Taking the "Small Business" Out of the SBA

Matt Singer and New West are highlighting an interesting story in the New Mexico Business Weekly that shows the Bush administration is using the Small Business Administration (SBA) to funnel taxpayer money away from small businesses, and toward some of the biggest multi-national corporations (many of which are Bush donors).

As the story notes, "in recent years, billions of dollars in federal contracts that various government agencies claimed were awarded to small businesses actually went to big companies like Titan Corp., Raytheon Co., General Dynamics Corp., Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., Archer Daniels-Midland, and Hewlett-Packard Co." As the links show, those companies alone gave Republicans hundreds of thousands of dollars.

A few years ago, there was an effort to force more federal agencies to send small-business-earmarked dollars to actual small businesses - not just to huge corporate campaign contributors. Those efforts, not surprisingly, were voted down by Republicans.

Small businessowners may, demographically, be ideologically conservative, but they are the frontline casualties of a political system that increasingly only does the bidding of giant companies. As I have said before, this poses a major opportunity for Democrats to win over support from the small business community by showing exactly how the GOP's shilling for huge corporations often hurts small businesses on Main Street.