The most powerful and experienced public relations officer from the Pentagon has taken over the Small Business Administration (SBA) press office. Why?
Retired Naval Commander Terrence Sutherland has had a long career with the Department of Defense (DoD) managing public relations damage control. Sutherland is a public relations heavy hitter who has handled the most high profile and sensitive events for the DoD for over a decade. He has been the worldwide spokesman for the Pentagon on a wide range of issues such as reviewing Saddam Hussein tapes, rape, murder, accidental deaths, shootings by military personal, crashes of spy planes, terrorist attacks and 9/11 whistle blowers.
Now, he has taken over what may be one of the most important and sensitive public relations campaigns the Pentagon and its largest prime contractors have ever embarked upon: Closing the SBA.
Senior Pentagon officials and some of the biggest names in the defense and aerospace industry have been lobbying for more than thirty years to close the SBA in order to cover up decades of rampant fraud in federal small business contracting programs by the DoD and its prime contractors. The excuses from the government that every year, for over a decade, small business contracts wind up in the hands of some of the nation's largest defense contractors as a result of "miscoding, computer glitches, anomalies and simple human error" are starting to wear thin and are no longer believable or sustainable.
ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN have all covered the story of the diversion of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal small business contracts to major Pentagon prime contractors.
During the Reagan Administration, the Pentagon was the driving force behind two failed campaigns to close the SBA. Reagan's plan was to close the SBA by combining it with the Department of Commerce. In November of 2008, I predicted President Obama would resurrect Reagan's campaign to close the SBA and end all federal programs to assist the nation's 28 million small businesses by combining it with the Department of Commerce.
In January 2012, President Obama proved me right and announced his plan to close the SBA by combining it with the Department of Commerce.
Sutherland's new mission for the Pentagon will be to try and convince Congress, the media and the public that the SBA is not really being closed but is just being combined with the Department of Commerce to "streamline government." One of his largest obstacles will be to obscure the fact that the SBA budget is just 0.04 percent of the Department of Defense's budget and any savings by combining the SBA and the Department of Commerce would be statistically insignificant.
For example, President Obama has claimed $300 million a year can be saved by combining the SBA and Department of Commerce. Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced over $2.3 trillion in Pentagon spending could not be accounted for. A recent investigation by the GAO found up to 25 percent of Pentagon expenditures cannot be accounted for.
Another challenge for Sutherland will be to overcome the lunacy of Obama's statement that he wants to close the SBA to save a paltry $300 million. At the same time he's trying to close the SBA to save money, he plans to spend $7 billion of our tax dollars to build power plants in Africa under a program named, "Power Africa." Obama's "Power Africa" budget would fund the SBA for a decade and fund his $300 million annual savings for over 23 years.
A major part of Sutherland's job will be to try and silence me and the American Small Business League (ASBL) and to block all of our efforts to simply tell the truth about who wants the SBA closed, why they want it closed and what the catastrophic negative impact that closing the SBA would have on job creation and the national economy.
Sutherland will no doubt employ the services of some of the largest public relations firms in the country to block ASBL press releases, blogs, YouTube videos, radio shows and national television appearances. In the past, the SBA hired APCO Worldwide, an international public relations firm that specializes in "crisis management." Documents I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act found the SBA had paid APCO Worldwide as much as $25,000 in a day to silence me.
It is with absolute certainty that some of the billions of dollars the Pentagon cannot account for will be used to fund their fraudulent public relations campaign to close the SBA and end all federal programs to assist America's 28 million small businesses. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, those small businesses are responsible for over 90 percent of the net new jobs, over 50 percent of the private sector work force, over 50 percent of the GDP and over 90 percent of all U.S. exporters.
Make no mistake, a man with Terrence Sutherland's background taking over the SBA press office is a clear indication that the Pentagon's top prime contractors are planning to mount their most powerful campaign ever to cover up hundreds of billions of dollars in felony federal contracting fraud and close the SBA.
I personally consider any politician or federal employee that lies to the American people and works to close the only agency in our government to assist the small businesses where most Americans work to be a shameful disgrace to everything that every American who ever died in combat was fighting for.
For the latest video from the ASBL, click here.