Huffington Post: The Kennedy Legacy vs Glenn Beck's Lies About Reform "Murdering" Small Businesses

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/art-levine/new-reports-small-busines_b_270116.html

Art Levine

Contributing editor of The Washington Monthly
Posted: August 27, 2009 03:29 AM

Last week, Glenn Beck supplemented his racist pandering by picking up the hoary right-wing talking point that both health care and labor reform would "murder" small businesses. Defending small businesses, in fact, is the last refuge of big businesses and their right-wing allies just defending their profit margins and the status quo. Yet Beck proclaimed (as noted in a right-wing blog):

"Small businesses in America...are dying -- and the government has their blood on its hands," Glenn Beck said Monday on his Fox News program which took the form of a town hall-style meeting. He added: The Obama administration and Congress is forcing socialized medicine down our throats. They're forcing unions to take over your successful businesses and hijacking the contracts of workers under the interestingly worded "Employee Free Choice Act." They're raising your capital gains taxes and, when that frightening cap-and-trade bill passes, energy prices are going to skyrocket so much that there is no way your small business is going to be able to afford to pay the utility bills.

Even as progressives look to honor the legacy of Senator Edward Kennedy by pushing harder for new health care and labor reforms (both of which he co-sponsored), conservatives are seeking to frighten small businesses with scare stories about the costs of reform. In response, new and updated reports by the pro-labor American Rights at Work group and a stepped-up organizing drive by the small business-based Main Street Alliance for health reform are challenging the smears and misinformation targeting this progressive legislation.

(In contrast to Glenn Beck's rants, you can hear straight talk about the politics of health care reform and the public option from Roger Hickey, the co-director of the Campaign for America's Future, this Thursday at 5:30 p.m on the Blog Talk Web radio show I co-host, "The D'Antoni and Levine Show.")

Whether it involves organizing rights or health care reform, or, historically, Medicare and the minimum wage, the alarmist cries from the right are always the same: this will bankrupt small businesses, destroy the private sector and cost millions of jobs. (Indeed, It's those sorts of bogus claims Sen. Edward Kennedy fought to overcome in nearly 50 years in the U.S. Senate as he championed workplace, anti-discrimination and health legislation favoring the poor and the middle-class.)

Yet as the AFL-CIO Now blog summarized some of the new reports on the economic impact of unions:

According to the report:


"The legislation will give back to small businesses the freedom to compete based on innovation and quality, instead of who can afford the most expensive anti-union consultants. In this economic crisis, the nation has a duty to enable entrepreneurs and start-up companies to focus on building sustainable, long-term success, instead of being forced to compete against irresponsible businesses in an unwinnable, low-wage race to the bottom."

The report, "The Employee Free Choice Act: Good for Small Business," looks at the reality behind the spin generated by opponents of the legislation, and points out that union-dense states have lower rates of small business failure. These facts are a valuable counter to rampant groundless rhetoric about the Employee Free Choice Act.

In addition, the ability of workers to freely form unions and bargain can provide small business owners and their employees with advantages like access to training and the ability to buy into health care pools to help lower the often-crippling costs of health care.

Most important, the advantages unions bring to workers in wages, benefits and economic security help boost workers' ability to buy goods and services in their community.

FULL story at link.