These are unusual times.

I'm dismayed and frightened by the venomous divisiveness surrounding presidential politics, attempts at recovery, stimulus, and bailouts. Is it not obvious that the whole world is threatened by an economic catastrophy at a scale suitable for a major disaster movie? Is it not obvious that this country, which, public and private sector, Republicans and Democrats, greedy, spendthrift, immediate gratification-sated for decades, played a lead role in getting us into this mess,  now has to play a lead role in getting us out of this mess?

This is not the time to play politics and look for what to criticize in emergency measures that are trying to keep a sinking ship afloat. If the new president is wrong, there will be time later to analyze and criticize and evaluate. Right now, though, the whole damn ship is sinking. We should be helping, not arguing. We can argue later.

I'm not an historian by any means, but I've been watching the world and particularly this country for a lot of years, and I've never seen anything like it. A new president inherits a perfect storm of collapsing banking system, mortgages, stock market, major industries, and skyrocketing unemployment. And it feels like three out of every four talking heads want to complain that he's doing the wrong thing to get us out of it.

Why don't we take every one of those talking heads and ask them to show us some good faith. What are they going to do to help? How much did they influence the sub-prime mess, or the deregulation of derivatives and the banking system. Let's listen to the people (if we can find any) who were trying to pull things back to sanity before the whole thing blew up on us.

It's hard to write about my normal topics while this is going on.

Photograph from "notsogoodphotography" via Flickr

This looks very interesting: Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing, and Kelly Spors of the Wall Street Journal at noon Pacific Time, Thursday March 5, for an online discussion of the Obama stimulus plan and small businesses. The discussion starts with 20 minutes from economist Raymond Keating of the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council.

All of these people know the territory very well. It should be a very good discussion.

I saw it here on Anita's Small Business Trends blog. She links here to register on the Intuit community site.

Over the weekend I happened to pick up Six Errors on the Path to the Financial Crisis from the DealBook Blog on the NYTimes.com.

It's short, well written, and well thought-out. It doesn't even mention the war in Iraq and doesn't single out the Bush administration overspending, both of which were the culprits I suspected first; so maybe I was wrong.

More important, by far, is that if this is a better discussion, and more accurate, then we're all better off for it.

Does it hurt? The bailouts, major layoffs, stocks down, houses down … so how is small business doing? I've posted some bad news here already. I've got more.

Almost one of every three business owners said they'd laid people off already. Almost one in two said they've also reduced hours. The average sales forecast for the group, looking at next year, was 49% less than this year.

I built a survey for the Huffington Post, asking people how they were doing. Here's a sample, from the comments that came in:

I cannot overstate how profoundly sad I am to have had to lay off staff members and reduce the hours of those who remain. I have been working like mad trying to figure out a way to survive in these enormously trying times. I've always provided our staff with health insurance benefits and year's end bonuses. Right now I am unable to even pay our monthly bills.

That's just one (an eloquent example) of the almost 600 responses to my small business survey earlier this week, in partnership with the editors of the Huffington Post. It started with meanwhile, back in the real world for the original post announcing the survey, and Survey Shows Bleak Outlook on Small Business for the results, including three maps, on of them interactive, and downloads of the full survey results.

Not everybody was in trouble. Although the overall impact is bad, and sad, there are bright spots. A business trading in live lobsters expects to double sales next year, it says because the lobsters are way less expensive than normal. An insurance broker expects to double business because people who were "too lazy to do financial planning" want to do it now.

I just picked up USA as a Restart on Early Stage VC. Very well done. Provocative.

"The USA looks like a classic Restart ‘opportunity.’ What happens in a restart? First, existing stakeholders get wiped out; The $7T of ‘new money’ is accomplishing that. Second, management gets changed. November 4 did that. We now have new managers who have a four year ‘vest’ and, probably, a ~100 day cliff. They don’t have a new incentive model – that’s a problem – and we have a tier of managers, called Congress, closely resembling the old group, except for some changes at the edges among the most junior members.

"Managing this as a VC Restart is more than just throwing money and new executives at the situation and hoping it gets better. Success requires that you have a point of view of about how to rig the situation to win. Winning here means more than growth. It also means productivity. Productivity is the profit margin in an economy. A VC restart wouldn’t invest to do more of the same. It would invest to grow the kernel of value. I won’t get into what’s the ‘kernel of value’ in USA, Inc. That’s a debate unto itself. I simply point out that capital allocation should follow a market mechanism, like an auction, rather than a budgeting process like a bailout.

"A VC Restart would also look for alliance partners to strengthen the offering. Perhaps a merger with another competitor with complementary skills, e.g. China? Merging with China might resemble YHOO+ MSFT – distance and culture conspiring against success. We might also argue about valuation, as there are dramatic differences in growth rates between enterprises. Perhaps a more logical partner would be Canada. Proximity, history, and language work in our combined favor. Canada brings natural resources and we bring ‘value-added processing.’ (We may have to spinoff Quebec to make this work.)

"Above all, a VC restart would begin with a re-definition of the core competencies of the Enterprise. What they once were or might have been is irrelevant. What is paramount is what they are now and how they can be organized to create value in a larger competitive environment. A ‘Green Manhattan Project or Green Marshall Plan’ might be one such initiative. Another might be an initiative to reinvigorate biological research to find a genomic equivalent of Moore’s Law and become a dominant and low cost producer of therapeutics as the world ages. I am sure there are several more big ideas out there.

"The current discussions (December 2008) in Congress and the Press resemble the discussions original investors have about failing companies. How big should the bridge loans be? What are the terms? How deep are the cuts? Are they deep enough? Who's fault is this?

"Like it or not, we are all now VCs. We have a stake in the Restart of the USA. The discussion has to turn to What is the Affirmative Plan of Record and How will we know if the Plan is working? Let's start asking these questions from our new executive team. "

That's by Peter Rip, a partner in Crosslink Capital, on Early Stage VC.