From MooreWatch comes a horrible story about Michael Moore's thoughts on American Small Business. This comes from a newspaper article covering a speech he gave at Humboldt State University March 5, 2002.
bq. �Small businesspeople are rednecks that suppress the town'
bq. You know in my town the small businesses that everyone wanted to protect? They were the people that supported all the right-wing groups. They were the Republicans in the town, they were in the Kiwanis, the Chamber of Commerce - people that kept the town all white. The small hardware salesman, the small clothing store salespersons, Jesse the Barber who signed his name three different times on three different petitions to recall me from the school board. Fuck all these small businesses - fuck 'em all! Bring in the chains. The small businesspeople are the rednecks that run the town and suppress the people. Fuck 'em all. That's how I feel."
Lee, the author of MooreWatch did a little proactive fact checking and found that in the USA, small business are responsible for the following:
bq. So, how important are small businesses to the US economy?
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bq.
- Represent more than 99.7 percent of all employers. bq.
- Employ more than half of all private sector employees bq.
- Pay 44.5 percent of total U.S. private payroll. bq.
- Generate 60 to 80 percent of net new jobs annually. bq.
- Create more than 50 percent of nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP). bq.
- Supplied 22.8 percent of the total value of federal prime contracts (about $50 billion) in FY 2001. bq.
- Produce 13 to 14 times more patents per employee than large patenting firms. These patents are twice as likely as large firm patents to be among the one percent most cited. bq.
- Are employers of 39 percent of high tech workers (such as scientists, engineers, and computer workers ) . bq.
- Are 53 percent home-based and 3 percent franchises. bq.
- Made up 97 percent of all identified exporters and produced 29 percent of the known export value in FY 2001.
