Small biz group outed

The political season is in full bloom and partisan ads are everywhere.  But here is a unique one.  Read the script of this radio commercial and guess which organization produced it.

The start of a new year can bring a sense of a fresh start, a new beginning.
But America’s small-business owners aren’t looking at January for a fresh start. They’re looking at November and Election Day.
They’re fed up with a president and some in Congress who don’t appreciate their sacrifices or the jobs they create.
They’re tired of federal regulators who punish them at every turn.
They’re sick of the assumption that they don’t care about their employees’ health and happiness.
And they’re weary of higher taxes and more red tape.
Small business has had enough of Washington’s class warfare.
It may be January, but these risk-takers -- who pay more than their fair share of taxes, struggle to create jobs and get no respect from their government  -- can’t wait for Election Day to arrive. 

Obviously this is a highly partisan ad targeting primarily the defeat of President Obama and like-minded Congressional Democrats using all the GOP buzz words.  So who is responsible for this radio ad? 

Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry?

How about one of the big super PACs supporting these presidential candidates?   Or was it the National Republican Party or the National Republican Congressional Committee?  Or how about one of the super PACs of those “independent” 527 organizations that work to get Republicans elected like Karl Rove’s American Crossroads?

If you guessed American Crossroads, you are almost correct.

This radio ad features the voice of Dan Danner, president and CEO of the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB).  It was produced and distributed this past Friday as that “nonpartisan” organization’s NFIB’s Small-Business Minute. 

I have expressed my feelings about the NFIB before.  I’ve called it a small-business pretender organization numerous times in my blog and have referred to it as a lapdog for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

But how did the NFIB go from never disagreeing with big business to overtly carrying the partisan water for corporate America to defeat the President?

Follow the money.

I always suspected that the NFIB was funded out of the same pockets that support big business organizations like the U.S. Chamber but didn’t have the proof.  Well, now I do and this is where Rove’s super PAC comes into play.

Fred Barnes, executive director of the conservative Weekly Standard and Fox News commentator, spilled the beans in a Wall Street Journal opinion editorial on December 28^th.  Barnes said that the GOP super PAC American Crossroads gave the NFIB $3.7 million in 2010.  Other conservative organizations also got big bucks for the same purpose—to get Republican candidates elected to Congress.   The plan worked in the midterm elections and those conservative organizations and more are getting additional money for this November from American Crossroads.

Now, some other business organizations do endorse candidates but typically based on membership consensus.  Others, like my own South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce, have opted only to provide members comparative information on candidates on specific issues.  Business organizations also receive contributions from outside interests to promote specific issues that are already part of their agendas.

But the NFIB has taken a different route altogether.  It has become a wholly owned subsidiary of
the big business and multinational corporation machine accepting huge sums of money and orders, explicit or implicit, to endorse and work for GOP candidates.

No longer can the media and public accept the NFIB as a national small business organization.  It can be seen now for what it really is—a highly partisan, political organization fronting for big business and multinational corporations to earn a buck—3.7 million bucks at least.

Amnesty for corporate tax dodgers or jobs?

Which will the GOP Presidential candidate choose during tonight’s debate--amnesty for coporate tax dodgers or jobs? 

Based on Monday’s Palmetto Freedom Forum in Columbia, the answer is sure to be amnesty for corporate tax dodgers.  

The GOP candidates have all proclaimed that the way to create jobs is to offer U.S.-based multinational corporations amnesty for most or all of the taxes they owe to us if they bring back to the U.S. the profits they’ve squirreled away in bank accounts in Bermuda, Luxembourg and other offshore tax havens. 

In May JP Morgan Chase estimates that there is $1.375 trillion being held in these offshore tax havens by 519 American multinational corporations like Apple ($41 billion), Microsoft ($42 billion), Cisco Systems ($38.8 billion) and Google ($40 billion).

The candidates you’ll watch on TV tonight all mistakenly believe that if we just let these corporations repatriate these profits to the U.S. and pay little (5%) or no income tax on the money, the sun will come out and jobs will sprout like spring flowers. 

But we tried this “one-time” tax amnesty before in 2004 and the only winners were the shareholders and corporate execs who pocketed the windfall while actually cutting tens of thousands of American jobs.  The congressional Joint Committee on Taxation has estimated that a new tax amnesty program would cost $78.7 billion in lost revenue to the U.S. Government over the ensuing  decade because the multinationals would hide more money offshore waiting for the next “one-time” tax amnesty day.  There will be no flowers, only weeds for the unemployed.

So tonight when each Presidential candidate calls for amnesty for these Un-American corporate tax dodgers (they’ll call it a repatriation tax holiday—doesn’t that sound like patriotic fun…a holiday!), listen to see what they’re going to do to help small business create jobs.  The silence might be deafening.