Walmart on steroids

If you, like everyone else, are tired of all the negative political ads, take solace in the fact that they’ll be gone next Wednesday.

But unfortunately, what will stay with us is an outright attack on our democracy. Our “government of the people, by the people and for the people,” thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, might now be better called “government of the corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation.”

And by “corporation,” I’m not talking small businesses. I'm talking about giant special interest, multinational companies that brought us these beauties:

Image: NyeGateway.com

• The Gulf oil disaster
• The financial crisis that led to the recession
• Skyrocketing health insurance premiums
• Jobs exported overseas
• Bloated military budgets to fight unnecessary wars

These corporations have been given the green light to spend all the money (actually their customers' money) they want to influence our elections, while not letting the voters know who is paying for the ads—most of which are negative—or being accountable for the truthfulness of the messages.

Total spending -- by candidates, political parties and special interests -- has topped $3.2 billion and is likely to hit $4 billion when reports detailing last-minute donations and spending are tallied, according to a study released Wednesday by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. That would obliterate the record $2.85 billion spent in 2006, the last midterm elections. Read more….

For the small business owner who might think that these giant multinational companies have their best interest at heart, you’ve been suckered into voting against your future.

Think Walmart on steroids.

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Want to do something about it?

1. Vote this Tuesday, November 2
2. Join us for our next BuySC Micro-Conference, Wed., Nov. 10 (details below)
3. Shop local on Nov. 20, 2010, Happy Hardware Day!

The SC Small Business Chamber presents the next installment of our BuySC Micro-Conference series:

Keith Spiro: 5 Steps to Business Freedom
 

When: November 10th, 2010
Where: 701 Whaley, Olympia Room (2nd floor), 701 Whaley Street, Columbia, SC 29201

Time: 6pm - 8pm

Price: Free for paying SCSBCC members / $5 Basic Members /$10 for non-members.  Click here to register and buy your tickets now. 

Want to save $5? Become a BuySC member at the "free" level and your ticket is half price. Why? Because we're a non-profit, and we want to unite SC's small business community.

Copy this digital poster to use on your Facebook, blog, website, wherever!

Our locally-owned, independent hardware stores need us more than ever. Let's support them!

Challenging the U.S. Chamber

The nonprofit, membership-driven South Carolina Small Business Chamber will officially be supporting an IRS complaint against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

We, along with other business organizations, are questioning potential violations of exemptions under the federal tax law in the U.S. Chamber’s conduct of lobbying and campaign funding. More on this later.

Below is a must-read New York Times story about the U.S. Chamber. If you have not been paying attention to the U.S. Chamber’s heavily financed legislative agenda and how it often is at odds with our agenda, this story should help bring you up to speed.
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The New York Times
October 22, 2010

Top Corporations Aid U.S. Chamber of Commerce Campaign

By ERIC LIPTON, MIKE McINTIRE and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce kicked off a national advertising campaign to weaken the historic rewrite of the nation’s financial regulations.

Dow Chemical delivered $1.7 million to the chamber last year as the group took a leading role in aggressively fighting proposed rules that would impose tighter security requirements on chemical facilities.

And Goldman Sachs, Chevron Texaco, and Aegon, a multinational insurance company based in the Netherlands, donated more than $8 million in recent years to a chamber foundation that has been critical of growing federal regulation and spending. These large donations — none of which were publicly disclosed by the chamber, a tax-exempt group that keeps its donors secret, as it is allowed by law — offer a glimpse of the chamber’s money-raising efforts, which it has ramped up recently in an orchestrated campaign to become one of the most well-financed critics of the Obama administration and an influential player in this fall’s Congressional elections.

They suggest that the recent allegations from President Obama and others that foreign money has ended up in the chamber’s coffers miss a larger point: The chamber has had little trouble finding American companies eager to enlist it, anonymously, to fight their political battles and pay handsomely for its help. . . . Keep reading

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Join the SC Small Business Chamber in supporting our independent, locally owned hardware stores next month:

Buy SC's Happy Hardware Day!!
Saturday, Nov. 20, 2010
Shop at independent, locally owned hardware stores to show your support for SC small business! 

Who owns the economy?

(The following opinion editorial by Frank Knapp appeared today in The Hill.)

Who is to blame for the state of our national economy is a political football. 

No one can argue that the recession that started prior to the Obama administration was owned by the former administration.  President Bush responded with the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) that was projected to be a $700 billion effort to avoid a catastrophic collapse of the banking industry.  It is now projected to have done its job for less than $100 billion, as many of the loans have and are being repaid with interest.

Then it was President Obama’s turn.  Faced with a declining GDP at a 6% annual rate and the nation losing 750,000 jobs per month, Mr. Obama pushed through his stimulus package of federal funds to rescue state budgets, keep people working and hopefully create jobs.  The state of our economy, and the fear of a jobless recovery, is now being perceived as belonging to his administration. 

So what is the state of our economy today and what would it have been without the efforts of Messrs. Bush and Obama?

According to a new study by Alan Blinder, former Vice-Chair of the Federal Reserve, and Mark Zandi, a past economic adviser to Senator John McCain, all the efforts to rescue the economy helped stave off a depression.  The study’s authors estimate that an additional 8.5 million Americans would have become unemployed if not for TARP and the stimulus.  That would have doubled the number of those who did lose their jobs due to the recession.

Our economy appears now to be stabilized and the GDP, according to recent data, is growing again at 2.4% annually.  Blinder and Zandi give credit for this turnaround to the Bush and Obama administrations’ programs. 

However, our economy is far from out of the woods could reverse course without more help.

Economists agree that small businesses must lead our recovery with hiring just as they have done in the last three recoveries.  But to do that, they need access to capital—something that is seriously lacking today.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke

"Making credit accessible to sound small businesses is crucial to our economic recovery and so should be front and center among our current policy challenges," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said recently in regard to the small business lending crisis.

A just-released survey by the National Small Business Association shows that a majority of the small businesses that needed access to capital said that they were unable to garner adequate financing.  SBA loans have also dropped dramatically this year.

The relationship between small business lending and job growth is well documented.  The NSBA report asserts:

“Since 1993, when NSBA began asking these questions, there has been a direct correlation between access to capital and job growth—when capital flows more freely, small businesses add new jobs.”

Also making this point is a report released last week by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition that found “a positive correlation between small business lending and employment; the more small business lending in a county, the higher the employment rate.”

It is clear that if we want to move our economy out of this stagnation and create more jobs, we must solve the small business lending crisis.  

That is why the Senate’s failure to evoke cloture last week on the Small Business Jobs Act was so devastating to our economic future. 

There are too many great small business provisions in this bill to detail.  No one appears to disagree that the bill will result in more small business loans being made along with other important features to promote the general fiscal health of small businesses. This is exactly what we need to allow small businesses to lead us to a better economy.

Yet, every Republican Senator out of party unity voted against even debating the legislation.

Senator George LeMieux (R-FL), who earlier had courageously voted as one of only two GOP Senators to include the crucial Lending Fund in the Small Business Jobs Act, is reported to have said, “Before I am a Republican, I am a Floridian and an American, and this bill is good for our country.”

Mr. LeMieux and the other GOP Senators may have one more chance this week to vote for America and not for party.  If none vote for cloture on the Small Business Jobs Act, the state of our economy going forward will be owned by Congressional Republicans.

Hoping for a George Graham and George DeMint

This past Thursday at 10 p.m. the U.S. Senate voted to include a proposed Small Business Lending Fund as part of a larger bill called the Small Business Jobs Act. The purpose of the overall bill is to increase private sector lending and provide tax breaks to small businesses.

All the national data shows that small businesses are being frozen out of access to capital as a result of the economic meltdown. Smaller financial institutions simply are not lending to small businesses because regulators are telling them to improve their balance sheet and warning them not to make loans that have any risk—i.e. small business loans. Without this access to capital, small businesses cannot grow and hire the workers we need to lift our economy according to economists.

One important way of breaking this log jam is the Small Business Lending Fund in which the Federal government would infuse $30 billion into community banks to improve their financial position and doing so in a way that strongly encourages them to make small business loans again. Supporters argue that this $30 billion will result in $300 billion in loans.

Sen. Mary Landrieu (D), LA

The S.C. Small Business Chamber has been an active proponent of this Lending Fund that was proposed by President Obama back in January.

Senator Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and chairwoman of the Senate Small Business Committee has been one of its strongest advocates in the Senate and a sponsor of the overall Small Business Jobs Act.

Before the vote Thursday night, Landrieu said, “This is something that we want to do to help Main Street, to help small business. This isn’t about Wall Street. It’s not about bailouts. It’s not about troubled assets. It’s not TARP. It’s a small business lending fund, a strategic partnership with community banks.”

In spite of the tremendous need for opening the spigot on small business lending, Senate Republicans continued to oppose the needed solution objecting to government assistance and calling the measure TARP-2. Only two GOP Senators voted for the amendment that enabled it to be approved 60 to 39—George LeMieux of Florida and George Voinovich of Ohio.

LeMieux pushed back on his Republican colleagues. “This has nothing to do with (TARP). These are small banks. This is the banker you know down the street – the banker who’s at your rotary, who you see at church or synagogue. This is not some Goldman Sachs banker. This is the community banker who loans to the tailor, to the construction business, the folks that employ people in your hometown.”

And for Senators concerned about increasing the deficit, there is a solution to that also.  Last Tuesday I joined Senator Carl Levin of Michigan and Representative Lloyd Doggett of Texas in a press teleconference coordinated by Business and Investors Against Tax Haven Abuse. In that press conference we discussed how to completely pay for the Lending Fund.


For all the talk by Republican Senators, including our two, about how they LOVE small business and want to help us, they just can’t set aside their partisanship to actually put their votes where their mouths are.

I had sent letters to Senators Lindsey Graham and Jim DeMint asking them to support the Small Business Jobs Act in general and the Lending Fund in particular. But our organization that represents thousands of small businesses across South Carolina received neither a response nor the votes we sought.

Hopefully the Small Business Jobs Act will come up for a full Senate vote very soon and let’s hope that the 60-39 vote will hold to break a Republican filibuster. If it does, not only will the Lending Fund be established but also SBA loan limits will be increased and business owners will be allowed to deduct the cost of health insurance for themselves and their family members in the calculation of their self-employment tax.

Send a message to Senators Graham and DeMint and ask them to put down their GOP flag for the sake of our small businesses and our economy. Ask them to be more like George (LeMieux and Voinovich) and vote for the Small Business Jobs Act.

July News and Updates

In This Issue:

•  Wall Street Reform Passes
•  Next Up: Small Business Lending Crisis
•  SCE&G Rate Hike Cut 49%
•  Helping Small Business Conserve Energy
•  Get On Board the “BuySC” Campaign
•  Upcoming Health Care Forums In Marlboro & Dillon Counties
•  9.8% Drop in WC Costs Approved
•  Looking for Answers from Gubernatorial Candidates
•  SCSBCC Partners with 3 National Biz Organizations

Wall Street Reform Passes

The U.S. Senate has given final approval to a major financial reform bill that was needed to address the greed on Wall Street and within other financial institutions. This greed led to the nation’s worst recession in our lifetimes and dried up loans and lines of credit for small businesses. Read a summary of the bill here. 


The S.C. Small Business Chamber of Commerce (SCSBC) has vigorously supported Wall Street reform as a prerequisite for getting our economy back on its feet. A strong and successful push-back against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which opposed reform, was needed to demonstrate that big business did not speak for small business. Read Frank Knapp’s blog on this issue. You can also view a video of his remarks at an April press conference held at the U.S. Capitol here.


Next Up: Small Business Lending Crisis: Call Graham & DeMint

Graham

With Wall Street reform under our belt, the SCSBC is turning to the small business lending crisis. Since March, the SCSBC has been calling on Congress to take action to spur loans and lines of credit to small business. 

In April, SCSBC president Frank Knapp led a delegation of other national business organizations to the halls of Congress for meetings on this issue. 

The message: small businesses will grow us out of the recession just as we did in the last three recoveries, but we need access to capital to hire the new employees to make this happen.

DeMint

The cries of small businesses have now been heard, and the U.S. Senate is preparing to debate the “Small Business Jobs Act” filed by Senators Baucus and Landrieu. Click here to read a complete summary of this bill. 

This bill has many provisions that will be beneficial to the financial health of small businesses. Three extremely important benefits would be: 

1. The creation of a Small Business Lending Fund that will both enable and encourage small financial institutions to make more small business loans.

2. An increase in SBA loan limits.
 
3. Allow small business owners to deduct the cost of health insurance for themselves and their family members in the calculation of their self-employment tax.
 
Contact South Carolina Senators Lindsey Graham (202-224-5972) and Jim DeMint (202-224-6121). 

Ask them to support the “Small Business Jobs Act.” Also ask them to support amendment S.A.4443 by Senator Udall; it will help unleash the ability of the nation’s credit unions to make more small business loans at no cost to the taxpayer. It would do this simply by increasing the Credit Union Member Business Lending Cap from 12.25% to 25% of a credit union’s assets.

Call Graham and DeMint today!


SCE&G Rate Hike Cut 49%

Small business customers of SCE&G are breathing a little easier now that their 9.52% electric rate hike request has been nearly cut in half to 4.88% by the S.C. Public Service Commission. That will be over $96 million dollars a year less in utility payments across the board. The president of the SCSBC, Frank Knapp, intervened in the rate hearing and played an instrumental role in reducing the rate hike. Read his blog explaining how it came about and what extra benefits he was able to get for small businesses.  The rate increase will phase in over three years. Small business customers of SCE&G will see a 1.35% increase in the first year, 2.52% the second year and 1.01% the third year.


Helping Small Business Conserve Energy

Small business customers of SCE&G also recently received some extra consideration in the company’s plan to encourage energy conservation. This plan has been approved by the S.C Public Service Commission. SCE&G agreed to SCSBCC President Frank Knapp’s request that small businesses be included in a pilot program to test an “Energy Information Display” that will give real-time feedback on the price of energy being used in a building and the cost of energy used in the month. This program had originally been planned only for residential customers. In addition, SCE&G agreed to have a representative from the SCSBC on an Advisory Group that will review the company’s energy conservation program. This program will include financial incentives for small businesses to purchase common energy efficient technology such as high-efficiency lighting, lighting controls, motors, HVAC systems and food service equipment.


Get On Board the “BuySC” Campaign

The statewide “BuySC” campaign is about to be launched by the SCSBC. If you are a small South Carolina-owned business, we want you listed on our “BuySC” web directory. It’s easy and free. Simply e-mail Stephanie and ask her to send you the form to be included in “BuySC.” Your company’s name, service/product, address and telephone number will be listed under a page for your county. The long-term answer to growing our state’s economy is to grow our own small businesses. Big businesses recruited by our Department of Commerce come here and then move on to greener pastures. Our small businesses are here to stay and create most of the new jobs in this country. Our “BuySC” campaign wants everyone in South Carolina to understand the importance of supporting our local small businesses. “BuySC” is not just a call to action for consumers tempted by big box stores and internet purchases. It is an awakening to the desire we all have for a healthy, sustainable economy.

Please join us in our “BuySC” campaign. Help spread the word by flying a “BuySC” hyperlink badge on your website to draw more attention to our campaign to help local, small business. Just email Stephanie or call 803-252-5733 and tell her you want to participate.


Upcoming Health Care Forums In Marlboro & Dillon Counties

The SCSBCC along with its partners in South Carolina Healthcare Voices will be holding health care forums in Bennettsville and Dillon. The forums are open to the public. Since passage of the health care law this spring, several beneficial changes have already gone into effect and a many more are still to come. Make sure that you know the facts—not the fiction.

Monday, July 26th at 6 p.m., the forum will be held at the Bennettsville Community Center.

Thursday, July 29th at 6 pm, the Dillon County Chamber will host the forum at the Dillon Wellness Center.

Representatives from South Carolina Healthcare Voices will give the public an overview of the important changes in the health care law. Questions will be answered by representatives from the SCSBCC, SC Appleseed Legal Justice Center, AARP-SC and SC Fair Share.


9.8% Drop in WC Costs Approved

Workers’ compensation insurance premiums will soon be dropping for many South Carolina small businesses. The S.C. Department of Insurance recently approved an overall decrease of 9.8% in “loss costs” in the voluntary workers’ compensation market. The “loss costs” for insurance companies is the difference between premiums collected and the cost of claims including court costs. So insurance companies overall were on a path to collect more premiums from South Carolina businesses than they could justify, leading to the industry’s filing that will—on average—reduce premiums.

This is very good news. The SCSBCC has successfully fought giant proposed workers' compensation rate increases over the years and has saved the business community approximately $200 million in premiums since 2006. This downward trend in the cost of claims is a sign that the business community is doing a better job in worker safety.


Looking for Answers from Gubernatorial Candidates

The SCSBCC does not endorse candidates nor give campaign contributions, as explained in a recent blog. However, we have sent a questionnaire to each of the three candidates who will be on the ballot for Governor in November. Senator Vincent Sheheen, Representative Nikki Haley and Dr. Morgan Reeves each received our questionnaire earlier this month covering the issues of healthcare, energy, taxation and economic development.

We’ll report to you and the public how the candidates answered our questions and our comments on their responses, which are due on August 2nd. We are also examining the legislative voting records of Sheheen and Haley to compare how they voted on bills of interest to SCSBCC.


SCSBCC Partners with 3 National Biz Organizations

SCSBCC’s success over the last year in being actively and successfully engaged in federal legislation to reform health care, Wall Street and now small business lending has been made possible by our formal alliance with several national organizations:

• Small Business Majority—A national non-profit, nonpartisan organization, founded and run by small business owners, that brings the voices of America’s 28 million small businesses to the public policy table.
• Main Street Alliance—A national network of state-based small business coalitions. The Alliance creates opportunities for small business owners to speak for ourselves in key public policy debates.
• American Sustainable Business Council—A coalition of business networks committed to public policies that support a vibrant, just and sustainable economy. Partnering organizations represent over 48,000 businesses and social enterprises and more than 150,000 entrepreneurs, owners, executives, investors and business professionals.

SC Small Business Chamber of Commerce
The Advocate of South Carolina Small Business
1717 Gervais Street • Columbia • SC • 29201
http://www.scsbc.org/ • 803-252-5733



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