Most mainstream American whites like to indulge themselves with the comfortable belief that we, as a nation, have long since conquered the ugly scourge of racism. That is why, when minorities complain of the racially-based challenges they continue to face, those complaints are often chalked up to hypersensitivity and dismissed. Sadly for them, the numbers [...]

During the Maryland event where the President made his Big Announcement, he said, “This administration is going to stand behind small businesses. You are our highest priority because we are confident that when you are succeeding, America succeeds.”

Are you feeling all warm and fuzzy yet?

I hate to have to burst your bubble, Mr. President, but, so far as I can tell, we only have your word for it that we are your highest priority. By any measure, whether it is time and attention, money and investment, even your failure to redeem your campaign promise to raise the SBA Administrator to Cabinet-level status, we have no evidence that we are any sort of priority to your Administration.

As you may recall, the Tax and Finance Subcommittee of the House Small Business Committee reported out a package of several bills which, combined, would reauthorize and tweak the SBA’s small business access to capital programs. In the next step in that process, the full Committee heard witness testimony about what various segments of the [...]

Oversight hearings, which fell out of fashion during most of the Bush Administration, came roaring back when Democrats took over Congress in 2006. In fact, there were those who thought said Democrats would use said oversight hearings to exact their revenge against Republicans for nameless partisan crimes and misdemeanors. That didn’t happen, of course. Mr. [...]

When they start talking about what they are going to do to help small businesses get through this recession, the only thing that seems to occur to them is to think of sixty-seven different ways that small businesses can take out a loan.

In fact, from the microbusiness point of view, loans seem to be the government’s answer to everything. If the economy is great, take out a loan! If the economy sucks, take out a loan!

If a tornado drops your house on the Wicked Witch of the East, take out a loan!

Do you remember the Credit Cardholders Bill of Rights? That piece of legislation, co-authored by Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D-MA), was supposed to ride herd on credit card issuers and their sometimes nightmarish practices, such as arbitrarily altering contract terms, retroactive billing and seemingly deliberate obfuscation of [...]

Probably the most urgent concern that policy makers have about small businesses in the current downturn, and the one they are best positioned to address, is access to capital. And the tool best suited to address that issue is the Small Business Administration’s 7(a) guaranteed loan program. Under normal circumstances, those 7(a) loans are counter-cyclical. [...]

It’s cute and quaint to think of microbusinesses as nothing more than the “Mom & Pop” restaurant down the street. And many of them are precisely that. But the fact is that microbusinesses are also developing new business models, new ways of structuring businesses, new products and services, and new ways to add value to existing products and services.

Microbusinesses are cutting edge; they are leading the way into the future. If American capitalism were working properly, these should be the very last firms that have trouble accessing capital.

New research released by the National Association for the Self-Employed last week found that approximately 3.8 million microbusiness owners hold an estimated 93% of so-called “toxic mortgages” that put them in immediate danger of foreclosure and homeless in the near future. Not only that, but mortgage brokers evidently deliberately targeted prime or near-prime microbusiness borrowers [...]

To say that Senator John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship, has long been concerned about the impacts of the credit markets on small businesses is a bit of an understatement. In fact, Chairman Kerry and his counterpart, Committee Ranking Member Olympia Snowe (R- ME), have been pressing the [...]