Posted by maguro_01, a resident of the Jackson Park neighborhood, on Nov 8, 2011 at 5:34 pm

Main Street, ~500 or fewer employees, is the real source of innovation, enterprise, and net new jobs. The exceptional companies around here don't change that basically. So the bill would seem a good step forwards. So far Congress, especially the right, has been bought by Wall Street and left Main Street twisting in the wind to our detriment.

The SBIC programs governed by the SBA have also been a source of funding for smaller companies and some of the participating VC's are around here.

The multinational corporations with their present hq's in the US are not, or are no longer, American companies. This would be true even if the US economy was doing well and was not structurally distorted. The companies are global and see their future growth and profits elsewhere. Since they can still Pay-To-Play in Washington, that's what they buy there. Effectively they hijack government, enabled by our Pay-To-Play system.

Perhaps now we can define Main Street as companies that don't do Pay-To-Play in Washington instead of ~500 or fewer employees, Organizations like the US Chamber of Commerce have been hijacked by the hard right politically and don't seem to represent its membership. The CEA may be similar.

Note, however, that Eshoo's record is mixed. She is also a strong advocate for large corporate agendas including visa worker programs extreme enough that it makes less and less real sense for American students to get near STEM at all. These days they may get a first job but will not have a career even if they are good. While being able to draw first-rate people as we still do is a privilege, the sheer number of STEM people is diminishing the US supply very seriously, a grave error and a result of the Washington Pay-To-Play system, not markets.