In a position paper on the issue, the Chamber sets forth a somewhat different scenario than it offered up in its newspaper advertising. The CFPA, it argues, would have such a terrible effect on the credit-granting industry that entrepreneurs and small business would go begging, says the Chamber. “It does not go too far to suggest that the CFPA Act of 2009 could deny the credit that garage-based entrepreneurs need to create the next Apple or Hewlett Packard,” says the Chamber.

In other words, if banks are prevented from abusing customers, they may pick up their marbles and…do what? Transfer their operations to Tahiti? That sounds an awful lot like the quasi-extortionate line of reasoning that Wall Street firms and hedge funds always use whenever effective regulation is proposed. Fortunately, there is pushback to that old canard.

Two small business groups, the American Sustainable Business Council and Business For Shared Prosperity, have begun to organize to keep the CFPA alive. The former has 200 signatories on a letter supporting the CFPA from a small-business standpoint, and Shared Prosperity already has a long list of backers on a petition, commenced last week, favoring creation of the CFPA, including Morgot Dorfman, CEO of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce.

These small businesspeople and entrepreneurs are backing the consumer agency for a reason that seems ludicrously simple in light of recent events, but seems to already have been forgotten. Had this agency been in existence during the housing bubble, there would have been a government agency with the power—and presumably the motivation—to put a stop to the predatory lending practices that preyed on consumers, and which were the raw materials for the pernicious financial products that were the proximate cause of the financial crisis.

"CFPA would raise consumer-protection standards for all types of credit and ensure that small-business owners are protected from unfair and deceptive credit options," says the ASBC. "Special interests lobbying against the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency don't speak for the business community," said one St. Louis entrepreneur who has joined the Business for Shared Prosperity petition drive.

No, they don’t. The question is whether Congress will have the gumption to stand up to a powerful big-business pressure group on an issue of such vital importance. Don’t hold your breath—but don’t give up hope, either.