Michael Hiltzik: Who speaks up for small business?

Or perhaps the better question is: Who pays it more than lip service?

The publicity handouts of political officeholders and candidates brim with concern for small businesses and their entrepreneurs as the engineers of economic growth, salt of the earth, creators of jobs, etc. etc. Here's Meg Whitman on the subject. Here's Steve Poizner. Carly Fiorina. Barack Obama.

But as my Wednesday column observes, almost nothing they've done or proposed really addresses the problems that are strangling these job-creators at every level. Banks are still not lending. Credit card processors are holding them up, as if at gunpoint. Credit remains frozen everywhere. Every small-business owner I've ever talked to in this state has complained that they have no way to get help dealing wth the multiple layers of bureaucracy in California -- state, county, air district, you name it. Let Meg, Steve, or Jerry name a small-business coordinator now and describe how he or she will really pare away red tape, and that will be a sign of progress.

The column starts below.

Gina Quatrine declared that her furniture factory was a "true old-fashioned European workshop" -- which seemed a bit incongruous, given that we were standing on a concrete shop floor in an industrial neighborhood of Rancho Dominguez.

Yet there was no contradicting her. All around us, Quatrine Custom Furniture's artisans were working with their hands, here planing the alder frame of a sofa soon to be upholstered with genuine cotton batting, there stitching a slipcover from a bolt of embroidered fabric, all in the name of creating a piece that will be sturdy and serviceable long after your mass-produced living room set has been placed out on the curb.

Quatrine, 48, serves a loyal and discriminating clientele from six retail stores in California, Michigan, Illinois and Texas. Every piece she sells is made to order in this factory, from a catalog of about 30 styles and hundreds of fabrics.

The firm was launched as a furniture retailer 20 years ago by Quatrine, a Southern California native, and started manufacturing its own pieces about five years later.

Quatrine Custom Furniture is the quintessential small business. It struggles with health insurance bills for its employees, an indifferent state bureaucracy, a drop-off in customers, and a remorseless credit freeze that still shows few signs of a springtime thaw.

"When you're a small business you're a microcosm of everything," she told me. "There are no stimulus programs or packages for us, no [free enterprise] zones."

Read the whole column.

-- Michael Hiltzik