Walmart on steroids

If you, like everyone else, are tired of all the negative political ads, take solace in the fact that they’ll be gone next Wednesday.

But unfortunately, what will stay with us is an outright attack on our democracy. Our “government of the people, by the people and for the people,” thanks to the Citizens United Supreme Court decision, might now be better called “government of the corporation, by the corporation and for the corporation.”

And by “corporation,” I’m not talking small businesses. I'm talking about giant special interest, multinational companies that brought us these beauties:

Image: NyeGateway.com

• The Gulf oil disaster
• The financial crisis that led to the recession
• Skyrocketing health insurance premiums
• Jobs exported overseas
• Bloated military budgets to fight unnecessary wars

These corporations have been given the green light to spend all the money (actually their customers' money) they want to influence our elections, while not letting the voters know who is paying for the ads—most of which are negative—or being accountable for the truthfulness of the messages.

Total spending -- by candidates, political parties and special interests -- has topped $3.2 billion and is likely to hit $4 billion when reports detailing last-minute donations and spending are tallied, according to a study released Wednesday by the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics. That would obliterate the record $2.85 billion spent in 2006, the last midterm elections. Read more….

For the small business owner who might think that these giant multinational companies have their best interest at heart, you’ve been suckered into voting against your future.

Think Walmart on steroids.

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Want to do something about it?

1. Vote this Tuesday, November 2
2. Join us for our next BuySC Micro-Conference, Wed., Nov. 10 (details below)
3. Shop local on Nov. 20, 2010, Happy Hardware Day!

The SC Small Business Chamber presents the next installment of our BuySC Micro-Conference series:

Keith Spiro: 5 Steps to Business Freedom
 

When: November 10th, 2010
Where: 701 Whaley, Olympia Room (2nd floor), 701 Whaley Street, Columbia, SC 29201

Time: 6pm - 8pm

Price: Free for paying SCSBCC members / $5 Basic Members /$10 for non-members.  Click here to register and buy your tickets now. 

Want to save $5? Become a BuySC member at the "free" level and your ticket is half price. Why? Because we're a non-profit, and we want to unite SC's small business community.

Copy this digital poster to use on your Facebook, blog, website, wherever!

Our locally-owned, independent hardware stores need us more than ever. Let's support them!

Still the naysayers on lending crisis

In the run up to the vote in the U.S. Senate on the Small Business Jobs Act that included a $30 billion small business lending fund to help address the complete collapse of lending to small businesses, opponents began claiming that small businesses were no long looking for loans. The economy--according to the naysayers like the U.S. Chamber and its lapdog, the NFIB--had scared small businesses from wanting to take on any debt.


Even today after the Jobs Act has been signed into law and the loan fund regulations are being finalized; there are still deniers of a small business lending crisis even by some who should know better.

Russell Colombo, president and CEO of the Bank of Martin in California, recently told a reporter that there is plenty of capital available to make small business loans but there is no demand.

Well, enough of partisan-tainted opinion. Here is the reality.

Last week the New York Federal Reserve Bank released the results of a survey that clearly demonstrated that access to capital is an important issue for small business with 59% of respondents had applied for credit during the first half of 2010.

Of the small businesses trying to get a loan or line of credit only half were successful and 75% of all respondents said that they received only “some” or “none” of the credit they were looking for.

This week Small Business California in a press told of a survey of their members that generated “over 150 comments regarding the problems they are having with banks, especially the big banks.” Scott Hauge, president of the organization, stated that “small businesses are seeing their lines of credit pulled, their loans pulled, interest rates on credit cards spiraling upwards of 30% and extending the time of clearing deposit checks.”

Our banker, Mr. Colombo, needs to get out of his executive office more often and visit the real world of small business.

10 down and 2 to go

2010 has been a very successful year for The South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce and there are still 2 months remaining before 2011.

Below is a very brief overview of wins this year and also some historical victories.

Success in 2010

-Passage of national health care reform resulting in no mandate or tax on small businesses. 53,000 SC small businesses being eligible for health insurance tax credit this year. Insurance exchanges in 2014 to allow small businesses to leverage collective clout to drive down premiums and elimination of premium increases due to worker with pre-existing condition.

-Passage of the state cigarette tax increase with funds going to meet health care needs of Medicaid recipients (133% of poverty and below starting in 2014).

-Passage of  national Wall Street Reform to reign in the excessive risky behavior of the financial industry that created the recession and create an agency for consumer, including small business, protection.

-Passage of the national Small Business Jobs Act which included a $30 billion lending fund to enable community banks to start making small business loans again and increase SBA lending ability.

-Successfully intervened in an SCE&G electric rate hike request of 9.52% to have it reduced to 4.88% over three years, a savings of over $96 million to customers.

-Successfully intervened in SCE&G’s proposed Demand Side Management program to enable small businesses more opportunity (inclusion in an energy information display pilot) to take conservation actions to reduce cost.

-Launched a “BuySC” (BuySC.org) program to encourage the public to purchase more goods and services from locally-owned South Carolina small businesses and establishing a free on-line directory of these businesses for customers to use.

Some of the past SCSBCC Successes

-Reducing the income tax on small business from 7 to 5 percent saving small business owners $129 million each year.

-Regulation of workers' compensation rates to reduce premiums.

-Job tax credits for the first time for small businesses.

-$1000 tax credit for new Registered Apprentices.

-Opposing SCE&G electricity and gas increases at the S.C. Public Service Commission resulting in savings to residential and business customers of over $172 million from 2003 to 2010.

-Opposing workers' compensation proposed rate increases in the Administrative Law Court resulting in saving state businesses over $185 million on premiums since 2006.

Our next networking seminar: Wed., Nov. 10 at 701 Whaley!

Our last networking event and small business seminar was quite a terrific success! If you missed it, no worries. We have another one coming up fast!

Join us on Wednesday, November 10 at 701 Whaley St. in Columbia, SC for a talk by business coach Keith Spiro, with hosted food and drink by Mac's on Main:

Online event registration for BuySC Micro-Conference: 5 Steps To Business Freedom with Keith Spiro powered by Eventbrite

Challenging the U.S. Chamber

The nonprofit, membership-driven South Carolina Small Business Chamber will officially be supporting an IRS complaint against the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

We, along with other business organizations, are questioning potential violations of exemptions under the federal tax law in the U.S. Chamber’s conduct of lobbying and campaign funding. More on this later.

Below is a must-read New York Times story about the U.S. Chamber. If you have not been paying attention to the U.S. Chamber’s heavily financed legislative agenda and how it often is at odds with our agenda, this story should help bring you up to speed.
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The New York Times
October 22, 2010

Top Corporations Aid U.S. Chamber of Commerce Campaign

By ERIC LIPTON, MIKE McINTIRE and DON VAN NATTA Jr.

Prudential Financial sent in a $2 million donation last year as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce kicked off a national advertising campaign to weaken the historic rewrite of the nation’s financial regulations.

Dow Chemical delivered $1.7 million to the chamber last year as the group took a leading role in aggressively fighting proposed rules that would impose tighter security requirements on chemical facilities.

And Goldman Sachs, Chevron Texaco, and Aegon, a multinational insurance company based in the Netherlands, donated more than $8 million in recent years to a chamber foundation that has been critical of growing federal regulation and spending. These large donations — none of which were publicly disclosed by the chamber, a tax-exempt group that keeps its donors secret, as it is allowed by law — offer a glimpse of the chamber’s money-raising efforts, which it has ramped up recently in an orchestrated campaign to become one of the most well-financed critics of the Obama administration and an influential player in this fall’s Congressional elections.

They suggest that the recent allegations from President Obama and others that foreign money has ended up in the chamber’s coffers miss a larger point: The chamber has had little trouble finding American companies eager to enlist it, anonymously, to fight their political battles and pay handsomely for its help. . . . Keep reading

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Join the SC Small Business Chamber in supporting our independent, locally owned hardware stores next month:

Buy SC's Happy Hardware Day!!
Saturday, Nov. 20, 2010
Shop at independent, locally owned hardware stores to show your support for SC small business! 

A local success + Happy Hardware Day Nov. 20!

Who's got the cheapest lumber in town? The cheapest mortar?

Think the best prices are way out at Lowe's? 

Think again. 

Shuman-Owens Supply Co., located just 5 minutes from downtown Columbia, SC, is a brick's throw from the S.C. State Fair Grounds and Gamecock Stadium.

And it's one of the last independent, locally-owned hardware stores in Columbia.








Despite the slump in the building trades and consumer flight to suburban big box retailers, this Shop Road standard is somehow creaming the big box retailers. How are they managing to succeed in such a tough climate?

Buy SC Local Success Spotlight:

 
Local Hardware Store Hammers the Big Box

What is this small business doing right?

"Well, for starters," says local stonemason Jefferson Hubbell, "Shuman-Owens is cheaper than Lowe's for just about everything I need on the job."

He gives an example: "If you need a 75 lb. bag of mortar for a masonry job," he notes, "Shuman-Owens will charge you $8, while a smaller, 70-pound bag will cost you $10 at Lowe's.

This really makes a difference when you're in a business that requires hundreds of bags of mortar per year."

(Choosing this local hardware store for just 10 bags of mortar per week for a year would indeed save you over $1000.

Not exactly chump change.)


The low prices don't quit on building materials, even as a project scales upwards.

"If your client needs a million dollars' worth of western cedar timber for his  post-and-beam hunting lodge," Hubbell adds, "Shuman-Owens will source it for less per board foot than pretty much any competitor in the Southeast."

A true family-run business

"The service makes a big difference for me," says Hubbell. "It's a family-run business."

""I've been going into Shuman-Owens for near 20 years, and it feels good. We know each other." 

While there are certainly a fair share of friendly, knowledgeable staff working at big box retailers like Lowe's, it's hard to beat the personal level of service that a local, independently-owned business can provide.

It's up to consumers to support these local businesses by voting with your hardware dollars. 

Read reporter Kristy Eppley Rupon's recent story in The State, "Hammered: Hardware stores pushed out by big-box retailers, economy" 

http://www.thestate.com/2010/08/23/1429381/hammered-hardware-stores-pushed.html#ixzz13200kYHa

And then take action!

1. Take your free spot in the new Buy SC directory of locally owned small businesses:

Sign up here: http://www.buysc.org

2. Fly the Buy SC badge on your website, Facebook fan page, etc., and ask us for a Buy SC sticker -- just like the one you see below on the front door of Shuman-Owens!

3. Talk up Happy Hardware Day, Saturday, Nov. 20! It's the first installment of our new "Local Has It" action campaign series here at the nonprofit SC Small Business Chamber, and we're really excited.

Shuman-Owens flies the Buy SC badge!

HAPPY HARDWARE DAY!

On Saturday, November 20, 2010, go and shop at independent, locally owned hardware stores throughout South Carolina. Spread the word!

You can print the Happy Hardware Day poster below, upload it to your website and Facebook, and pass on this call to action to your own social networks. It's up to all of us!

Spread the word! Let's Buy SC!

Huge thanks to the talented graphic designer Karen Williford, who designed the Happy Hardware Day poster *and* the Buy SC logo for the South Carolina Small Business Chamber of Commerce.

Health care rationing

Remember the most effective warnings about the new health care law?

“Rationing” and “Government getting between you and your doctor”

To this day the opponents of reform are still out on the stump scaring voters with these statements.

Read today’s story in the New York Times and see where the real rationing and interference with patient care will be coming from in the future—the health insurance companies and even doctors.

Health insurance companies are starting to pay cancer doctors for not prescribing the most expensive cancer drugs. The article points out that these doctor incentives “could represent a first step toward denying patients additional treatment or the latest chemotherapy regimen based solely on the cost….the new effort could be viewed as a move toward rationing care at the end of life.”

Joseph P. Newhouse, a health policy professor at Harvard who has studied how the Medicare payment system affects doctors’ choice of treatments, suggested that some payment options might give doctors an incentive to stop treatments if they lose money or make too much by not actively treating patients. . . . In the UnitedHealthcare program, for example, oncologists still get a fee even if the patient is not getting chemotherapy.

There is no argument that cancer treatment is very expensive and that “Hail Mary” unproven therapies need to be reigned in for the good of both the patient and cost, especially if we are all paying through Medicare. And that’s exactly why the new health care law establishes a system of medical experts to determine comparative effectiveness of treatments for all types of illnesses.

But ironically the political party striving to take control of Congress has pledged to eliminate the government effort to determine effectiveness of treatments. If they are successful, only the health insurance industry will make cost benefit decisions about treatments for you and your doctor. Are you afraid now?