Category Archives: America

04/3/20

Paycheck Protection Program Interim Report Card — A+++

Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin said he would get money to eligible persons as soon as possible.

“My name is Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin and I have money for YOU! Come on down, amigos. Get some. Get yours. Let’s get busy.”

But, of course, he’s the “government” and — yawn — who believes the GOVERNMENT?

First day report:

Loans made — 1,926 (as of today at 11:00 AM EST)

Funds disbursed — $756,985,761

Participating lenders — 245 banks

This element of the rescue is dealing with Main Street not Wall Street and your Big Red Car has to say: “Well played, Federal Government. Well played, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin. Well played indeed!”

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04/1/20

Fair Comparisons — WutangCurse By The Numbers

Public opinion is driven by emotion. Emotion should be based on facts, but we suffer from an inadequate body of data and an unwillingness by the media to report the facts fairly and accurately.

Honestly, I think the media is not smart enough to be able to make the right comparisons and the lens held up to evaluate the problem is too shaky and biased.

How is the US doing v the WutangCurse?

Let me make a comparison: the United States v the European Union (a roughly comparable equivalent).

USA v EU

The United States has 331,000,000 people.

The European Union has 341,000,000 people.

[This is a subset of the European Union which is being used for comparison purposes and doesn’t include all the twenty-eight European Union countries. This is the same subset used by World O Meter from which all the numbers are taken as of 00:00 GMT, 3-31-2020.]

The US has 188,592 total cases of the WutangCurse and has suffered 4,055 deaths.

The EU has 363,150 total cases and has suffered 25,318 deaths.

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03/26/20

Socrates v Gladiators

In my sheltering in place (something clearly I excel at — excuse the brag), I have taken my normal quest for truth to a new high and am reading a ton of things that I might not otherwise have read given the constraints of having to eat lunch at Green Mesquite BBQ from time to time.

Copy of Jeff Minch June 1 2007 060

In that quest, I have reinforced something that I have noted for some time: We have no real idea of how to discuss something. I almost said “civilly” but I did not. 

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03/22/20

No Perfect Leaders

I have been in the leadership business since I was a cadet at Virginia Military Institute in 1969. As an Army officer, we were not converted into “wartime” CEOs, our constant context was war. That was what we were trained to do.

It is like nails on a blackboard when I hear venture capitalists describe the “wartime CEO” using the Army as a context.

All of this has drawn me to assess the leadership of the country in the context of the WutangCurse.

The nature of leaders

The WutangCurse is a crisis and it will require stalwart, sound, optimistic leadership to navigate the medical, the intellectual, the psychological, and the economic shoals of this dilemma.

We do not have perfect leaders. Life gives us leaders who may be or become perfect for that challenge.

Today, I think we have two of them: President Donald J Trump and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.

Winston Churchill, an exemplar

Winston Churchill was the perfect leader for England and what would become the Allies — long before the United States entered into the war — when on the heels of Dunkirk, he spoke directly to Hitler and told him England would resist the Nazis with ever fiber of their being.

In August 1941, Prime Minister Winston Churchill signalling “V for Victory”

In the Parliament of the United Kingdom, 4 June 1940, having lost his army’s heavy weapons in France, his army in tatters, Prime Minister (since 10 May 1940, the date upon which the Nazis launched their attack against the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg) Winston Churchill, rose and said in his inimitable voice:

“We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills, we shall never surrender.”

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03/21/20

Capitalism To The Rescue

The day after Pearl Harbor, Ford Motor Company announced it was retooling all of its production lines to produce Jeeps and other military vehicles thereby setting in motion a wholesale shift of American industry to support the war effort. Three and a half years later, America was producing 50,000 airplanes of all types on a monthly basis.

The US would produce 640,000 Jeeps (270,000 by Ford alone, the balance from other auto manufacturers) in those three and a half years. When I was in the Army in the 1970s, I had a Jeep like this. I loved my Jeep.

This is what happens when American industry is tapped to rise to a national crisis. Today, we see the same thing happening in the startup world.

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03/20/20

Being An American In Trying Times

I once asked a man who had been in the Army when Pearl Harbor happened what it felt like to be attacked and lose most of our fleet in the mud. I imagined it was harrowing. I imagined that America was scared to its core. I was wrong.

This man would fight in the war in Italy — through two hard winters — carrying an M1 until he was “asked” to run a battery of 105mm guns in support of his infantry regiment and was ultimately to receive a battlefield commission ending the war capturing a German railway construction battalion which he oversaw as POWs.

“So, how did that feel?” I asked him, meaning how did that feel the day of and after Pearl Harbor.

He looked at me with the wise look that men who have lived hard lives like him, who have put his ass on the line for our country, who have killed our enemies in close combat, who have shot it out in direct eyeball-to-eyeball fire with Kraut 88s across Italian valleys, and he said, “I knew we were going to put an ass whipping on those Japs like they never imagined.”

I was incredulous because I had read west coast newspapers of that time and they had the Japs landing in California any day now. The Japs took the Philippines and a bunch of other places. The Germans had already invaded Poland two years earlier. The Germans declared war against us and we had fewer than 200,000 men in the Army and they had 6,000,000 plus great tanks and those damn 88s.

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