Big companies are starting to dance it up. Wall Street firms are almost back to prerecession levels; Goldman Sachs’ third quarter revenues doubled and earnings tripled. Even Ford and General Motors have gotten a whiff of smelling salts.

But smaller companies on Main Street? They’re not at the party.

Just last week, the Credit Management Association of Burbank released its third quarter survey of 800 credit managers across the western United States, and 64 percent said their collections of trade credit remain no better than fair. Worse, 74 percent see no change in the near future.

Trade credit is heavily used by medium and smaller companies; it is an unsecured loan that is repaid when goods are sold. So the fact that most companies are reporting that collections of such credit are only fair and that three out of four companies don’t see any improvement soon, well, that doesn’t exactly portend a quick bounce back for smaller companies.

Although misinformed anti-corporate travel rhetoric is starting to subside in Washington, the media is still bent on keeping the controversy alive. Months of damaging negative press – often inaccurate – continue to haunt the meetings segment of the hospitality industry, which employs 2.4 million Americans and generates $240 billion in spending and $39 billion in tax revenue.

A great example of this is a local CBS affiliate’s implication that Caltrans employees lived it up on state funding at a luxury Palm Springs resort, which was hosting the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials convention Oct. 22-26. The report asserts that the trip violated non-essential travel banned by the State, but buries the fact that the trip was approved as an exception because it has been proven that these types of conferences not only foster collaboration, idea-sharing and generation, but provides an opportunity for California transportation officials to network with federal transportation officials and open up millions in federal monies for California road projects.

At first blush, it seems to make a
lot of sense.  As National AG, Eric
Holder says, paraphrased, let them have their justice rendered within blocks of
the National Memorial where the Twin Towers that they destroyed used to stand.  Unfortunately, that is also the prima facie showing on the criminal defense
side of our judicial system in support of a motion for a change of venue for
the trial on the basis that nobody could ever hope to have a fair trial if
conducted in the literal shadows of this horrendous crime against humanity
where thousands died so horribly on national TV and in reality.

I know, I know . . . we all have
our image of the quintessential old-timey situation where they catch the horse
thieves and somebody yells out -‘Let’s hang ‘em from the nearest tree,’ and
then somebody else, usually the justice of the peace, yells out – ‘No, let’s
give ‘em a fair trial first, then
let’s hang ‘em from the nearest tree!’ 
But, that is not what our legal system stands for in the modern post
WWII era, not since the Nuremberg Trials anyway. 

Sen. Dianne Feinstein said recently that she won’t decide whether to run for governor until she sees what the current candidates plan to do with the state budget.

Fine. Budget plans are important. She should start with hers.

When asked recently by an Associated Press reporter whether she was thinking about big-footing her way into next year’s governor’s race, California’s senior senator said, in effect, “Maybe.”

First, though, she wants to see what plans the existing pack of candidates have to deal with the state’s ongoing budget woes and determine how committed they are to making the changes that are needed.

“California is in considerable distress and there have to be reforms,’’ she said.

I am shocked, shocked, shocked to discover a press spokesman
taping on-the-record conversations between his boss and reporters.

This
sort of recording took place only just about every time I interviewed a
politician during the 2008 presidential campaign. And during the 2003
gubernatorial campaign. And during most high-profile campaigns for office. And
during any number of impromptu press availabilities in the state Capitol. Such
taping, after all, is only legal in 38 states of the 50 states, so such an
obviously illegal act truly is outrageous. For someone to record such
conversations over the phone now, as former Jerry Brown spokesman Scott Gerber
did… Hey, did I mention I was shocked?

And I totally share the outrage on
both left and right over the attorney general’s investigation, which was so
cursory that it only released 93 pages of transcripts and emails that, in the
effort to cover up this terrible crime, revealed that Brown’s chief deputy Jim
Humes had advance warning of at least one of the tapings.

Milton Friedman famously observed that there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program. In the political world, the Democrats have learned that something of the reverse is also true: there is nothing so temporary as a permanent political trend.

One year ago, Democrats were proclaiming they had established in 2008 a winning political coalition that would last a generation. Independent voters had joined labor unions, ethnic and other groups to form an invincible coalition that would guarantee Democrat victories for the foreseeable future.

Well, the “foreseeable future” lasted about as long as a failed one season comedy on NBC.

What a difference a year makes. Today, Democrats are clearing out of two governor’s offices while Republicans are preparing to move in. A Republican is preparing to take a seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, four counties in New York State fell this month, and the list goes on.

“Hope” and “change” may have been enough in 2008, but that didn’t cut it in 2009.

It’s been a tough year for small businesses in California. But thanks to Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, 2010 could be a little brighter because the members of our small business organization are less likely to be saddled with increased workers’ compensation insurance costs of as much as 23 percent.

Poizner recently stood up to the Workers’ Compensation Insurance Rating Bureau (WCIRB), an insurance industry financed organization, by rejecting its call for a 22.8 percent rate increase in workers’ comp premiums. That would mean the costs of covering the hundreds of thousands of our member’s employees would jump almost 25 percent. And that’s just the average – some of our members could have seen rates jump much higher.

It’s no secret that higher operating costs means less job creation and could eventually lead to further layoffs, adding to the state’s already record-high unemployment rate.

When he was governor three decades ago, Jerry Brown explained his political philosophy this way: “You paddle a little bit on the left, then you paddle a little bit on the right and you keep going straight down the middle.” As John Wildermuth pointed out here on Fox and Hounds,
Brown is not the first politician to try this system. Bill Clinton and friends called it triangulation. But, Brown’s description is more appealing and it makes it easier to examine what he has been up to lately.

Brown has been paddling hard on the right side of the canoe.

On Wednesday, Brown told LegalNewsline.com that over-regulation and too many laws were hurting California business.

"The whole framework of law is crucial for the operations of business enterprises," Brown said in the interview. "But when over prescriptive, it creates a huge and growing amount of overhead and it does seem that we’re reaching the point of counter-productivity." Brown indicated too many laws make it too easy to sue in California.

Legislators are generally convinced that if people only paid more attention to the work elected officials do in Sacramento, there would be a lot more sympathy for the plight of the poor politician.

But a poll released Thursday by the Public Policy Institute of California seems to show that the more involved people are in government, the less they like the people making the laws.

Take, for example, the job approval ratings for the state Legislature. When the poll asked a sample of all California adults how the Assembly and state Senate were doing, 18 percent thought they were doing a good job.

Limit that sample to people registered to vote in the state and the approval rate slips to 15 percent. But when only those people who are registered and likely to vote are surveyed, the Legislature’s approval skids to a rock-bottom figure of 10 percent. That’s a record, by the way, but don’t expect to see any celebrations in the Capitol.