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Media/Government Agenda Forcing A Broader Portfolio

by Michael D. Hume, M.S.

I just heard a radio-show caller talk about how she’s closing her 32-year-old successful business in the northeast U.S. because, for the first time, she and her husband have not been granted extensions for their immigration paperwork. They are not illegals, she said, but have become victims of a “crackdown on legal immigration” while a constant flow of illegal immigrants continue to cross our country’s southern border unabated.

This is one of hundreds of sad stories about someone whose small business has been laid to waste by America’s current media/government agenda. If you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t need anyone to tell you the economy’s tough right now, and you probably have done more than a little thinking about what the possible causes of the downturn could be. It started with a mortgage bubble the government and media either ignored or assured us was not a threat. Soon we were awash in bailouts and “stimulus,” driving government debt into the stratosphere. These days, the gulf oil spill and debate over Arizona’s immigration law have been put before us by a government/media complex that probably would prefer we not spend too much time thinking about a tax-and-spend progressivism that is eating our nation’s businesses like cancer.

What does all this have to do with your business? Maybe you are not facing expulsion from the country, like the radio-caller mentioned above, but the tax burden we will all soon carry is a clear and present danger to all businesses, and especially to small businesses. Nanny-state burdens like the so-called “health care reform,” wrong-directed immigration policies that expel hard-working entrepreneurs while inviting thousands of illegals into the country (for whom there will be no hard-working entrepreneurs to provide jobs), shut-downs and takeovers of entire industries (with the accompanying chilling effects on the small businesses downstream), and the like… these are all pieces of a larger agenda that has been imposed upon us by our government and their partners in the mainstream media. So, as a business owner, you might feel like you have no time for “politics,” but none of us will be able to escape these calamities.

Wasn’t running a business hard enough already?

If you even have time to watch TV or listen to the radio, see if you don’t pick up on a biased presentation that borders on malicious propaganda. To hear most mainstream pundits, you’d think everything is going great, and the agenda is finally pulling us out of the wreckage of the “former administration” (which has been our current leadership’s favorite target all along). And if you buy into that thinking, you might wonder why your business is struggling. Is it just you? No, look around: things are not getting better yet, and your neighbors are struggling in their businesses, too.

When I went to journalism school decades ago, we were taught that the media is supposed to be objective. In fact, the true hard-core journalists I knew refused even to vote in elections, just as a precaution against forming an unwanted bias. Wow! What a difference from that day to this. Now we are fed a steady diet by the media, not of the news and facts, but of the “direction” and agenda. Dissent is unwelcome on good days and openly fought on most. Not that it matters, but it’s hard to figure out whether we have a state-run media in the U.S. or a media-run state!

Let me leave you with a more uplifiting thought: all of this does not have to drag your business down. What’s needed now is even more entrepreneurial ingenuity than ever, a broader portfolio of revenue streams, new products, new services, new channels to reach your customers. I heard a happier story the other day about a guy who runs a small boat-accessory business. I would be worried about a boat accessory business these days: who’s got the money for a boat, let alone accessories? But this guy, undeterred, decided to broaden his portfolio through the internet. He already had a presence in cyberspace, garnering something like 10,000 clicks in a three-year period. He took the time to get smart about a more professional platform for his business, and got another 10,000 visits in only three months. Now, he says he’s busier than ever.

Food for thought. Think about how you can broaden your business to make it more resilient to the challenges our media/government leadership are throwing your way. Eventually, the broader economy will be more small-business friendly, and if you can survive until then, the rewards will be more than worthwhile.