Voters mad about something

The trouble with polls is they lump everyone's individual opinion into clumps and ascribe the results as indicative of what all Americans think.

But whenever I read a news story about poll results, I remember what my first wife told me: Opinions are like assholes, everybody has got one.

That's why when I heard Charlie Rose and David Brooks, the New York Times columnist, agree the other day that the Obama administration didn't seem to fathom the angry wind sweeping the country over health-care reform and deficit spending, I shouted at my television that the pair's conclusion was wrong, wrong, wrong. I had seen no polls to support the breadth of the anger with government.

Now I have. The Washington Post reported today that their Post-ABC News poll of 1,004 randomly selected adults taken from Feb. 4-8, showed two-thirds of Americans were dissatisfied or outright angry at the way Washington works nowadays, one year after Barack Obama's inauguration. The headline over the Denver Post's story read: "Poll: Americans unhappy with government's tack." And the implication, amidst all the newstalk of the so-called "Tea Party movement," was that most of the anger being generated is a result of Obama's attempts to reform health care.

I submit much of the anger is also generated as a result of Obama's and Congress's failure to reform health care in America.

In fact, the Washington Post poll found more of those polled viewed "Tea Party" views unfavorably (40 percent) than those polled who found those views favorable (35 percent), and a full quarter of those polled (25 percent) offered no opinion at all when asked that question.

Which means the angry "wind" Rose and Brooks were describing Monday night is mostly huff and puff. Brooks noted that the president's personal popularity still out scores any dissatisfaction with his policies, and the Washington Post admits in its story that what "Tea Party" advocates advocate is almost unfathomable because the "movement" is so disorganized and disparate.

So come November, if the winds keep on a blowin', incumbents of every stripe are going to be at risk of voters' wrath. The American people want to see results out of Washington; not bipartisan incompatibility.

New journalism: partisan but professional

My headline ought to get some of my journalistic colleagues' juices flowing, but according to a writer in The Atlantic's January/February issue, American journalists are going to have to make some accommodation with the concept.

In fact, I'm making an accommodation to the notion with this ongoing blog. I'm writing about small business and politics from a very liberal perspective. And I hope to attract advertisers to my readership.

Paul Starr, a professor at Princeton, wrote the Atlantic piece. In "Governing in the Age of Fox News," Starr states toward the end: "Although most American journalists assume that professionalism and partisanship are inherently incompatible, that is not necessarily so. Partisan media can, and in some countries do, observe professional standards in their presentation of the news."

I have always questioned the journalistic principle of so-called "objectivity" in news coverage because I know as a writer the way you put words to paper (or on a screen) is inherently subjective. What nouns you use, what adjectives are colored by the writer's choice of words.

There's no escaping the tinge except by the samurai editor's butchering sword.

Unfortunately, quality of writing often slides away with the fat of a trim; occassionally, however, the cuts can actually make the writing better.

I take my journalistic principles and professionalism to the writing of this blog. I mean for my profiles of small businesses to carry the good and the bad about a firm, although my advocacy for small business will emphasize the good over the bad in most cases. And I will always give a business owner the benefit of the doubt.

I will not, however, give business as a community a pass when it comes to the harsher side of issues. Colorado's current debate over the elimination of tax exemptions for business is an example.

The tax exemptions should be removed in an attempt to balance two state budgets (fiscal 2010 and 2011) despite any damage to the state's reputation as "business friendly." A "people friendly" business community will recognize it must contribute to fiscal austerity that requires Colorado to reduce services to all its citizens.

At the same time, legislators should not forget that business owners are citizens, too, and already share as much as anyone else in the general pain.

Tax exemptions can be restored as well as removed.

If the state would correct its budgeting problems, if it can regain some economic steam, and refuel its revenue streams, exemptions and incentives can be given back as easily as they can be taken away.

Business and the business lobby knows that. They should begin working for the common good rather than their own self-interest.

Looking for a few good small businesses

Tom Mauro is looking for a few good small businesses that want to make themselves better.

Mauro, a retired banker, is CEO of Colorado Performance Excellence, a largely volunteer organization celebrating it's 10th anniversary this year, an anniversary marking a decade-long effort to improve other Colorado business organizations.

Make them better.

The tool CPEx uses for improving both nonprofit and for-profit business organizations is the criteria for winning a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, which for me has always been a mouthful.

After 10 years, the award remains a mouthful, but for two Colorado business organizations, the award is a mark of national recognition and source of pride.

Poudre Valley Health Systems in Fort Collins won the national award for health in 2008 and the Monfort College of Business at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley won the award for education in 2004.

The Monfort school, with a staff of about 50 people when it won, was the smallest organization to ever win the award from Colorado, Mauro said, but he is looking for small businesses to hook up with his program so he can improve on that record.

"Job growth is going to come from small businesses," Mauro said, "and if we're going to be a service to the State of Colorado, we really need to focus on figuring out how to get them involved" in Colorado Performance Excellence.

But Mauro knows getting involved in a Baldrige application, either for a state or a national award, or, more simply, merely for the feedback on your organization's performance, requires a small-business owner's significant investment of time and money, and that the prospect of making that investment is a disincentive to the owner.

"It's more or less: 'We just don't have the resources to take the time to do this,'" Mauro said, describing the typical small-business owner's response to the CPEx pitch. "I mean, they may not say that to us directly," he said, "but we know that's why they don't get involved."

Yet Mauro will also willingly tell you how to get a free copy of the Baldrige criteria from either his own CPEx website or the Baldrige award site, http://www.baldrige.com./

"As a small-business owner, you're the one that has to think about all these things, and when you're trying to meet the payroll and do whatever it is that you do, either run a small fast-food organization or a small manufacturing firm doing biotech, you have to think about all these things. One of the best uses of this criteria is for small business to use it as a business plan."

The criteria, for example, ask you a series of questions about how you engage your customers with your product or service: "How do you identify and innovate product offerings to meet the requirements and exceed the expectations of your customer groups and market segments?" By answering the question, a business owner gains a perspective on how well his or her organization is performing, and at the same time, automatically compares the organization with national standards because the question is derived from Baldrige national standards of performance.

It takes a lot of work and a lot of time to prepare truthful answers to such rigorous self-examination. But if you sign up for Mauro's program (fees for a small business can range from about $1,000 to $3,000), a batch of volunteer examiners will go over the answers and visit your business to provide "feedback" on how to make your business better.

Mauro admits that CPEx and the national Baldrige awards have a reputation for serving large businesses with the resources to spend on such self-improvement, even when an award can provide an almost immeasurable amount of prestige as a return on an applicant's investment.

But an economic recession can bother even national "quality" programs, and Mauro's statewide board recently agreed that the group had to figure out how to deliver its products to small businesses in order to keep its own operations sustainable.

If you are interested, call or e-mail him at 303-893-2739 or tmmauro@aol.com.

Welcome a filibuster, change or be gone

Here's a thought: Seat the new senator from Massachusetts, finish crafting a decent health-care reform bill that merges House and Senate concerns, and let the Republicans filibuster all they want in the Senate. The vacuousness of their arguments against the bill will show them up as anti-middle-class blowhards.

And the American people, young and old, will welcome action, any action, from Congress, just to shut it up and be able to move on.

The 60-vote super majority in the Senate is just that. A health-care bill can be passed with fewer votes but still a majority, and the stupidity of a Republican stand against all the good parts of the bill might even convince some of them they want to be on the right side of history when the bill is signed into law.

My friend, Bob O'Neil, a successful retired business man out of Chicago, believes the election in Massachusetts was a message to all incumbents in Washington, including Obama, that something must get done or all their futures are in jeopardy.

I remember telling my friend Herman Malone after Obama's election that he had better "change" things or the whole country would explode. Young people in America, who strongly supported him, as well as middle-class whites, are mostly frustrated with the Washington bureaucracy's inabilty to fathom their 2008 election message. "Change" or be gone.

The same message will be sent this year come November if there is no evidence the people were not understood the first time.

RobertSchwabPoet.com: Business plan

I'm dying. I need four, $50,000 angel investors to fund a business I am creating as a legacy for my two daughters. Call it the "New Journalism."

Two blogs: one to discuss small business and politics in Colorado; another to discuss the arts in the state, primarily literary art. But also to offer a markeplace for young artists to sell and license their work.

That's my goal. My doctor, Tom Kenney who works out of Porter Hospital, has given me "two, maybe three years" to live under the spell of chemotherapy. So I cannot guarantee a return-on-investment for my investors, other than to pay off the debt at 4 percent interest as soon as revenues reach the point when I can afford to begin making payments.

But time has already passed on the two-year minimum Kenney has given me. So here is my business plan for making my exit. If you are an angel, I hope it interests you. If you are a reader, I hope you enjoy the way I put it to words here.

THE BUSINESS BLOG: “Schwab on Anything”

RobertSchwabPoet.com is a speculative play.

The small-business blog, "Schwab on Anything," has already been established and is being marketed on Facebook and Twitter, as well as with a distribution list of e-mail addresses of people interested in the writer's work.

Blogs are the new journalism forced on professional journalists following the Internet's destruction of the traditional newspaper business model. Robert Schwab is an experienced journalist who has covered small business in Denver and Colorado for 13 years at both The Denver Post and ColoradoBiz magazine, where he was editor of the publication for more than six years. At The Post, he started a weekly column on small business called "Schwab on Small Business," which appeared on Saturday's usually on the cover of the business section.

"Schwab on Anything" is an extension of that work. It will profile interesting small businesses from around the state and cover, journalistically, small business issues. It will also cover state politics, and occasionally touch on topics outside either realm that are of interest to the writer. The writer has already, for instance, written several pieces about his personal experience fighting colo-rectal cancer, called "In the Chemo Room." “Anything” reflects an expansion of the writer’s interests, and opens a door to comment on such broad political issues as labor, health care and education.

Advertising will support the blog, but ads will be sold at rates Colorado small businesses can afford, offering an alternative to more expensive mass-media advertising available in The Post and on Denver-area radio and TV broadcast stations. Blog ads will be priced at $300 per month for a display ad. RobertSchwabPoet.com anticipates selling 10 new ads per month and retaining at least 60 percent of initiated ads for periods of at least six months to a year. That revenue stream along with the startup capital provided by investors will allow the business to launch a Colorado Business Almanac and Small Business Directory, which will create another, if limited revenue stream.

Business-card sized ads will be sold for $300 per year for a business to be listed in the directory. The ad will appear in various digital sortings: by industry, by service or product provided, alphabetically, and by years of operation. In the latter list the business owner will have a chance to provide a profile of the business (or have it written by the writers of RobertSchwabPoet.com) which can be updated through a password-protected Wiki, allowing the company to update its accomplishments and growth.

(Cash-flow projections will be provided to potential investors as part of a printed presentation of this business plan.)

THE COLORADO BUSINESS ALMANAC
&
SMALL BUSINESS DIRECTORY

The almanac will be another reader-friendly entrance to RobertSchwabPoet.com. On a separate website from the blog, an almanac of business information gathered from all public sources available in the state will be compiled and updated to provide any current or prospective business owner market information important to his or her business. The directory of small businesses, over time, should include a fairly extensive (and hopefully exhaustive) list of competitor participating in a specific market, including information voluntarily given by business directory participants in their self-written profiles.

The front of the book, however, will contain updated information regarding the latest business and market statistics available statewide, including demographics drawn from Census information, all to be used as reference material to judge the business climate in Colorado.

Once established, it is expected that this front-of-book material, too, would attract advertisers from businesses big and small, drawn particularly by low ad rates and widening readership. That increasing traffic would be driven, too, by the self-promotional ads included in the Small Business Directory – and the business-owner’s ability to update his or her own business profile.

There is no way to project the success of this revenue stream. The book needs to be established and to begin to draw readers in order for ad sales to take place. Until then, no projectons can be made.

THE COLORADO ARTS BLOG
&
MARKETPLACE

This separate website will create a conversation between artists in Colorado and art consumers, and will provide a market for young artists to post their work in hopes of licensing their images or selling original property through the site. It will also serve as a marketplace for writer/owner Robert Schwab’s poetry, fiction and non-fiction.

This is perhaps the most speculative enterprise to be described for RobertSchwabPoet.com because there is no such Internet meeting place for Colorado artists of every stripe, or their audiences, and no venue for young (or old) not-yet-established artists to market their wares.

Bloggers from the various arts will be paid for their contributions to the ARTS BLOG, and a one-percent-of-sales fee will be charged to artists to facilitate the online showroom they will have at their disposal.

As traffic increases on this blog and marketplace, it is anticipated that ad sales will also be possible: to music venues, to artists, to publishers, to bookstores, to galleries and other business vendors trying to reach the growing artistic community in Colorado.

MARKETING & TECHNOLOGY

Print and Internet advertising to market these three venues will be purchased once the sites are established as a viable product for readers and small business owners.

Invested capital will be used to make these purchases. Radio and other advertising also might be possible, depending on revenue streams generated by the business. Technology services also will have to be purchased to set up the various websites, directories and Wiki. Invested capital will be used for those purposes as well.

Conclusion (minus financials)
This is the legacy I hope to leave to my daughters, one of whom is a visual artist, and the second, still in college, an undecided potential aid-worker, lawyer, writer or businesswoman, with a bent toward international arenas. I have two to ten years to make my business happen. I think that’s more than possible, and an opportunity to establish two lasting institutions to serve Colorado for the foreseeable future.

(Relevant financial information will be provided to interested investors.)

Post shows its colors

The Denver Post finally shows its true colors today in an editorial calling on Colorado's two senators to vote against the interests of most of their constituents by voting against, and killing, the nation's closest attempt in its history to reform health care in America.

The Post's myopic editorial suggests that the latest negotiations over items in a bill yet to emerge from a Democratic caucus - namely a compromise with unions and an already failed attempt of one senator to gain something from the bill for his state at the expense of other states - is reason enough to kill the whole historic effort only days away from its finish line.

This is exactly what the insuance industry would like to see happen, and would validate their investments in ferocious lobbying to kill the historic movement.

Legislation is the art of compromise, and to see a compromised bill get passed to further the health of an entire nation should be no surprise to anyone.

The art of lawmaking is to create a format that benefits the most people even if measures must be tweaked to get the best results some time in the future.

The Post, like a lawmaker, should consider doing the widest possible good for its readers before bowing to the ideological and business interests that it serves by calling now for a surrender of the greater good.

Hardball over health care

I come here in advance of my next intended post (RobertSchwabPoet.com: a Business Plan) to remark on the politics of Democrats trying to pass a health-care reform bill in time for the president to claim it as an accomplishment in his first State of the Union.

Hardball, to say the least.

One example: Massachusetts election officials say it might take them weeks to certify the election results of the upcoming special election to replace the late Sen. Edward Kennedy, which the Associated Press points out could preserve for Obama the 60th vote he needsin the current Senate to pass a health-care bill without a Republican filibuster.

I read about the move in an Associated Press item packaged in the Denver Post next to a piece about Colorado Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet's protests of the closed-door negotiating between members of their own party to combine separate bills passed by the House and Senate.

The closed-door negotiations are as much an indication of the hardball politics Democratic Senate leaders are imposing on the negotiations, which include Obama at the White House.

Republicans complain that the non-traditional approach to melding the two bills harks to the smoke-filled rooms of lore, but they don't remind their listeners of similarly harsh tactics used by the Congress when Trent Lott and Dick Armey were ruling the roost.

It's true that opening the negotiations to television cameras would make make for a truer "Democratic" result. But no Republicans have indicated any willingness to buck their disciplined ranks to vote for a final bill, so crafting one without them seems the more efficient path.

Bennet rightly criticizes the lack of transparency. But I doubt it will keep him from voting for the historic bill. It should not.