazine

November 16, 2009

I got this email from the American Small Business League Thursday:

On Oct. 21, President Barack Obama announced he would convene a small business conference to address increasing access to capital for small businesses. Yet less than a week before the conference is set to convene on Wednesday, Nov. 18, the Administration has refused to release any information regarding the event’s location, time, agenda or attendees.

The American Small Business League (ASBL) is concerned that the administration is withholding details on the conference as a means of preventing legitimate small business concerns, small business advocates and the media from attending.

“This is a clear indication that President Obama has no intention of adopting any policies that will actually benefit legitimate small businesses. My guess is that this is going to be a love-fest for his venture capitalist buddies and the Fortune 500 firms he is giving small business contracts to every day,” ASBL President Lloyd Chapman said.

The ASBL is predicting that the meeting could actually propose creating a loophole that would divert federal small business contracts away from legitimate small businesses and into the hands of wealthy venture capitalists under the guise of “increasing access to capital” for small businesses. The ASBL is concerned that in a worst-case scenario President Obama may even try to wind down federal small business contracting programs under the guise of bolstering the SBA by combining it with the U.S. Department of Commerce.

The ASBL questions the motives of President Obama and the legitimacy of the conference as a whole.

“Obviously they don’t want media coverage of their sham small business conference and they clearly don’t want any input from legitimate small business advocates,” Chapman said. The administration’s strategy may be to prevent input from small business groups that have complained about the Obama Administration awarding millions of dollars a day in federal small business contracts to Fortune 500 corporations, including stimulus dollars, according to the ASBL.

The ASBL points to the fact that the Administration has allocated less than 1 percent of stimulus funds to small businesses. …

“If President Obama really wanted to help small businesses he would have honored his February 2008 campaign promise to ‘end the diversion of federal small business contracts to corporate giants,’ but he hasn’t done that has he?” Chapman said.

This is ironic given that today begins Global Entrepreneurship Week. But it’s not surprising, in part because the Obama administration is developing a reputation for listening to only what it wants to hear. (Which makes them far from unique in the political class, of course.)

The other unsurprising thing is that, beyond the aforementioned venture capitalists, the Obama administration seems to consider two kinds of businesses, and only two kinds, to be worthy: high-tech companies (which makes potential Democratic gubernatorial candidate Kevin Conroy perfect for the state Democratic Party) and “green” businesses. Neither of those kinds of businesses can be considered large-scale employers, at least not now.

Venture capital-funded and high-tech businesses are high-risk high-reward ventures, and ventures found more often in the Madison–Milwaukee axis than up here where we build things. (And, to environmentalists’ tsk-tsking, use a lot of energy, much of it created by coal, to build things. Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal appears increasingly likely to stick it to Wisconsin’s economy, and particularly Northeast Wisconsin’s economy, than to provide benefits we’ll get to enjoy in our lifetimes.) “Green” businesses are businesses too, of course, but “green” is usually more expensive in the short term (and not always better products) than non-green competing products. One reason for going green, of course, is long-term savings (return on investment), but that can be difficult to justify in periods of tight cash flow, depending on how long ROI is.

So if the ASBL thinks Obama’s small business conference is going to be a dog-and-pony show where everyone is singing out of the same hymnal, well, they’re not alone.

Source:  http://www.marketplacemagazine.com/blogs/blog2.php/2009/11/16/a-conference-where-you-re-not-invited