Posting on my blog used to be a morning ritual for me.  From 7:30-9:00 or so, I’d pour my thoughts, my emotions, my inner demons on this site wherever it happened to reside.  It’s been 46 days since I put anything down here, just too busy and too worn out most of the time.

So it is all of the furor of AIG bonuses that has brought me out of hiding.  Oh, you haven’t heard about it?  There are a zillion thoughts on the matter, from Elliot Spitzer’s take at Slate to the NY Times Paying Workers More to Fix Their Own Mess, which brought hoots and howls aplenty.  Here’s a great timeline of the key AIG retention bonus events.

Here’s my take: these AIG bonuses are a red herring on the one hand and the poster child of what’s wrong in our new America on the other hand.

First the red herring part.  Many of us don’t receive bonuses.  For those who do, most bonuses are nominal chunks of change for a job well done, more in the $2-10k range at the end of the year.  A small portion of us are highly compensated.  When I worked in Corporate America, I was one of these people.  I received a six-figure bonus for a couple years, as well as things like stock options.  These weren’t gifts but were detailed parts of my compensation.  I left a job and various benefits like accrued employment time and pension to receive this type of compensation package.

Once, I even signed an agreement where I had a retention package.  It stated that I received an extremely large amount of money if I remained employed through the divestiture of the business unit that I was employed at.  I had been deemed a valued executive who needed to remain through the sale and acquisition of my company regardless of who the buyer turned out to be, as well as regardless of my value to the acquirer.  You can search this site if you’re interested in what happend next.

I say all of that to state that some people make alot of money.  “These people” who got AIG into the most significant financial crisis are indeed the same people who have been rewarded with extremely sizable bonuses.  I’m assuming they met the goals and criteria to receive these bonuses and are now being paid.  It is an easy out to attack these highly paid individuals, to torch them all collectively as inept, as criminal, as evil.  I have never met anyone from AIG and have no knowledge of any individual’s performance.  Demonizing those receiving bonuses is a red herring because it takes our focus away from the real problem.  And as I said, the real problem can be seen quite clearly by these seven-figure bonuses.  Here is the real problem:

The US Government cannot run a contemporary, leading company effectively.  They do not have the business acumen, the management capabilities, the nimbleness, the ability to soberly make very tough decisions regardless of the fallout.

You’ll forgive me if I’m foggy on the details, but we basically loaned hundreds of billions of dollars to AIG (or gave it to them, I’m not sure which).  The US Government then gained either ownership or something akin to 79% of the controlling interest in the firm, again I’m not sure which.  From Day 1, our AIG Takeover/Turnaround Leadership Team should have been drilling into the minutiae of AIG, should have sniffed these retention bonuses out early, should have quickly dismissed the need for them.  Really, where would any of these folks go in today’s economy?  If we wanted to sign a retention contract with them that included some sort of bonus, we could have tied it to staying for a longer period of time and meeting specific objectives, both financial and non-financial.  Ditto General Motors, ditto Chrysler, ditto the banks, ditto whomever else we’ve poured funds into.

I’ve quickly become tired of all these characters who so easily point at yes guilty scapegoats yet fail to take ownership and accountability.  Do you think a Senator can actually run General Motors by meeting with their CEO once a month while serving as a Senator from Utah or Florida or Texas?

Here’s a clip from one of my favorite movies, The American President.  It has nothing to do with the topic, but to me it is illustrative of what we desperately need: cutting through the clutter, taking ownership, and being ready to grind it out.

This isn’t about AIG, it’s not about bonuses, it’s not about Frank nor Limbaugh nor Obama nor Liddy. It’s not about Democrats and Republicans, not about winners and losers.  Every ounce of energy focused on these types of things are a collective waste of effort.

It was just six months ago that we gave AIG their first loan.  Six months.  That isn’t very long ago.  I say that to demonstrate that each of these days is precious for the thousand or so men and women in our nations capital, the tens of thousands of government leaders throughout each of our states and municipalities, and the tens of thousands of executives throughout Corporate America trying to figure out what to do next.  Are they our best and brightest?  A good chunk of them are for sure.

Be sure of a couple things.  First, we’re going to have many, many more screw-ups in the coming weeks as we try to right the ship, a ship that is still listing severely and who may not be seaworthy for quite awhile.  This should not come as a surprise to anyone.  We still have no idea what the banks have done with all the money we’ve given them.  There is no big flood of new credit that is jumpstarting things.  On the contrary, credit card limits have been slashed, as have lines of credit.  If each Senator worked full-time at only one company that we’ve loaned at least $500mil to in the last six months, do you really think they’d have the capabilities to turn their assigned company around?  So AIG executives received $1mil+ bonuses based on retention agreements they signed in the early parts of 2008.  Chalk up the $165mil as Lesson #1 for the Federal Government in how to run a company.  The education of our Democratic and Republican leaders in how to run all the companies they’ve loaned money to and bailed out will cost well over $2,000,000,000,000 I’m sure when it’s all said and done.

And that brings me to the worst part of all this, the second thing in my couple things.  That couple trillion dollars isn’t going to change America for the long-term, it isn’t going to do anything like reinvent American manufacturing so that we can suddenly grow ten million manufacturing jobs, it isn’t going to suddenly reinvent our energy demands, it isn’t going to suddenly create sustainable enterprises that will yield a stronger citizenry when our children are coaching soccer.

We as Americans have the capacity to think for ourselves more today than ever before.  If you want to get all worked up and shout to your Congressman, your Senator, and your President, then take the words AIG bonuses out of your rhetoric.  Let’s get rid of the red herrings, the easy targets that make us all feel better that we finally found someone to blame all this on.  If you want to shout, then shout to them that we are all ready to take the tough medicine that is facing us.

My rant has fallen apart a bit, but there you go.  If anyone reads this and wants to chime in, be my guest.

What does this day mean, to me and to America?

I don’t have time to put down my thoughts about the significance of today, but I am compelled to put aside a long night of work ahead of me to document this.  First, some backstory as they call it today.  I grew up in a small town in Mississippi.  I moved from the outskirts of the state capital south when I was ten, an hour’s drive down I-55.  I started 5th grade, and those boys and girls who graduated with me were the first graduating class to be integrated in the 1st grade.  Mississippi was the poorest state in the nation, so we bounced between the formerly black school to white school and back and back every two years.  4th and 5th at the old black Elementary school, 6th and 7th at the old white Jr. High, 8th and 9th at the old black High School, 10th-12th at the old white High School.

We never went to school dances at the school, the whites heading to the Country Club or some other facility, the blacks heading to the Teen Center or some other facility.  We played sports together, went to classes together, then headed home.  I was embraced by the black kids and whites alike, welcomed by both groups yet with few deep friends.  I mainly had a stead girlfriend or a sport.  I cringed when a racial slur was used as my parents never used the language, but it was simply the way things were.

I never had deep friendships, so I can’t say that I was somehow some great friend to my peers.  My life was lived in the midst of these realities, the good, the bad, and the ugly of race in America.  I was above the evils of race in my mind.  I earned life brownie points by spending time with blacks, by treating my classmates well.  I may be too harsh as I gaze back on my past.  It isn’t relevant really, and I don’t look back on it in judgment of who I was and who we were.  We were generally good kids trying to figure out how to grow up in the first integrated generation.  I think we generally did a good job.  I know each of us who were there or somewhere else in the South have a deep understanding of the complexity of race.

And today?  Today, race has been replaced by diversity.  Skin color has been replaced by ethnicity, by religious belief, by sexual preference, by socio-economic group, by blue or red or purple.

Our new president is a man of color, as is his wife and their girls.  The African-American community have embraced him with vivid enthusiasm, and the line that now their children can achieve anything has already become boring to me.  I understand the premise, but I think this day is so much more important than that.

This day is all about diversity.

The analogy I draw is the first time I sat at Nassau Presbyterian Church and looked up at a woman in the pulpit.  The Reverend Cynthia Jarvis was the Associate Pastor, and the Presbyterian Church (USA) ordained female ministers and elders.  This was so foreign to me, as I’d grown up as a Southern Baptist where this would never happen.  I don’t know enough about theology to answer the question of which is right.  All I know is that Cindy spoke to me in a different way, with a different perspective and a unique voice that was different simply because of her life as a woman.  Her eyes, her ears, her mind, her heart, it was all the same yet somehow different.  It is the same with our new leader.

As a candidate, Barack Obama chanted “hope” again and again.  As President, he ushers in a new era of diversity as the key to our future success.  For too long, we have used diversity, race, and other differences as an excuse to bring up a group of people to some minimum standard of what an American is.  Educate our black children to the minimum standard of your white children.  Let our men earn as much as your men.  We have spent too much time struggling with our differences.  We failed to realize that diversity is our great strength.  It is the great differentiator of our nation compared to others.

President Barack Obama understands intimately what diversity means, the challenges of being a diverse nation, yet the great potential that our differences bring to us.  The Muslim mom, the Hindi editor, the Buddhist diva, the Republic of Georgian coach, the Korean neighbor.  A generation ago, these people never would have been in my lives, in my peer group, people I would know, respect, and care for.

It is easy to lay race at the feet of the former Confederacy.  Race was a great evil, no doubt, but it clouds the issue at the heart of our struggle to break through into an evolved nation.  The millstone that has been around our neck is our culture of lifting ourselves above those strange-looking, strange-sounding, evil-believing others in our midst.

Tired of hearing about hope?  Here’s my hope:  that today marks the first day of a new age where each of us understands to our core that we are equal to our neighbor whomever he or she is, regardless of their beliefs, their bone structure, their hair, their skin color, their dialect, their homeland, their parents.  Let today be the first day of an America that leads the world with getting it, a land where each person changes each day as they better understand their neighbor.

I thank you, Mr. Obama.  You have your work cut out for you, battling this America of polarity amidst a meltdown extraordinairre.  Let’s make Wednesday a step forward for ineraction with an understanding built not on hope but on candor, on transparency, and on being unafraid of going through the difficult times necessary to build a greater land.  I’m ready for that step.

I went out yesterday afternoon to vote for the next President of the United States, the first time I’ve had confidence that I was casting my ballot for the winner in quite awhile.  I’ve voted for the winner before, but the races were much tighter then.

I parked down the road from the library/polling station, this after passing dozens of cars littering the side of the road.  I went armed with supplies for the wait:  iPod, iPhone, Wall Street Journal, Sports Illustrated, Business Week, and my Bose headphones.  2.5-3 hours was the estimate when I got to the library as the line of a couple hundred folks snaked around the building.  Expectations are a big part of dealing with a wait time like this.  Disney figured that out years ago at DisneyWorld, adding TV screens to entertain while giving wait times at different points of the queue.

I kept busy bouncing from Twitter and taking pictures with my iPhone, the background music shifting from John Legend’s new “Evolver,” Missy HIggins, Hillsong United, then finishing with the “World Soccer Daily” Podcast.  I’d used a tool on the AJC to look through the different races and their responses to questions posed by the League of Women Voters.  That and an occasional further visit to candidate websites gave me my list of individuals to vote for the Commissioner of this and the Sherriff and whatnot.

Every four years, we Americans vow how we’re now going to get involved in making a difference in America, in politics, etc.  As I used the touch screen to vote, I felt pretty depressed that I’d done so little to decide who I was voting for in all these races.  This is Democracy?  Most voters cast their ballot for president then just go down party lines to decide who to vote for.  Even the little research I did had me ultimately bouncing party to party when I voted.  It is an embarrassment, as especially these local decisions impact our lives so immediately and intimately.

And the next president?  I ultimately decided to vote for Obama.  I admire McCain greatly, but I could not get past how he demonstrted his analytical process to decide on his running mate along with other recent decisions (the bailout as one example).  Qualifications and capabilities are two entirely different things.  Just because the citizens of Alaska put Palin in office doesn’t automatically check off the box of either her qualifications or her capabilities.  We’ve lived through eight years of flippant, gut decisions finalized by a lack of analytical rigor.  That shouldn’t dictate a future choice, but it definitely heightens one’s awareness of who to choose presently.

I do think that the stature of the United States will get a lift from Obama’s election.  Europe will give the US a new chance, and it will be very important that Obama has a plan to capitalize on the good will that results.  I am not vehemently for Obama or against McCain, but I do feel this is the best choice.  My hope is that whichever of the two is elected will table every promise he made to get elected and get neck-deep into the mess that we’re in on all fronts.  What gets you elected is different than what you lead with, and McCain knows this more than anyone.  He tried to stay on the high road eight years ago.  Bush and his cronies slandered him with horrific messages, and the wonderful citizenry of South Carolina dutifully pushed our current President along his way.

My hope is that we finally have the burning platform to make real change in America, and here I’m not talking about chanting change ad nauseum.  What is real change in America?  First, make sure everyone understands this from Change Management 101:  change is painful.  No one wants change, and those that benefit from current state fight it the most.  Anyone proficient in driving change knows that it leaves carcasses all over the place and that getting to the finish line is neither predictable nor simple.

What are the particulars of real change in America?  Here are a few to consider:

• Infrastructure investment with high short-term cost and long-term payback
• Lowering the standard of living of almost all Americans from the easy-credit past 20+ years to one where smaller homes with smaller, fewer cars are filled with less stuff; the economic impact of doing this will be significant if it is achieved
• Reinventing our financial system and saving America fiscally
• Modifying the transformation of the US Armed Forces, ensuring that our Military leaders do not become deficient in waging war on the large-scale and in guerrilla theaters as they have become more proficient at managing occupation and nation-building
• Changing the culture of American families to produce a higher percentage of higher-performing students who achieve advanced education (>2 years of university), all while lowering the costs to achieve this while improving the means
• Lowering the costs to treat the massive 55+ year-old American population over the next twenty years
• Navigating dangerous international relations over the next ten years, including the following:  Iran, a China that needs to fuel its own growth and needs to continue to suck resources to do that, India, Russia
• Accelerating the move away from fossil fuel-based energy to sustainable energy; costs are becoming approachable finally as mass builds on many alternative sources (e.g., wind, solar, electric cars/transportation), and we should be relentless on this.  This will mean further job losses in current areas with job growth in others; again, disruptive in the short-term, but palatable as we’re in the midst of this (see Detroit).

So that’s that for me.  Call me a pragmatist, a pessimist, an old fart, whatever.  I don’t see Eutopia on the horizon, far from it.  I’d put it more like this.  You’re driving with your family to some vacation scam that you said yes to (the four-days, three nights at no cost if you look at their time share or something).  You’re not exactly sure what it will be like, but surely it’s better than chasing each other at your house for the week and everything that comes with that.  You can’t really afford to take off from work as you just had a negative performance review and your new boss has already fired half of your friends.  Oh, and you think your spouse could be cheating on you.  So you’re in the minivan four hours into the drive, your youngest son just threw up a few miles back.  Right in front of you is the biggest storm you’ve ever seen.  Brilliant lightning, sideways rain with some hail thrown in for good measure, horrible winds.  Cars off the road, pulled over, wrecking here and there.  And you’re about to drive head-long into it.

Welcome to America, 2009.  Good luck.

Brilliant piece of writing in the Atlantic on the philosophical struggles within the Army regarding the strategic direction of our military going forward.  If you read one thing today, read this.  I don’t know enough about this to really have an opinion, but it is quite possibly one of the most important debates impacting the future of America.  Should we create a nation-building Armed Forces or a battle-winning Armed Forces?  Do you cut the training in marksmanship while increasing the training in negotiation skills is a fascinating question.  Thoughts?

I can tell you that this world that we live in here in Suburbia of the ATL has been a jolt to the system over the last couple weeks.  New artifacts have popped into our collective psyche, much like mood rings and disco balls did thirty years ago.  Plastic bags on gas nozzles, Kroger traffic cops directing drivers through a maze in their parking lot to get to the pumps, numbers vacated from the signage at service stations (the sign that no fuel is available), snaking lines into traffic where there is fuel, abandoned cars in line for when fuel returns.  The excuse du jour for missing any event is lack of fuel.

I don’t think you can truly understand what it’s like unless you experience it for yourself.  This is a life-changing crisis that we’re in the midst of, life-changing in that it has quickly changed personal and collective behavior seemingly overnight.  It gives me a sense of what happens during wars, how you simply have to adjust to new realities and rules of society and life.

Add the catastrophic breakdown of the financial system to this, and we’re in the toughest America since at least 9/11, probably the toughest in my adult life, and possibly the toughest in my life.  One of the reasons the VP debates are being so eagerly anticipated is that people want a release from all this.  I watched some of the first Presidential debate on Friday, and it became clear to me that both of the candidates understood that this job one of them will take on will hardly be a rah-rah position.  He and we are faced with an America in even worse shape than we were in six months ago, and there will be no simple path for us.

I’m working on ideas for what happens next for people like us.  What will America be going forward.  Here are a couple of glimpses.  First, the citizenry has now been unleashed upon Congress like no time in its history.  The news clips of staffers and Congressmen holding up the stacks of printed emails shows that this crisis has now trained common Americans in how to proactively communicate with their Congressmen.  There will be no turning back from this, and it will become increasingly important how these officials collect and analyze the views of citizens in making their own decisions.  Blanket emails to Washington have been growing in popularity, but this pushes us into a new frontiers of interaction with the masses rather than just the talk radio listeners.

Another example seemingly distant from all of this is the education of our children.  Resources available to educate our children should decline in the next decade as government revenue declines, discretionary income for private education declines, and monies for educational infrastructure collapses.  Capable parents will need to take even more ownership of the intellectual advancement of their own children.  This may include some level of home schooling regardless of where their child attends school.  I’m a big advocate of public education, and we’re fortunate to live in a district whose high school ranks #3 in the state in SAT scores.  I’m skeptical of how this can be sustained as job losses accelerate over the next two years.

If you haven’t already, take a hard look at your finances, including your assets and debts.  Work aggressively on contingency plans if your own situation deteriorates.  I’m hoping I’ll collect some wisdom over the next week, but please don’t wait for that.  Become an expert on your own finances.

I’ve received many different links of thought leaders regarding the bailout.  The best synopsis I’ve seen is from Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith (Why You Should Hate the Treasury Bailout Proposal).  Too many to list here, although I’ll try to update this page with as many as I can find.  Very busy the last couple days, so sorry for the lack of posts to all.  Definitely read the Yves Smith post before you do anything else.

I like to think I’m pretty smart, although I am the first to admit that I don’t know everything about everything.  High Finance is one example.  I’m pretty sketchy on advanced financial instruments, as well as the Corporate twists and turns used to create earnings out of thin air.  I’ve seen it at work all the time when I was in Corporate America, when several business units came in short only to see the company meet or exceed their promised earnings to Wall Street.

So you won’t find a detailed description of exactly what is going on Wall Street and in America.  Here’s the Cliffs Notes version: the Housing bubble created a ton of bad debt, the funds of that bad debt created alot of dissipating revenue that evaporated quickly, and the bad debt permeates a ton of disparate financial instruments held by a variety of big firms.  Firms and individuals ran up incredible profits as they whipped the money all over the place.  Everything was good, so everyone was smart.  Now, the next shoe is in the process of dropping.

And how has our leadership addressed all of this?  By acting much like my local Home Owners Association would (no disrespect intended to our HOA, a thankless job if there ever was one).  Get in a conference room, have snacks brought in, facilitate Bank of America’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch (check), tell Lehman Brothers they’re out of luck and can go into bankruptcy (check), decide to take over AIG (check), break for lunch (check).

Are these the correct decisions?  I have no idea.  These are the choices you make when you have no choices, and you have no choices because you wait until you have no choices.  And you wait until you have no choices because you don’t take ownership of an America and an economic situation that must be intimitely understood and mastered, at the first whiff of a stench not as an inferno rages around you.

It is very easy to point at the White House, and believe me, it is where ultimately I feel the problem is.  This is just one more example, in my mind, of an Administration that believes something philosophically, doesn’t take ownership, and isn’t proactive about mitigating risk and charting a clear path that may hurt us.

It is very easy to point at the White House, but that isn’t the problem.  The problem is that our nation, our citizens, you and I, cannot fix our system.  We do not put our best and brightest forth to lead the nation in evermore complex times and evermore complex situations.

Our problems aren’t soundbite problems, and they cannot be solved by studying talking points.  For some of these problems, the inability to accept short-term pain to minimize the impact of a situation causes us to suffer long-term struggles left with expensive choices which may not work.

W vs Gore.  W vs Kerry.  This is the best we can do?

Both of these parties are screaming change at the top of their lungs, but they created this with our encouragement.  What exactly are we talking about in change?

When I look at a business or personal, I try to see the glass as three-quarters empty instead of half full.  What is the potential downside, and how to I minimize it?  The Democrats have nominated a candidate high on charm and short on experience.  The Republicans have nominated a vice presidential candidate from the same cloth, who was basically mayor of Travelers Rest, SC (just north of G-Vegas) a couple years ago.

It is totally irrelevant which of these has the least amount of experience or whose experience is more relevant.  It is simply that two of the four potential leaders of our nation don’t have the greatest, broadest capabilities necessary to lead this great United States of America.

Remember the days when an NFL Head Coach would demand full control of the club, forcing them to give him the GM role as well as coaching?  Well, those days are gone.  The reason is that the job is just too complex, the competencies required too unique and too varied to be consistently housed in a single person.  Why are the Patriots the best run club in sports?  Because they have individuals in every position who are excellent at what they do and understand how to execute as part of an organization all headed in the same direction.

The President of the United States is an incredibly challenging job requiring tremendous people management skills, analytical abilities, charisma, candor and bluntness in examining a situation, strategic planning, fortitude, a balance of fearlessness with pragmatism, and content expertise on every topic from religion to economics to Southeast Asian fractional politics to military to science to environmentalism to aging to education to racial/ethnic issues to immigration.

This day, 17 September.  It is a dark day in a dark time in our nation.  And I have brought us here, me and the millions of neighbors across this nation.

It’s a long list, those avocations that consume Americans.  Head to your attic or garage, and you’ll find the relics like tennis rackets, skateboards, Rubic cubes, and yes, poker chips.  The newest thing sweeping the States?  Bashing anyone who chats about poliitcs.

IGGY’s taken barbs, along with everyone from Don to my favorite sports radio show (the Herd) and my favorite daily soccer podcast, World Soccer Daily.   Toss one comment or opinion about the Presidential race, and a firestorm of criticism comes your way.

I actually think that is part of the problem.  With the explosion of cable outlets and talk radio, more and more of our opinions are shaped by a core group of pundits and talking heads from both sides of the aisles.  It is counterintuitive, I know, but there it is.  Don’t believe this?  Listen or watch one of the ladies or guys that you don’t agree with, then listen to those you bump into at the water cooler or at the soccer game over the next week.  We’ve become a nation shaped by propaganda, and we have powerful engines who shape large chunks of us on a variety of topics.  Disney/ABC/ESPN does it to us on sports.  The GOP and Democratic Party does it to us on politics.

The problem with our America is that the needs, opinions, and views of its populace doesn’t break neatly into two buckets anymore.  At the same time, we’ve run into a bad period of time where the two political parties regularly fail to produce the best America has to offer.  How can McCain select Palin knowing that he will be the oldest elected president to take office?  It is his responsibility as a future President to assume that he will die in office.  I hope he lives to be 100, but you have to plan for the contingency if you say you are the right choice for President.  Anything short of that is reckless.

Obama is charasmatic, no doubt, and it is almost funny that this has been turned into one of his flaws.  Yet the situation is no different in that party either.  He’s inspirational, no doubt, but the questions of his capabilities and experience aren’t slanderous.  They are real.  With Obama and Palin, we’re saying the highest office in America is second only to NBA coaches in the prerequisite for actual experience.

And let’s put aside all of the partisan red herrings, shall we?  My wife forwarded one of these email chain letters about Obama raising taxes.  My comment to her was uncharacteristically blunt and passionate.  I know absolutely nothing about Obama’s plans for taxes, but let’s put this in proper context.  Our nation has its Armed Forces deployed in a foreign, sovereign land.  Men and women are dying weekly.  I am bearing absolutely no cost to that.  Our infrastructure is barren and broken, from the product of our education system to the physical infrastructure of our lands to the energy consumption and production of our nation to the natural resource consumption and production of our land and, increasingly, the developing world.  Our long-term commitments are underfunded (see General Motors et al for symptoms of what happens next).  Our country is diving deeper and deeper in debt to peoples who do not share our motives nor our values.  Our Federal Government has demonstrated a long-term inability to solve long-term problems.

And we’re realistically whining that our taxes may go up?

There’s no mystery here.  Our taxes should go up while our level of services should go down.  In case we need a primer here, we are spending more in areas we historically have not spent more in (e.g., the Military), and we are taking in less in the process.  The costs born by our citizens have increased, as have the costs born by our massive Government.

Maybe none of this should be talked about during an election, I don’t know.  Both parties understand without a doubt that the objective in an election is to get elected.  Both parties, by and large, are competent enough not to give an opinion that will cut themselves off from a group of voters crucial to getting elected.

So really, we’re left to ourselves to talk about this stuff and try to raise both the awareness and importance of what’s really important in our nation.  Shout it out, whatever your opinion.  If you’re a reader, lurker, listener, or viewer of a content-specific source of humor, content, or community, embrace it and dont’ fight it.  “I don’t want to hear about politics on your _______ site/show/program,” is a cop-out.  I’d much rather hear about it or read about it there than listen or read the pundits.  Don’t forget.  We are America.

The Atlantic is bookmarked I think because my brother occasionally forwards things to me from it.  In the September 2008 issue, there is a brilliant article detailing the Senator Hillary Clinton campaign, looking in a detailed manner at how the staff worked to lose the Democratic nomination.  The core lesson to me is a lack of execution, the inability to decide on a path then complete actions with hopes for an expected outcome.  Regadless of who you have supported or do support, it is a fascinating read.  We can all learn from this in our professional lives especially.

In an ironic twist for me, I awarded a Republic of Georgia national jersey to the soccer coach working with me to launch a new soccer club (the new little hobby that has consumed me the last two months).  We used the specific red in the Georgia’s flag for the logo design of the new club.  All of this was the first I’d really thought of this nation in my life.  Since I handed Coach David that jersey, his homeland has been in upheaval, his brother was called into active duty since he was slightly under 50 years of age, even though he’d only recently had open-heart surgery.  He was raised as a Georgian Soviet, played football professionally in the Soviet Union, and won what would now be the Champions League back in the 1980’s.

So Russia has been at war with this nation over the last week, and today a cease fire has been announced.  Should we care about any of this?

Not only should we care about all of this, but we should be stunned by both the turn of events as well as anxious about the next decade.

Georgia was one of the few nations who joined the US in Iraq, brought to our collective attention when 2,000 troops were ordered back to Georgia this past week.  They have pursued NATO membership, wishing to join the ranks of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, and Slovakia among others.  President Bush was the first and only US president ever to visit the Republic of Georgia.

Regardless of who exactly did what to start this, Russia has been waging war against Georgia over the last week.  The US response seems to have been limited to chatting at the Olympics between Bush and Putin, as well as some sort of assistance to get the 2,000 Georgian troops from Iraq back to Georgia.

The aftermath of all this is much more important than the actual incident, with my apologies to the families of soldiers and civilians who lost their lives in Georgia this week.  Georgia is a relatively new ally of the US, much like Pakistan for that matter.  What exactly does that buy you in our new world order?  Who sets our foreign policy when it comes to our alliances, the President or Congress?  And how exactly should all of this work in the future?

Obviously, the US did not come to the defense of our dear friends, the Georgians.  We did not cut off diplomatic ties with Russia, did not send in aircraft to support the troops.  What have we told Russia, France, England, India, Pakistan, North Korea, China, Uganda, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Japan, Vietnam, Serbia, and countless others around the world?

No, the 21st Century is a much more complex one when it comes to good and evil, friend and foe.  Throw in diminishing raw materials and a finite energy supply, and we have indeed entered into a world of fractured misunderstanding.  We have only a hint of realization that we poorly understand these sub-nations, these emerging places of interest.

We had a severe problem once at the Aerospace company I worked in when we lived in Phoenix, and the CEO had a day where everyone would “Stand Down.”  Basically, we took a day where everyone stopped to focus on our core problem, much as he said the Navy would do in a time of crisis.

In the midst of this Election period and the aftermath of Iraq and this crisis in Georgia, it is time for a “Stand Down” for our leaders; really, for all of us.