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Political Lies and Small Business
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Brace for a storm of platitudes, recycled myths, and just old-fashioned
political lies.It will all start with President Obama when he addresses a joint session
of Congress on Thursday about the jobs deficit. Whatever he says will be
followed by scorn and abuse from the Republicans. All the hoary old claims
about the absence of leadership, wasteful spending, punitive regulation
and the need to cut taxes will be regurgitated.The president will have a TelePrompTer full of enchantment tales. He also
will talk of cutting some taxes; maybe because he thinks this will endear
him to the undecided voters, or mollify some Republicans, or because he
consistently tries to make his way in a viciously partisan political world
by endeavoring to sound like the voice of detached reason. It will make no
friends and infuriate the Democratic core. It will be another betrayal to
them.All of the tax ideas, presidential and Republican, will be wrapped in cant
about small business. Oh, do politicians love small business. Apple pie is
good, mom is noble but small business, and small business alone, can cause
the entire Congress of the United States to genuflect.They love the travel agent with six employees with the same passion that
they adore General Electric. The machine tool repair and maintenance
contractor with 40 employees – he is the very embodiment of American
exceptionalism. The woman with a wholesale jewelry business that she
operates with her husband and grown daughter — they are the stuff of
American legend.Nonsense.
If Congress knew anything about the small business world, it would
stop forcing the wrong medicine on the patient. Incorrect therapies won’t
help, no matter how vigorous the applications.To the political establishment, small business is suffering because of
taxation and regulation. Fiddle with these twin bugaboos, the political
narrative goes, and small business will bloom like the bluebells in
spring.Have any of these people ever talked to small business operators? Small
business has many problems, but taxation is seldom one of them. Do they
really think the garment manufacturers on New York’s 7th Avenue are on the
phone, schmoozing about the rate of corporate taxation? More likely they
are talking about why the banks won’t lend, even against collateral, to
heretofore good customers; why imports from all over Asia are laying waste
to their customer base; and why the traffic in the cross-town streets is
horrendous.Like all small businessmen, they don’t agonize over the frustration of
having to meet OSHA and EPA standards — these are irritants. Instead,
they agonize over whether there will be enough money to meet payroll.
Taxes, if any, come once a year, but the payroll keeps the small
entrepreneur anxious all year. It is the ogre that visits every two weeks.To many, government is the problem; but not in the way legislators think.
The problem is the growing shortage of federal and state funds. This
affects many small businesses like builders, excavators, asphalt-layers
and the service industries that owe their survival to small contracts:
social service providers, translators, software writers, and consultants
in just about everything.If you cut budgets, you cut small business.
Then there is the “chaining” of America. Local diners, hardware stores,
pharmacies and other retailing are crushed, annihilated when the chains
move in. The chains are not inherently evil, but they are manifestly
merciless. Walmart is but one of the chains putting small business to the
sword.If those who administer government want to know something about small
business, they should spend a weekend at a strip-mall bakery or any other
firm with less than 50 employees. The experience would radically adjust
the rhetoric. It’s too late for Thursday, but don’t believe what you hear.–For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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Washington on Vacation: From Martha’s Vineyard to the Political Vineyards
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That great sucking sound you hear is the annual evacuation of Washingtonians. Tired and weary, but nonetheless self-important, they snatch a little beach time and act like other people.
The upper tier — including President Obama and his family — flock to Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. A few — most notably storied editor Ben Bradlee and his fabled party giving-wife, Sally Quinn — enjoy the delights of Long Island and the Hamptons. Alas, Washington incomes aren’t commensurate with Washington egos; hence the Hamptons are only for the few, and those with super-rich friends.
A little pity, please, for members of Congress at this time of year. While bureaucrats, senior civil servants, lobbyists and journalists have boardwalk splinters in their feet and spilled beer on their T-shirts, legislators have to face the voters. Ugh!
This year, that’s an especially nasty experience.
All the polls say only about 11 percent of the country approve of the job Congress is doing. That’s tough enough, but this year there are the unemployed–the same unemployed as last year, but now they are more bitter and angry.
Legislators have forgotten the platitudes used to calm the unemployed last year. But the unemployed have not; and worse, the local TV stations can pull up clips as fast as a member of Congress can say “my record shows.”
If you’ve made a point of denouncing the deficit, it’s hard to explain why you haven’t been more diligent in bringing home the bacon to your constituency. If it’s your summer boondoggle, it’s hard to explain that it’s an entitlement.
You get a holiday in an election year? Get off it. When comfortably re-elected, you can contemplate a little time with you feet up. Unless you want to join the unemployed, better campaign; and campaign some more when fatigue has gripped you by the soft parts. Hit the phones and beg for money.
To stay in Washington, you need to be able to denounce Washington in brutal terms, while yearning for the members’ dining room, the simpering of the staff, and the adulation of the cable television network that agrees with you.
Every day you must praise the wonders of America and your fabulous constituency, while you long for a congressional fact-finding trip to London, Paris or Rome. After all, you’ve been stuffed with barbecue since you got back to the voters: the God-fearing, family-loving, hard-working, ignorant pain-in-the-butt hicks.
What do voters know of the burden of office?
What do they know of you being cajoled in the White House while the TV cameras are lining the driveway, waiting just for you? What do they know of representing our country at dinner at 10 Downing Street or the Elysee Palace? Have they ever had an audience with the Pope?
What do the voters know of the thrill of dropping in on our troops in Afghanistan with a TV crew? If you do that, you can almost book yourself on a Sunday morning talk show. Heck you can feel thrilled on “Meet the Press,” even if David Gregory reads aloud an encyclopedic list of your gaffes, votes, and friends of the opposite sex.
Actually, the worker bees of the nation’s capital just hate to be away. If you are a member of Congress, you’re reminded that there are nasty people with clever advertising agencies, trying to get into Washington and make you part of that unemployment statistic.
Even those who don’t have to run for office feel the burden of free-floating anxiety. Who’s after my job? I make out to be the most important job in the most important city in the world, even if I know in my heart I’m a clerk.
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U.S. Chamber of Commerce Faces Its Own Guns
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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s building on H Street in Washington glowers across Lafayette Park at the White House. It is a impersonal building, austere even, reminiscent of a British colonial post office.
With 3 million members, and the largest budget of any trade group in Washington, the chamber is a political force to be reckoned with, as is its hard-driving chief executive, Thomas Donohue.
Its stance is that American business is a kind of Gulliver, tied down by the Lilliputian strings of regulation and regressive public policy. Under Donohue, the chamber has relentlessly sought out threats to business, real and hypothetical. It opposes unions; regulation; government intrusion into markets; expansion of programs that cost tax dollars, which is all social programs; and raising the minimum wage. It is more ambivalent these days about health care. And Donohue can be quite capricious; for example, he has called for normalizing relations with Cuba.
Now the chamber is roiled as it seldom has been. The casus belli is climate change, and what a storm it has produced. Three large electric utilities have withdrawn from the chamber, accusing it of extremism in its stance on climate change. Sneaker giant Nike has resigned from the chamber’s board of directors in protest, but is still a member.
The utilities include Exelon, by some measures the largest utility; Pacific Gas & Electric, a giant in California; and PNM, the largest utility in New Mexico. As a percentage of membership, they do not affect the chamber much; but strategically, their rebuke means a great deal. They are the very constituency the chamber and Donohue are out to help. They burn coal as well as other fuels, and they are critically affected by what is to happen in climate legislation or regulation.
The utilities want Congress to pass cap-and-trade legislation. If Congress fails to pass the legislation, they fear Environmental Protection Agency regulation. The stakes are high. The chamber is opposed to the present cap-and-trade legislation before Congress, and has challenged the science that would be used by the EPA.
“If Congress does not act, the EPA will and the result will be more arbitrary, more expensive and more uncertain for investors and the industry than a reasonable, market-based legislative solution,” said John Rowe, Exelon’s chairman and chief executive officer.
Two of the big rebel utility CEOs are national business figures: Rowe of Exelon is revered as a prince-philosopher inside and outside of the electric industry; and Peter Darbee of PG&E, who wrote a strongly-worded letter of resignation to Donohue, is a major corporate friend of the environment.
All three utilities, along with their Washington trade association, the Edison Electric Institute, favor cap-and-trade legislation now being considered in Congress. Another utility savant, James Rogers of Duke
Energy, is pulling his utility conglomerate out of the National Association of Manufacturers, because of its opposition to cap-and-trade.
Darbee hit hardest at the chamber. In a two-page letter he wrote: “We find it dismaying that the chamber neglects the indisputable fact that a decisive majority of experts have said the data on global warming are compelling and point to a threat that cannot be ignored. In our view, an intellectually honest agreement over the best policy response to the challenges to climate change is one thing; disingenuous attempts to diminish or distort the reality of these challenges are quite another.”
The chamber has opposed not only the EPA’s plans to regulate carbon emissions in the absence of legislation, but also has attacked the scientific basis put forward by the agency. Yet Donohue insists that the chamber is neither denying the carbon emissions problem, nor is opposed to a legislative solution. Instead, it wants one tied to a global agreement on greenhouse gas emissions to protect U.S. companies from onerous conditions.
Friends of Donohue–who applaud much of what the chamber stands for–say that it is caught in a position where it has to say what it is for, not just what it is against. The chamber has always been at the barricades, not facing its own guns. The experience is novel and unpleasant for those on H Street. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate
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The lost art of debate — and other wordy topics
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Guests: Aram Bakshian, author and critic; Atul Singh, Fair Observer
Obama’s strengths and weaknesses; the Internet
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Guests: Tim Farley, Sirius XM Radio; Adam Clayton Powell III, University of Southern California; Wayne Madsen, Wayne Madsen Report
A discussion of Shirley’s book, “December 1941: 31 Days That Saved America and Changed the World”
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The Joys of Transportation
January 2nd, 2012
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