On Wednesday, October 21, President Barack Obama announced plans to convene a conference of “regulators, congressional leaders, lenders and small businesses to determine what additional steps we can take to get credit flowing to small businesses that want to expand and create more jobs.” Small business groups like the American Small Business League (ASBL) are concerned the real agenda of the upcoming Obama administration small business conference will be to adopt legislation and policy that will change the definition of a small business and divert federal small business contracts to wealthy venture capitalists. The Small Business Act requires that a small business be “independently owned.” Firms that are owned and controlled by venture capitalists are not considered small businesses in federal small business contracting and grant programs. The venture capital industry, led by the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) has spent millions of dollars lobbying members of Congress to change the current definition of a small business to allow even billionaire venture capitalists to participate in federal small business contracting programs

WASHINGTON — Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, who is fighting for his political survival, proposed Monday an immediate interest rate freeze on existing balances for the estimated 700 million credit cards in circulation. The legislation is unlikely to go anywhere in the Senate, where business-minded Democrats would join Republicans in casting the measure as draconian and unnecessary. Banks say that capping interest rates would cut their profits and force them to lend less money, which would reduce spending and worsen the economy

Yahoo! News : On the auction block in Detroit: almost 9,000 homes and lots in various states of abandonment and decay from the tidy owner-occupied to the burned-out shell claimed by squatters. Taken together, the properties seized by tax collectors for arrears and put up for sale last week represented an area the size of New York’s Central Park. Total vacant land in Detroit now occupies an area almost the size of Boston, according to a Detroit Free Press estimate


 
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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has been vociferous in its opposition to White House initiatives on financial reform, health care reform and climate change legislation. The pro-business behemoth boasts 3 million members (though that number has been disputed since it includes hundreds of smaller chambers around the country) and shelled out $34.7 million on lobbying expenditures in the third quarter of 2009.

In the coming months, we will come together to offer a tangential view — not a consensus view, and certainly not the average view. We seek to synthesize information and ideas from different vectors and extrapolate a resultant vector in an orthogonal dimension. Raj is an entrepreneur/technologist born and raised in India, educated in the United States, who now markets green energy solutions globally.

Soon after Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) announced today that health care reform legislation taking shape in the Senate would include a provision for a public insurance plan that would compete with private insurers, the top lobbyist for the health insurance industry called the milestone a roadblock. “A new government-run plan would underpay doctors and hospitals rather than driving real reforms that bring down costs and improve quality,” said Karen Ignagni, president and CEO of trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, in a statement. “The American people want health care reform that will reduce costs and this plan doesn’t do that.