As Big Business Is Accused of Becoming ‘Woke,’ Small Business Is Looking to Go Its Own Way

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/29/opinion/chamber-congress-small-business.html

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Big Business and the Republican Party used to be as close as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but not anymore. On social issues such as abortion and race, the Republican Party has moved to the right while many big corporations have shifted left in an effort to please their diverse mix of employees and customers. Many companies embraced Black Lives Matter. Now a number are promising to cover travel expenses for employees who need to go to another state to get an abortion.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents the biggest multinationals as well as smaller companies, is feeling the heat. Republicans in Congress were annoyed that the U.S. Chamber endorsed 23 first-term House Democrats for re-election in 2020. They complained this year when Suzanne Clark, the U.S. Chamber’s chief executive, teamed up with Brian Deese, President Biden’s National Economic Council director, to write an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal on how to solve the housing shortage.

Some G.O.P. lawmakers are more comfortable dealing with organizations such as the National Federation of Independent Business and the Job Creators Network that focus on small business. Generally speaking, small business owners lean more conservative than chief executives of large corporations. Social issues are lower on their priority list than taxes and regulation.

“The U.S. Chamber is a lost cause,” Alfredo Ortiz, chief executive of the Job Creators Network, said in written statement for this article. “The chamber is not an advocate for small businesses or the private sector. It regularly supports big government and ‘woke’ policies that small businesses oppose.”

I recently interviewed Gentry Collins, the chief executive of a new organization, the American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce, that’s positioning itself as an anti-woke alternative to the U.S. Chamber. It, too, is focused on small business. It is based in Des Moines, Iowa, and led by Terry Branstad, a former Iowa governor who was appointed U.S. ambassador to China by President Donald Trump and served there from 2017 to 2020.

“We’ve been working on it probably for the best part of a year,” said Collins, who is a past national political director for the Republican National Committee and the Republican Governors Association.

He said he and others had been hearing complaints from companies, including gun sellers, that were in danger of going out of business because payment processors were refusing to work with them. Some payment processors steer clear of gun sellers to avoid legal liability. “There’s a trend in recent years toward deplatforming businesses that are in disfavored lines of work for political and ideological reasons, not for illegal behavior,” Collins said.

Another complaint, Collins said, was that big businesses were allowed to stay open during the Covid-19 pandemic while small ones had to shut down.

“Then comes the conversation about why isn’t someone doing something about this,” Collins said. “We found a great deal of frustration on Capitol Hill about the very same matter. The biggest of the big had plenty of advocacy. We’re not here to say there’s anything wrong with Big Business. What we oppose is an uneven playing field.”

The American Free Enterprise Chamber of Commerce, or AmFree Chamber, as it’s calling itself, is starting small. Collins said he and a couple of administrative staff members are the only paid employees so far. Fifteen or so volunteers are also supporting the organization, he said. Dues are $99 a year, regardless of company size, so that companies of all sizes have an equal voice, Collins said.

Branstad, who was an early supporter of Trump’s presidential candidacy, is “a very active chairman,” Collins said. He said Branstad has not been in touch with Trump about AmFree Chamber.

Collins said he would “enthusiastically” support Democrats for office if they lined up with AmFree Chamber’s agenda. Referring to the U.S. Chamber’s 2020 endorsement of 23 first-term House Democrats, he said: “My heartburn isn’t that they were Democrats. My heartburn is that not a single one of them voted the chamber’s way on the issues that were really important to the future of free enterprise.”

(The U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorses candidates who score 70 percent or more on its rating system, regardless of party affiliation. For example, in the 116th Congress, which was in session from 2019 to 2021, Representative Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican, had a rating of just 49 percent, while Senator Kyrsten Sinema, an Arizona Democrat, had a rating of 81 percent.)

I asked Collins if he felt any sympathy for big-company chief executives whose employees are pressuring them to be progressive on social issues. In a way, yes, he said: “We are beginning to lose a generational battle over whether free enterprise is a force for good in our world. When C.E.O.s only hear from a set of employees that have never been exposed to the story of free enterprise’s role in human flourishing, that to me is a failure of us to tell our story.”

To get the U.S. Chamber’s perspective I interviewed Neil Bradley, the organization’s executive vice president and chief policy officer. He said: “We’re focused on advocating for our members in the business community. There are a lot of important fights right now we’re in the middle of: stopping tax increases, lowering tariffs, expanding energy production, fighting against overregulation.” As for AmFree Chamber, Bradley added: “We’ll work with anyone. Nothing’s going to distract us from our mission of working for our members.”

Right now AmFree Chamber is still more of an aspiration than a player. Its website includes a 10-part “bill of rights” that is studiedly uncontroversial. “The role of government should be limited, transparent and fair” is one principle. (As opposed to unlimited, opaque and unfair?) AmFree Chamber probably would not exist today if Big Business and the Republican Party had remained on better terms. The cracks in that long-term alliance are worth paying attention to whether or not AmFree Chamber ever becomes a power player.

The green economy will need low-cost, long-term, clean energy storage so that electricity generated from the wind and the sun can be stored and consumed hours, days or even months later. For batteries, the element of the future could wind up being the same as the element of the past: iron. Iron flow batteries are made from food-grade iron, salt and water. Nothing toxic. Their energy density — the amount of energy that they store per unit of volume — is quite low, so they will never be used in cellphones. But they’re ideal for storage on the electrical grid, where space is not a consideration. The battery company ESS of Wilsonville, Ore., is a leader in the nascent technology and got its start with the help of the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, a unit of the U.S. Department of Energy. Who says the Iron Age is over?

“We can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness.”

— Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking, Fast and Slow” (2011)

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