Sent to my Senators, Congresspeople, and the President:
Small business owner, here. Ten employees, twenty years in downtown Sacramento. We sell mostly outside the state and internationally. I just wanted to relay a few hard facts to you.
1) The SBA is broken and useless. No bank is interested in helping with debt consolidation, and no bank is interested in the ARC loan program. We’ve always had a good credit history, but all historical precedent and apparently all logic has disappeared. I continually read articles about how small businesses generate most of the jobs in the U.S., and how the focus should shift away from helping massive financial institutions that produce nothing and benefit only a few, towards helping small businesses cope with the disastrous crash of October 2008 – and I will tell you frankly that it is all too late.
The ARC program is a joke. If you qualify, you’ve already been out of business for a year. Even if you survived, and you still qualify, absolutely no financial institution is interested in providing ARC loans. It’s a useless program, a fool’s game for small-business owners already working 80 hours a week, who divert time and resources to pursuing debt consolidation, only to find out that the whole thing is a complete waste of time. So, worse than a simple lie, it is also a destructive lie. You should know that down here in the nitty-gritty real world, the SBA is absolutely powerless and dysfunctional, useless and fake – score one for Big Finance. Speaking of which:
2) Financial institutions are now engaging in rapacious practices that will doom the surviving small businesses for the purposes of protecting short-term profits. Even the venerable Bank Of America has turned to cannibalizing its oldest small business customers, raising fees, freezing credit lines, and hiking credit rates, taking actions that will damage job growth for the next decade – while taking billions from our taxes to do so. Short-term profit; long-term national devastation. Not too smart.
From down here, it looks like nothing is working. No one is paying attention to us on any functional, local level. I do not expect that we’ll survive the next year, so count these ten jobs lost. We’re an honest business, and our word is our bond. We work hard, we’ve survived the worst, and now comes this wave of profit-taking by an oligarchic financial industry that has no wisdom, no judgment, no guidance – only an insect-like propensity to defeat sensible regulation, destroy the best programs, and consume people’s lives.
If you can’t figure out a way to make the SBA work, there will be no true recovery, and the misery index for the average citizen will continue to rise. If you can’t get help to small business like us, then Republicans will be returning to power sooner than later, because they’ll be able to claim that the Democrats failed. Of course, they created the problem, and are blocking all solutions – but the American Public thinks only in sound bites these days, and no one seems to have time for the facts, only for the false narrative -- what a heavy price we’re going to pay for that in the end.
We don’t command the financial power necessary to play politics; therefore we are the prey of those who do. How very nineteen-thirties. The Robber-Barons ride again.
I know you’ve got a lot on your plate right now. But you need to know – it can’t go on this way. If you can, find a way to fix the SBA. Right now, it’s worse than useless to everyone that really needs it.
Bank Of America froze our company's credit line last week without warning. No letter, no call, no nothing -- The 'Risk Department' decided we were a bad bet after twenty years with the bank, with not a single late payment, no bankruptcies, no defaults, and relatively good credit.
I've been reading this story over and over everywhere, so I'm not surprised. Still, it stings. Bad.
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