Prologue
Off Like a Shot
When they assassinated my friend Barack Obama, those responsible fell into the fire beneath the frying pan and were burnt beyond all recognition. I was walking through the crowd right next to him when the gun went off. There was no “saving” him; there were no attempts at resuscitation; there was only blood, brains and death.
At a rally just a few weeks prior to being reelected for a second term, my friend was shot in the head at close range by a deranged pawn by the name of Clement Dobbs. He and his stupid gun were wrestled to the ground before the cowardly fuck could take his own life. I won’t dignify the trigger finger of a lunatic by sharing his words of delusion here. Suffice to say he listened to the never-ending rhetoric of the fanatical right until he was consumed with bigotry, hate, and false purpose.
If it wasn’t so predictable, if it wasn’t so fucking cliché, it might warrant the attention of a single, sentient human being.
It doesn’t.
We celebrate our million-dollar athletes, our coked up, drunken celebrities, and the criminals that keep us entertained enough in this country already. Clement Dobbs had a reason for killing my friend. It’s simple, really; his country let him down. He isn’t alone; we let a lot of people down. He is no less a product of American indoctrination than the Heisman Winner, the Oscar Winner, or the lottery winner. He is us; we are him. Listen to Sympathy for the Devil by The Rolling Stones. Dobbs did not kill my friend, “…after all, it was you and me.”
I still smile on occasion, but there is trauma and perhaps madness behind that grin. It is my shield, it is my cage, and it is my gift to the American people in a time of chaos. To say that the nation mourned our loss is a gross understatement – the world felt our grief, and the backlash made every revolution before or after pale in comparison. If the protesters at Occupy Wall Street were the beginning of an unorganized revolution in The States, then the weeks, months and years after we lost the leadership of my friend Barack, was nothing less a decisive, well-orchestrated coup of the United States Government, its treasury, and the bulk of its international interests around the world.
I’m proud to have been part of it, and frankly, I was lucky to come out of it alive.
Secretary Clinton served up The Oath in the emergency room. I still had bloodstains on my shirt and clots of red in my hair. She struggled to keep the Bible steady under my quaking left hand. I promised aloud to publically honor my office, but I silently ground my teeth and swore to wage a private war to uphold all things sacred to my friend.
During our initial campaign run, he was advised to remove the words “smokestack industries” from one of his first speeches. He called “bullshit” right in front of D.C.’s finest speechwriter and everybody else in the room. It impressed the hell out of me. He said it would take hope, change, and jobs to get our economy and American pride back on the right rails. I took this quite literally from the get go, and started working in the private sector on the praxis of such a declaration as early as 2005. This would serve me well during our country’s transformation. I’ll get to more on this, later.
Some pundits called it a “Coup,” a “Takeover,” and I guess it was a little of both. Those words usually evoke violent images of a dictator’s rule coming to an end, and although there was violence, the end was actually a beginning or a return to the true “melting pot” mentality that had been deteriorating since JFK, RFK and MLK met with a similar end back in the ‘60s.
Ironically, all the “big picture” ideals my friend had in mind for the future about the land he so loved, came to fruition not because I continued his policies, but because the People acted in a way that made it impossible for me to do anything else.
I miss my friend.
He would have loved to see this.
Sure, I smile. I talk my way in and out of the tough questions just like all the guys on the other side of the issues. I make mistakes. Barack made mistakes – he’d be the first to tell you that – given the chance.
I can’t tell you whether his sacrifice is acceptable. Ask his beautiful family that question. I think he would be mad as hell to learn that I recklessly embraced the fallout and turned it into policy. I think he would have advised me to back off and not let his memory impede my judgment about using anarchy as a tool against our political adversaries. He’d never forgive me for putting myself and my family in the same risky position – I flatter myself, really – but I won’t crawl into a hole; I’m a public figure, a servant as he was, and nothing more.
This is not necessarily just my story. This is the story of how – along with the help of countless others – The Obama/Biden administration was able to turn fifty years of corporate oligarchy, and the death of one 21st Century martyr into a cultural, spiritual, and financial revolution, almost over night.
Stage One
Mending Fences
Panic.
So, we needed help securing our borders at home. Port Authorities stateside needed federal help and now. I used this as an excuse to do something My President had always wanted to do, I brought all non-essential military personnel home from around the globe, and cut all discretionary military spending to zero.
Zero.
I ended The Department of Homeland Security – at least as it was initially intended – called out the National Guard and put Colin Powell in charge of the whole shootin’ match. I literally “guilted” the man out of retirement to become my Secretary of State. Hillary Clinton moved to VP and I could not have asked for a more trusted colleague at a time when America needed her most.
Then I did the last thing anyone expected.
I closed America.
Cerrado, gone fishin’, fermé, out to lunch.
Air cargo, shipping cargo, and all international passenger flights going anywhere outside, or coming across our borders were grounded. Port cities at our periphery were in chaos. Deliveries of goods and products going in and out of America were stacked up a mile deep at airports and shipping terminals around the world.
I did this to get to the bottom of it.
I honestly felt like there was no other way to get to the truth. I can understand that U.S. corporations can make more money with overseas sweatshops, lobbying refunds, tax incentives for outsourcing, and shipping perks; I guess what I struggled with – especially considering the current state of our country –I just couldn’t understand “why.” A first-year economics student could see that their tactics were unsustainable.
I simply did not trust those around me. I know that sounds terrible and paranoid. There was just too much money to be made and too much hidden dog-eared kickbacks and campaign donations unaccounted for. If I stuck to the manifests and tracked who was making the products, who was buying them and where the profit was being spent, I could at least figure out who was on our side versus those who didn’t give a shit about the future of American Democracy.
Drastic measures were in order.
The paltry little electrified border fence idea one of the shortsighted Republican candidates was crucified for in the last election couldn’t hold the jockstrap of the monstrosity I unleashed. The Peace Wall immediately created a million jobs and became a structure that would define our commitment to self-sufficiency, redefine our North American relationships, and refine National Security. Pissed off, laid off construction contractors and their crews hurried to our northern and southern borders like condoms on prom night.
Stick that in your Hoover Dam.
Unions representing the airlines, rail service, ground transport, and longshoremen went on strike in protest within a week. Manufacturers were unable to ship, retailers were unable to accept shipments; lawsuits against the government were the perennial weeds in our annual flowerbed. Riots in the major cities were inevitable and it took an armored division just to protect The Whitehouse.
Militias were just as plentiful; they all had specific grievances, shifty lawyers, and catchy monikers. The Peoples Free Market Coalition, Americans for Open Trade, Unified Workers for World Welfare, and more. It wasn’t these folks that made me and my two boys hold up on Pennsylvania Avenue under armed guard; it was the militias without lawyers and without catchy names that worried the security team and me. They were, at best, local terrorists, and at worst, hired hit squads sold to the highest corporate bidder.
I made sure that available Human and Social Services personnel helped man the ports to redirect any and all foreign or exotic medical supplies necessary to keep hospitals and patients supplied. Exported medical supplies needed to maintain hospitals and the lives of those foreigners relying on our drugs were also an exception. The $1.5 billion in shipping per day with Canada was a priority; Powell had that down to a science in a week, and our neighbors to the north relaxed a little.
What my friend would have frowned upon would be my inability to maintain our support to those in struggling third world countries. Millions in aid to parts of the world that counted on American generosity – at least for the time being – would have to fend for themselves as we took care of business here at home.
Damn.
There were enemies to be made through all of this and I could not justify cuts here at home without equitable cuts abroad – also not popular.
No. He would have not liked that part of my plan.
The returning men and women of our armed forces were immediately dispatched to the port of call closest to their families. Soldiers around the country were retrained as Transport Security Agents, and a whole new protocol for container ships, parcel services, and international postage was enacted. A new pecking order for international trade was made into policy, and a hybrid of The US Military and The United States Postal service was a natural consequence – unanticipated, but natural just the same.
I love to see an American soldier close to home.
We called it Operation ReSource, and it went something like this: If you were an internationally held corporation, you were assessed tariffs based on the trade agreements with the US and the country that benefitted the most from your profits. If you were an American company, you were given tax incentives, and export tariffs based on the ratio of your outsourcing versus your American held jobs.
I was accused of holding American capitalism hostage. I was accused of being a communist, and finally, I was accused of using the death of my friend to push an agenda for my own political gains. It got to the point that if a Triple A football team in Poughkeepsie lost in the semi-finals, that it was my fault because a shipment of the quarterback’s favorite cleats were held up at a harbor 5,000 miles away.
Really? People died.
Due to miscommunications between doctors and patients, pharmacies and doctors, insurance companies and pharmacies, and between suppliers and those at the front lines of Operation ReSource, people died.
And yes, they died because I closed America.
I’ve dealt with death before. I was pumped full of pride after winning my senate seat back in 1972. It was a week before Christmas when my family was t-boned by an 15-ton 18-Wheeler. I lost my wife and one-year-old daughter; both my sons were critically injured.
I was mad as hell.
I can certainly understand anger, loss, and the need to assign blame and to find a reason for such loss.
Blame me. “If not, then…” I’m a lawyer; get it.
Blame me. Not the doctors, pharmacies, shipping agents or insurance company. In layman legalese, “If not, then…” for me, means that I closed America and the rest followed. I truly believed that the “madness” behind my smile had a method. I would never claim that the means, made it difficult to justify and believe in the end, even if it was the end I so clearly saw so many times with my friend. I prayed for America’s patience, just the same.
As the harbors both in the air and on the water started to ease up, a miraculous thing began to happen. The “smokestack” philosophy began to bear fruit. Plants, factories and industrial complexes in the most dilapidated neighborhoods in the United States saw a renaissance in retrofitting and real estate sales. Camden, Pittsburgh, St. Paul, Yuma, Sauk City, Detroit and some of the other hardest hit blue-collar communities found money. Real money from American investors funneled in to start producing the products and services that had only been available from overseas providers.
I purposefully created new incentives for American made products, which spurred even more new growth, and gave us a new way to look at a lot of things we thought were beyond repair in this country. We found a new generation of wealthy Americans eager to invest in manufacturers reproducing formally imported goods, especially when matching federal funds were available. American held patents on popular, “green” products, coming out of re-fitted, rebuilt, or new, “green” factories, created jobs, revitalized communities and created profit. These investors were then given further incentives to reinvest that profit into research and creating more jobs, here.
Then, we had to recreate a healthy international trade relationship. People around the globe were completely pissed off. I had either stopped accepting their goods or stopped selling to them. There was a lot of bad blood, bad business and hurt feelings. This is where the former First Lady started to kick ass. Her relationships with our allies and our enemies alone were enough to smooth this shit over. She was in charge, but because she was also acutely aware of the task at hand, she confidently added the shrewd political savvy of her husband to the mix. The two of them embarked on an exhaustive diplomatic tour that would have put James Brown to shame.
We didn’t lose capitalism in this fight; we lost our reputation as a bunch of wasteful bigots.
Seriously.
Who puts a welcoming, giant green statue in a harbor facing the world and then picks a fight with anybody who won’t give us a break on oil prices.
Sheesh.
Stage Two
Jailbreak!
The most exciting reparation we made was the way we thought about incarceration. With foreclosures skyrocketing and new home sales in the tank, someone a hell of a lot smarter than me came up with a win-win situation.
We had thousands of qualified architects, contractors and construction workers out of work. Simultaneously, we had an imbedded prison system that supported $200 billion a year in bloated bids, plantation-type labor, and a criminal INjustice System perpetuated by 21st Century Jim Crow laws.
Cancelled – all of it.
Privatized prison companies became a thing of the past.
The super-powers in the lock up business had the choice of becoming a part of the state correctional system or filing suit. Most of these prison profiteers chose the latter, but we had enough red tape in the way to discourage such a prolonged, expensive endeavor. Security wasn’t an issue because the guards didn’t care who signed their paychecks; all union contracts were grandfathered in, legally transferred to each state, and reopened for collective bargaining at termination. All contracts regarding laundry, food service, uniform, weapons, continued training, etc. would be re-evaluated and explored for political ties and “strings-attached” special interest money, then re-awarded to the bidder with the interests of the inmates and the new state system in mind.
Obama held our forefather’s contention that one man’s freedom should not be purchased at the cost of another’s. In other words, a system as dour yet necessary as incarceration should not line the pockets of private citizens. The private prison lobby had been influencing representatives to pass laws targeting marginalized populations to feed the cycle of reoffending long enough.
It’s never been higher in our nation’s history.
It stands to reason that if you put profit motive into incarceration, profiteers will want to find more “clients,” and keep them in longer. Barack didn’t invent the theory, but it sure stuck in his craw.
In addition, any and all land on prison grounds fertile enough to support livestock, vegetable, and lumber production would first be mandated to create fresh meats and vegetables for the health of inmates. Any and all profit made from an abundant crop would be held to purchase healthy food when crops suffered due to flood, drought or other natural disaster.
In the time it took me to smile, I signed documents awarding building contracts to each state for a new factory and a new school adjacent to each prison. Whatever product or services the inmates provided internationally, militarily or locally, was continued. However, all profit assignment on said labor, goods and services was re-evaluated and distributed in the interest of rehabilitating the inmates.
Furthermore, inmates with clean behavioral records and construction experience were allowed conditional, supervised participation in the building process. The completed factory was tooled to recreate the products previously completed in the prison work areas, and the work areas were converted to re-acclimation centers, which started with the basics of building pluralistic, contributive identities in those stuck in the cycle of offense perpetrated by the system.
By the time the factory and re-acclimation centers were in full swing, inmates could apply for conditional parole that would allow them to use the skills they’d learned toward a new vocation, legal citizenship, English as a Learned Language classes, career re-assignment, or a combination of all the aforementioned. This parole would allow them to spend part of their remaining sentence attending the school – built by inmates, for inmates – so that they may have another opportunity to become free, self-sustaining men and women of our society.
Yet another segment of targeted workers flocked to prison towns around the U.S. and work began. More guards were hired to help oversee the new construction. As the lawsuits thinned, the spirit and dignity of the men and women in our prisons, were met, again, by American wealth – investors who believed in supplying goods and services to our prisons at a fair price and those who wished to receive a fair exchange from American made products and labor, started to come out of the woodwork. Many re-skilled parolees found work at The Peace Wall as well.
Just as the hopped-up, neo-capitalists and their lobbyists were ready to throw the economy, the stock market, and our legislative process under the bus; they made the tragic mistake of killing our president and leaving me in charge. My experience with leaders and international organizations, and my work as chair of the Subcommittee on European Affairs bought me some time with our allies, which in turn kept hostile opportunists at bay as well. Stocks, bonds, and investment capital in American competitive upstarts and municipalities that had been biding their time in obscurity, turned into the epinephrine needed to end market complacency.
This is the shot in the arm my friend would have wanted for America, and I was just crazy enough to see it through.
Stage Three
Choosing up Sides
Each member of Operation ReSource was strategically and experientially trained to gain authority over a very specific collection of departments, councils, offices, courts, independent establishments, and government corporations. They held sway over targeted commissions, committees, sub-committees, personnel, jurisdictions, records, and decisions.
Once we had secured these positions, it was time to flip the switch. Timing was crucial, and the opposition began to see the train coming down the tracks, but it was too late. Oh, there were Libertarians, Dominionists, Tea Party thugs, and even centrist Republicans who vied for power. They claimed responsibility for everything that worked. As for everything that didn’t, they’d claim I was heading up a conspiracy to overthrow the government with a collection of left-wing nut jobs all with a socialist agenda.
I truly don’t think half of them really know what that word means.
One reporter even suggested that we were cloning members of Operation ReSource and were enacting a scenario not unlike “The Boys From Brazil.”
That’s just weird.
Their argument fell flat when in my first public address I admitted to everything but the cloning bit.
You heard me, everything.
When I was the lead Senator on the Narcotics Control Caucus, we created the position of “drug czar” to oversee our national drug-control policy. This was an unprecedented position with unprecedented power that demanded international knowledge of narcotics dealings on both sides of the law, and it had to be applicable to governments of all types. Not just the Banana Republics, the growers, the harvesters and the transporters we see in the movies. There is no better way to expose a conspiracy than to start one of your own. So, if by “heading up a conspiracy to overthrow the government,” they mean I used all my means legal and otherwise to expose the “legal” laundering of American taxpayer pockets to line those of bankers, corporations, military middlemen, and outsourcers, then I’m guilty as charged.
As for the left-wing nut jobs, the only way my friends and I in the NCC could get to the bottom of the drug problem was, again, by understanding how other countries, other leaders and lawmakers addressed the problem. Americans are addicted to all kinds of things, coming in legally and illegally from all over the world. We’ll cover that again later, too. So, if your interim president has to call in a few favors from a few decision makers with alternative approaches to restore order around here, it’s probably because the “traditional” approaches weren’t worth squat.
Socialist countries that are successful, know how to get the job done when it comes to drug trafficking; I figured if they would have some ideas about sustainability in open-market economies, pluralism and intellectual freedom, too; pardon the fuck outta me. How do they police their borders? What are their policies? What are their re-offense rates? Who makes their decisions about the differences between “legal” and “Illegal drugs?” I can tell you that it sure as hell isn’t the people who stand to gain the most profit by those decisions, and I can also tell you that the way that we’ve made those decisions hasn’t worked so very well for our country thus far.
We claim to be such an open-minded, individualistic country, but I would suggest that we have become too insular, too self-absorbed of late. “The American Way” is not a sacrosanct, divine, modus operandi. There are plenty of low-key, effective, “free” societies around the world who have already learned important lessons on their road to attaining that magic balance between spirituality, statehood, and economic success. My plan is not to reinvent the wheel, here; we are simply hitting the brakes, putting the car up on blocks, and looking at what we can learn from those lessons before we put the wheels back on. If we adapt and adopt a socialist idea into The American Way, that means we are trying to improve that “way” for our people. It does not matter from which nation we learn that lesson. Period.
I saw a bumper sticker the other day that read “Evolve Already.” I love that.
Moreover, there are plenty of countries out there that don’t disguise military production as a healthy GNP, that don’t disguise oil acquisition as military occupation, or disguise profit for corporations as a “trickle down” system, which is supposed to care for those on the margins of our society. If we want to save the world with Democracy, then we better damn well have a model that works.
I assigned one of my conspiratorial, left wing clones to infiltrate the lower echelons of the executive branch. This person took the post of U.S. Trade Representative, collected favors and built a consensus in three major departments: Agriculture, Commerce and Labor. Concurrently, decision makers in Government Corporations and Independent Establishments would have to be won over and led toward a light that burned bright enough to garner admirers without burning our new wings.
These groups included, but were not limited to, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Export-Import Bank of the United States, the Farm Credit Administration, the Federal Labor Relations Authority, the Federal Maritime Commission, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, the Office of Personnel Management, the Trade and Development Agency, the United States Agency for International Development, the United States Commission on Civil Rights, the United States International Trade Commission, the Postal Regulatory Commission, and the United States Postal Service.
I think it was important that all of us supporting Operation ReSource exuded an authentic sympathy to the points of view held by our opposition. This was not merely to obtain an effective bargaining position in each area of concern, but just to bring about the immense “buy-in” necessary for a transformation of this magnitude. We had several moles in every branch, department, and office, just for checks and balances, but other than a couple of indignities, most of our strategic placements paid off. We needed to confirm a new Superior Court Judge – someone on our team.
The Honorable Anna Chun survived a similar journey to mine; she came from Wilmington, worked her way to D.C. and faced a particular set of challenges and contradictions that made her the perfect fulcrum on which to leverage the new shift. Earlier in life, she used her G.I. bill money to study international business law and held a double major in early literacy and adult basic education.
Bingo. She’s confirmed and wheels start to turn.
Her position would be critical in the aftermath that was sure to follow such an unprecedented reassignment in American power. I anticipated that once the “switch” was indeed “flipped,” there would be an outpouring of lawsuits, boycotts, protests, revolts, and work stoppages from all fronts. It would be Anna’s job to use her swing vote-status to quell any and all litigation directly detrimental to the end game.
Mistakes would be made.
There is no way I could foresee half the shit that went wrong. We would compensate the unforeseen but not bend to the greed prevalent among outsourcers, polluters, and bailers. Organic political pressure and media attention established during the “Occupy Wall Street” demonstrations happening around the world helped divert the overt hatred of the unknown harbored by the right with regard to the “hippies” and “slackers” they thought were actuating the changes. This helped us to focus on the task at hand, and to keep things in check.
The strategic co-conspirator to Anna’s position would be the new Head of the Department of Education. Nothing less than a ninja, demagogue, used-car salesman, mutant-appointee would do. This complicated assignment would seek consensus among those affiliated with the Federal Reserve, and have the ability to handle moneys formerly used to pad,
…okay,
…subsidize the cronyism prevalent in the Federal Retirement Thrift Investment Board, the National Capital Planning Commission, the National Credit Union Administration, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, the, Overseas Private Investment Corporation, the Social Security Administration, and most importantly, the Securities and Exchange commission. Moneys that were now freed up to bolster Barack Obama’s pet project, the Department of Education.
Hey, my dad was a used car salesman, one of the best. He was sharp as a tack. I don’t think I’ve ever seen, let alone known a real Ninja.
In other words, the highest educational office in America, the new head of the Department of Education, would be intimately linked to the tiebreaker seated in the highest court in the land. This duo’s primary concern would be to shuffle and mete out money for what Oprah Winfrey and I coined The Barack Obama Educational Pluralism Project. This movement, in conjunction with Operation ReSource would piggyback onto Harvard’s longstanding religion-oriented Pluralism Project, exploit Oprah’s influence on Americans, and Barack’s focus on creating educational equity and cultural fluency – not “tolerance,” not “diversity,” or “cultural competency” – but true educational pluralism.
For long enough, education has been treated the same as every other endeavor under the stars and stripes, and was subject to a “what-the-market-will-bear” mentality. My Catholic upbringing and a decade of broken political promises woke me up to this startling fact. America’s school children exist largely as a criminally unrepresented commodity, bought and sold through a complex market of threadbare schools designed to reconstitute them through years of meaningless standardized tests, insidious marketing campaigns, and empty, comparative competition to be three things for us: soldiers, consumers, and criminals.
I’d had it with the Darwinist international conglomerates driving the bus. The kids on the margins without educational options grew in number with each passing year, and the bus didn’t stop anywhere near their neighborhoods, leaving them to fend for themselves. This was the laser-like focus of our new head, equality for all – special treatment for none.
As for the previously held position, i.e. bending over and taking it in the shorts from all the lobbyists, hucksters, and candidates claiming to prioritize education, this new ass-kicker would merely have to shake hands, and continue to let them believe that the earmarked legislation they bought was actually going to send a lucrative contract their way, right up to the last moment – before I pulled the plug. Anything else would draw suspicion.
Ha – fucking – ha.
Exactly how is it that a contemporary American public school can’t provide the promise, the longitudinally proven concept of inclusive public education without a row of Goddamned vending machines provided by the sugar and soda pushers – known to all – who cultivate blatant associations with drug companies?
To hell with that…
Here’s another thing the average U.S. citizen might wanna know. The same company responsible for operating those damn machines full of empty calories and addictive rot gut, are also responsible for strategically operating fast-food restaurants along inner city bus routes – nationwide. That way, those who rely on “Happy Meals” and “Twofer Tuesdays” to feed the family, can end up as obese diabetics on an assortment of drugs, AND the drugs to counteract the side-effects of the first drug. That’s a pharma-lobbyists wet dream.
“But they invented Santa Claus!”
Yeah. Fuck that, too.
Stage Four
Lead, Follow, or Say It with Cash
The Court of International Trade would be brimming with unhappy outsourcers, sweatshop owners, and corporate retail powerhouses pulling every trick in the book to maintain their ridiculous profit margins. This would be nothing new to the highest court in the land; they’d just find themselves on the other side for once, that’s all.
Heh-heh…
Big money in The States has always had a hand in manipulating the seats and decisions of its decidedly most corrupt collection of “unbiased” judges in Christendom.
In order to maintain the façade that certain judgments, opinions, and voting history ran to the conservative, I had to constantly reassure Judge Chun that the eventual “big picture” showdown would absolve her from her any glaring contradictions among her colleagues.
So we had a bought congress and a bought supreme court.
Fine.
You want money? You want power? Okay, this is how it’s gonna work.
Admittedly, commandeering The U.S. Treasury would have been a lot harder without a turncoat in the Executive Branch GOP leadership. His last-minute “flips” would come as a shock to his party, to his adversaries, to his wife Debbie, and his kids. However, his “flops” would come as even a bigger surprise to those who had him in their pocket. The newest member of Operation ReSource would not survive this – socially, vocationally, or in any other way, really. His new political life would be filled with clandestine exchanges, reversals of position, adaptable strategies, and an unshakeable dedication to the transformation. As Speaker of the House, this devout Republican would be both Judas and Savior to Operation ReSource, and would be mercilessly sacrificed in the end – a lifetime of building a house of cards, would slowly be forced upward, directly into a high-powered ceiling fan.
Barack had a way of putting it when somebody got what he or she deserved. I rarely heard him cuss as I do, and he wasn’t a vindictive person, but he used to say, “Well” if the Foo Shits!?…” He always got a kick outta that.
This time, the secret Architect of The Capitol would be in our pocket, and his moves would steal the breath away from the situational opposition. Only at the eleventh hour would Members of his own House realize they were orchestrating their own demise. Slightly more frightening to his closest victims in the GOP, would be his new approach to the Congressional Budget Office. Reps on both sides of the aisle would feel the sting when the cards flattened and spilled onto the floor.
When the CIA came to me with the information about Boehner, I couldn’t help it.
I literally yelped like a schoolgirl.
It’s funny. I really wish I could say that it was some seedy, underhanded, politically motivated, Watergate-like bullshit, or that he had a penchant for little boys or something. Fortunately – or unfortunately, depending how you look at it – Boehner’s fall from grace made all the others look like a stumble at the airport. In the end, his biggest crime was pride. We used our information to keep him in his position and to work for us. We convinced him that making change and creating hope in the next for years for Americans, was gonna be better than the four years he spent trying to undo all that my friend Barack tried to accomplish.
Oh, he was the same old Boehner, crying, lying, dodging questions; we counted on it. America counted on it. He kept up his end of the bargain in spades. He tried to backdoor us once and we spanked him pretty hard for it. He never tried it again. We didn’t want his wife or his constituents to pull their support. Debbie’s a wonderful woman and we needed his image as a family man intact. We also needed all his lackeys and cronies to continue to say “how high?” when our new man said, “jump!” He did, and they did. It was a thing of beauty.
He continued to rail against any shifts in departmental power, dissolutions of proprietary taxes, funding rollbacks for military subcontractors, or any uncharacteristic support from his side of the aisle for anything I tried to push their way. All the while he was pushing buttons for yours truly. He was particularly helpful when we cinched up consensus with the folks along The Bible Belt.
The GOP has a long and desperately hypocritical relationship with Red States and their convenient re-interpretations of The Good Book. Throughout this carefully orchestrated political turn, he would continue to pray, proselytize, cater to, and solicit from, the biggest names within whispering distance of The Almighty’s ear. This cad would discount the concepts of pluralism and contributive identities for all Americans as unattainable “concepts” and “ideals” with ties to socialism, communism, and even botulism if the voting constituencies would fall for it.
Conversely, in his private conversations, with these men and women of God, regarding these concepts as part of an educational, societal, or administrative philosophy, he would be a master of theological ambiguity. This duplicity wracked John with guilt. We even had to call in a special doctor to help him deal with the anxiety. “Remember,” I would often remind the speaker, “Jesus wasn’t a Christian.” This always seemed to help, sometimes.
When we reinstated The Works Projects Administration, however, he tried to take his own life.
I feel bad about this.
For his own good, we covered it up and made up a wild story for his family and the press that rivaled Cheney shooting that guy in the face. Border closures meant shipping limitations; shipping limitations meant fewer shipping jobs, fewer shipping jobs meant longshoremen, railroad men, and truckers were out of work from coast to coast. The WPA was the only practical thing to do. Workers who had lost their jobs would be paid to retrain in other fields. It only made sense.
Public Service Announcements repeatedly went out through the airwaves, radio, television and the Internet, as to where and when the new factories were being opened or reopened, and weekly notices about the times and places of the training programs went out as well. The irony was that the hubs of the new growth started by Operation ReSource took place in many of the small towns that suffered during the “oligarchy” years. There were very few American companies that had completely avoided outsourcing throughout their history, but they got first shot at expansion in these neighborhoods. Grant money for rebuilding and facility acquisition went to them first.
Next in line were companies that did most of their manufacturing stateside, and kept their profits in R&D here. American companies who had been cleared with our people at the borders and signed agreements to expand here at home were next. Those that I’d courted (as previously mentioned), and a few that I dealt with as the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations back in the day. When the “Occupation” started and folks saw that my friend would probably be re-elected, some of these companies anticipated that trade might become an issue and had already started to look at re-tooling these factories on their own.
Once the department of Ed got their hungry little hands on all the dough previously used to transport military supplies and personnel halfway across the world, we reopened negotiations with all the Independent Establishments and Government Corporations involved in international trade. Independent lobbyists whose job it was to lean on our elected officials in matters of lowering tariffs, international trade agreements, and outsourcing, had a difficult time proving how, under the nation-building stance of Operation ReSource, their existence benefited jobseekers, defunct municipalities, and companies who were already on board.
Mission Accomplished, lobbyists were now the “jobseekers.”
In our more casual conversations, Barack used to call the GOP privateers who created this whole mess “The Bootstrappers.”
To him, Bootstrappers were Americans who hadn’t evolved beyond “The Red Scare” of the ‘50s. To them, people who’ve had a run of bad luck – the poor, foreigners, people with a low socioeconomic status, or people marginalized due to their ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation – they were the parasites. It never occurred to them that maybe someone lost a spouse’s income due to a terminal illness and couldn’t afford their mortgage anymore, or maybe they had to leave a mental health facility after their insurance ran out, or maybe they experienced a childhood trauma and couldn’t shake an addiction. These factual, documented, researched reasons for poverty. Didn’t matter, they were parasites, all of ‘em.
…or if you simply had dark skin and/or a name that was difficult to pronounce with an American tongue.
Same diff.
Bootstrappers welcomed the amount of government that existed in their lives as an entitlement, but only when it was convenient for them. Government was okay as long as it created military conflict, showed up during national disasters, trolled for oil under foreign feet, gave them loans for school, businesses, homes, and doled out even more when it came time for pensions and Medicare. Anyone else who needed help from the government simply needed to pull himself up by her “bootstraps” and deal. Somewhere in their logic, something a fellow citizen was unable to do became equal to something he or she was unwilling to do.
Bootstrappers saw no connection between the Reagan’s “War on Drugs” and the peaceful, yet meteoric rise of the pharmaceutical mega-corporation – nor did they notice the odd but undeniable similarities between contemporary drug advertising and the tobacco and alcohol commercials of the ‘60s and ‘70s. Barack saw the one-upmanship of the pharmaceutical companies as corporate comparative identity building, and uniquely transparent.
An “independent” study (funded by pharmaceutical companies) found an undeniable link between the network television advertising of alcohol and tobacco, and cancer. Both were immediatley and legislatively banned from the airwaves. Booze and cigs were out; drugs were in. Oh yeah, except weed and all the other drugs kids were doing. Those were bad drugs; adults knew how to use.
Then along came cable, and booze was back. Then a new, New, study found an undeniable link between the use of warning labels on cigarettes and alcohol packaging, and a reduction of smokers, drinkers, and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). Then when these bottom feeder’s research discovered that people were turned off by the fact that each of their “snappy” little ads for curing America’s depression was followed with warnings about explosive diarrhea, sterility, narcolepsy, facial bleeding, and cannibalism; they brought out a new, New, NEW, study!
This undeniable bullshit held that if cigarette manufacturers were forced to put a disgusting photograph of a big black lung on every pack of smokes, people got even LESS cancer, ZERO SIDS due to the inevitable glass of wine that went with the cigarette. Put that checkbook away; there’s more! Even the packaging fights global warming! That is, if Bootstrappers believed in global warming.
Maybe that’s why my boss enjoyed a beer and a good smoke every now and then. Cheers!
When did we all get so gullible?
Bootstrappers also saw no connection between the decline of American public education and ascension of the imbedded prison system. My research team went back to the beginning and brought back the term “whiteness,” to describe any attitude that stood in opposition to plantation-esque, or race-specific legislation.
Ya gotta remember, education is not important to the uneducated. There is no use in waiting around for leadership steeped in greed to embrace anything else, so it became personal, especially after they shot my friend.
Stage Five
Give Me Back My Fuckin’ Country
We were also highly unpopular for Acquiring Nation Status for Washington D.C. The Bootstrappers constantly claimed that we “shut down” the Nation’s Capitol.
It simply wasn’t true. Oh, and I say “we” because there is no way in hell I could have executed this kind of strategy on my own. Nation Status was the only way for us to declare Marshall Law, protect government workers, and keep things running, safely. We set a curfew and made sure folks had escorts whenever possible.
In an effort to model pluralism, we held regular meetings with all members of Operation ReSource and spitballed around each other’s problems in our perspective areas. Good people around the table who had limited intel on the ins and outs of each other’s issues were unafraid to say things like, “Have you tried?”… or “Did you ever think about…”
It was amazing.
At one point, somebody with minimal clearance said something to the effect of, “We need to protect the changes we make AS we make them.” You coulda heard a pin drop. D.C. employees needed protection; that was a priority. We took everyone’s loyalty to the Operation as a given unless proven otherwise. We updated everybody’s background check, and all government employees before Operation ReSource were still employed by the government after Operation ReSource, they merely had new codes on their badges to get in and out of their buildings. Armed guards surrounded most buildings during the day and by surveillance cameras by night. All tourist activity was temporarily cancelled, and that pissed some people off.
However, if a person was on a government payroll, for example, and no one could figure out how it served the government or the people, they were given a one-month furlough to thoroughly present their contribution at an informal hearing.
We decided to link up the movement with the Harvard Pluralism Project website, and then advised folks who had questions about our plans and the reasons for shutting down The Capitol, to call a toll-free number or go to the website.
Despite our best planning for this inevitability, Harvard still had to close down for the day. They slowly added a dozen servers to an already monumental system, under the guise of a non-existent master’s thesis project. They hired IT techs to troubleshoot and to be ready for the volume, and students were recruited and trained to answer questions about the existing Pluralism Project at Harvard, but given a second script book to study to answer calls about Operation ReSource.
It still wasn’t enough.
We were banking on several different variables to either torpedo or energize the movement in the first 24 hours. Fifty percent of the world’s population is under 30 years old. Now that could go either way as many young people were unhappy with the politics-as-usual that had bankrupt the country financially, spiritually, and intellectually. Even more were already drinking the “trickle down” Kool-Aid there parents were weaned on.
Several from The Operation went to Boston a week prior, to get the students ready to field calls at a call center on campus. Exactly how to talk to folks from all different perspectives was going to be a neat trick. Most of the calls went something like this:
“Pluralism Project, this is Nguyen, how can I help you?”
“Jesus! Really? I told you this was real! Okay. Nguyen? What’s next?”
“What’s your name?”
“Gabriel. Gabe”
“Well, Gabe do you have access to the Internet, a regular mailbox, and a desire to see America start over again?”
“Hell yes!”
“Great! I can either take your email address down, and send you a downloadable form to send back to me, or you can go to our website, facebook page, or twitter account to stay current on our progress. If you need a hardcopy I can send that to you as well. Where are you calling from?”
“Chula Vista. Hey! How do I find out more about this?”
“You can go the website, or I can put something in the mail to you. What’s your postal code?”
“Uh, 91909. I’ll just go to the website. This is so cool! Thanks!”
Not all the calls, posts, and emails were so rosy.
“Pluralism Project. This is Sureesh. How can I help you?
“I knew it. Who’s this?”
“This is Sureesh at the Pluralism Project and Operation ReSource; How can I help you?”
“I told you their call center was in the middle of Pakistan someplace. Hey boy? Where you located at.”
“You’ve reached Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. How can I help you, sir?”
“Harvard? USA Harvard? Bullshit.”
“Yes sir? Do you need some information on Operation ReSource or The Pluralism Project? Can I answer any questions for you?”
“Sure ya can SHOOR-eesh! How do you faggot, intellectual cocksuckers talk your way out of 12 gage shotgun shoved up your ass?”
“Before you hang up sir can I have your zip code?”
“I wouldn’t give you the sweat offa my balls, towelhead!”
‘Click.’
Volunteers were not allowed to take any abuse. Some hung up when a call started to go south, some hung on as best they could to get a zip code so we could tally positive and negative responses. That way, we could see where the militias were, perhaps, gaining momentum. We already had a pretty good idea where the hot spots were. The good news was we were growing in numbers, preparedness and anticipation were on our side.
As I’ve said. I’m no stranger to “God’s unknowable will.”
What a crock o’ shit.
As you can probably tell, I’m no stranger to anger either. My depth of anger at The Almighty after Neilia and Naomi were killed, and Beau and Hunter so badly injured, was unfathomable. My core as a Catholic American was shaken, stirred, diced, sliced, and set to frappé. I went out to the wrong neighborhoods at all hours of the night just to pick fights with anybody who’d look at me the wrong way. It was irresponsible as hell, I know. I got the shit kicked out of me more than once. I got a few good licks in, though.
