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You might assume that the Small Business Administration exists to help, you know, small business. But that would ignore the conniving nature of big business… and the weaseliness of the SBA.
Of course, Bush & Company constantly poses as the champion of America’s small enterprises. For example, the honcho of Bush’s SBA recently bragged that the agency had awarded more than a fourth of its contracts to small business, offering this as proof that “The president and his administration are committed to helping small businesses get there fair share of government contracts.”
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Not so fast, slick. Let’s do some simple math: of the 26 million business firms in America, 99.9 percent are officially considered small, so bestowing only 25 percent of contracts on them falls way short of being fair. Besides, shouldn’t all of SBA’s contracts go to small businesses? I mean… it’s in your name.
It turns out that even SBA’s one-fourth number is a lie, for it includes contracts awarded to huge corporations that use legal loopholes to grab money set aside for small firms. For example, Boeing has 37 of SBA’s “small business” contracts, General Dynamics has 47 of them, and Northrop Grumman has 121. The trick is that these giants either set up or buy small subsidiaries that get SBA cash. As a Boeing spokesman so cleverly rationalizes this ruse, “these companies shouldn’t be penalized because they are associated with a large company.”
Hello… are you stupid, or do you just hope we are? Your corporate subsidiaries are not “associated with” Boeing – they’re wholly-owned by it, integral cogs in the Boeing machine.
This is Jim Hightower saying… Every dollar siphoned out of SBA by these connivers is a dollar denied to legitimate and deserving small businesses. To learn more and to help put the “small” back in SBA, call the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies at 415-255-1108.
Sources:
“Some Small Businesses That Can’t,” The New York Times, July 5, 2006.