If you think the high arrogance of the Bush administration is confined to its dismissiveness about Abu Ghraib; its shrugging off the admonitions of former military brass; its bogus rationale, management and cost of the war in Iraq; its domestic spying and its insistence on tax cuts for people with money to burn, think again.
Apparently, there is no limit, there are no edges, there are no boundaries to Bushist hubris. Even a relatively backwater agency like the Small Business Administration has got Can’t Touch This fever.
For years, the SBA has run a program called the Small Business Investment Company, which licenses venture capitalists to use a mix of federal dollars and their own to kick-start small businesses around the country. Four years ago, an Atlanta-based firm named Diamond Ventures applied for an SBIC license. Diamond wanted to invest in inner city upstarts, with a focus on women and racial minority entrepreneurs.
Despite a stellar track record in previous ventures by Diamond’s experienced, highly accomplished partners, SBA turned Diamond down. The agency concluded that the principal members of the management team were not up to the work.
Diamond filed suit against the SBA in 2003, charging racial discrimination, in part because, allegedly, SBA did not apply the same standards to Diamond as it had for other applicants. Even the agency’s own inspector general had a problem with how SBA assessed Diamond’s application. In fact, he concluded that the SBA didn’t even follow the usual rules in how it rejected Diamond.
At every turn so far in federal court, Diamond has won. Every motion SBA has filed has been denied. Every one Diamond has filed has been granted, most notably the one requesting SBA’s records on SBIC awards. It’s been a year since the court ordered the data released. SBA has ignored that order.
Since then, both House and Senate members have demanded an accounting from the SBA, having grown suspicious of its secrecy and of repeated charges that the agency, indeed, has plenty good reason to hide its records.
Proving that it is non-partisan in its intransigence and disrespect, then-SBA Administrator Hector Barreto (Barreto resigned in late May to become head of The Latino Coalition advocacy group in Washington) and his staff ignored demands from a federal district court judge; Rep. Nydia Velazquez, D-N.Y., the ranking member of the House Small Business Committee; Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., ranking member of the Senate Small Business Committee, and, recently, Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Not so much as a “bug off” from SBA.
I have two dogs in this hunt: First, one of Diamond’s partners is a close friend -- an earnest brother who wants to help and has the chops to do it. Second, as a fully vested, taxpaying United States citizen, I am sick to death of being flipped off by the hired help, which this, and any, administration most assuredly is.
From the start, the Bush clan has made it clear that only established, big-monied players count. Merely aspiring to such stature does not get you in the game. Moreover, if you don’t aspire to be one of the big boys, but only want to feed and clothe and house and heal yourself and your family, you count for naught.
Where do you turn when that happens? For all of its reassuring language, what good is the Constitution if it is flouted and without consequence? We’ve seen this with the whole National Security Agency wiretapping issue, whereby the president himself not only clearly violated law, but has essentially said he would do it again and will continue to do so.
I should not be shocked, then, that a functionary like Baretto would follow his master’s lead and ignore legal and constitutional protocols, mistreating a small band of well-intended investors who only want to animate the president’s own rhetoric about an “ownership society.”
Proof once more that Bush is nothing short of a crook.
