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Post by Floyd Looney on May 23, 2009 13:33:32 GMT -5
Reggie guided his little car onto the highway, hardly bothering to look and see whether something was going to be in his way. Very quickly he passed a few other personal cars, just as small as his own and came up behind a few massive tractor-trailers. He felt the wind from their massive machines shake his tiny car as he zipped between two of them.
They could be carrying electronics or furniture or even fruit for all he knew, it was their size that bothered him. His vehicle did not even come up to the top of the tires on the semi. Their spinning wheels made him nervous every time he was in the next lane to it.
Reggie knew the trucks could easily crush his tiny vehicle and not even notice the sensation over the normal bumps and potholes in the concrete. This was his job he told himself, there was no way he'd be using the highway without a really good reason like his job. People were squashed all the time, he had worked a few of those cases himself.
Every now and then Reggie saw the passage of derelict farmhouses and rotted barns, almost a blur as they whizzed by at a good clip. Then there boarded up shops and storefronts without windows or any kind of inventory. Reggie didn't like to see sights like those but they were everywhere along this route and some of it was still standing.
The economy had crashed, the nation was so far into debt that it was forced to inflate its money supply to pay back the worthless paper for those foreign debts. Foreign debts from other countries were paid back in the proscribed manner, with the currency. Even though it was now worthless.
Reggie remembered back when there had been stores selling things for a dollar, those same items now went for more than $14 just a few years later. Those items were now hard to find as they could no longer buy foreign goods with their currency, you needed a “hard currency”. You also needed an off-the-books job because nobody could make ends meet, even as the government set a minimum wage of $15 per hour, plus there were exorbitant taxes.
Reggie remembered when an hour of work at minimum wage could buy two loaves of bread, now it took more than an hour for a single loaf. Things were slipping backwards, progress had stopped long ago. People just didn't produce much nowadays, they had no incentive to risk all their savings, if they had it, on a business idea that had no chance to make a profit.
The President had been elected on a platform of fighting against greedy business conglomerates and the wealthy who enslaved and stole the labor of their workers. The President talked about the virtues of shared sacrifice and that “we are all in this together”.
The Secretary of State said “we will take things away from you for the common good” and to struggling companies barely able to pay their high tax rates “we are not worried about undercapitalized businesses”.
The Secretary of the Treasury told the nation that the economic problems they were suffering was the fault of the “rich who hid their profits in secret foreign banks”. Although the Secretary himself was a well-known tax cheat who was now said to be 'reformed' with the blessing of the President.
Reggie took the upcoming exit, breathing a sigh of relief, and began to negotiate the pockmarked roads toward his destination. The screen of his vehicles navigation system was blank, just a few months ago the GPS satellite system had begun to fall out of the sky and could not be replaced. The head of the space program blamed contractors for failing to build goods that last and accused them of swindling the nation. Congress threatened to hold hearings to denounce the contractors.
The road he drove onto now was dirt, he had to negotiate the tiny spaces between the wood shacks and former ocean-going cargo containers that served as shanty homes. Reggie had business here, there was someone he was supposed to meet.
The nation still had not recovered from the terror attacks of a few years ago, during the worst economic atmosphere of nearly a century. Thats when terrorist missiles had rained down on Los Angeles, laying waste to massive sections of the city. Tens of thousands were dead, the nation was in shock, economic activity was at a standstill.
The President had apologized to the world for our national arrogance and our past history of not making nice to hostile nations. He said the country would reach out a hand of friendship to those that hated us with every fiber of their beings. He removed soldiers and naval forces from several foreign bases as a show of good intentions toward the terrorists.
The poor nations we abandoned had been friendly towards us, close allies for decades and we sat and watched as the terror armies began to lay waste to their societies and impose their own terror regime on entire populations. The President was certain this was the right course to take in the name of peace, leaving hundreds of thousands dead and tens of millions enslaved under brutal conditions.
Reggie found the wood ramshackled hut spraypainted with the number 772 a bit farther from where he had to park than he cared for. He knocked on the door and then wondered why he was so eager to carry out such old fashioned customs. Probably a desire to reclaim the past, to keep a bit of the civilized in the world that was more and more uncivilized every day.
The door opened a bit and a young woman looked up at him with a worried look on her dirty face and asked him “Shaun? Where is Shaun? Who are you?”
Reggie Daniel Miller really hated his job, but he had to eat and the chance of finding another job was slim to none. There were fifty million unemployed people across the country, jobs just did not exist in the official economy.
“I am very sorry” he said and she was already breaking down, knowing what he about to tell her, she shook her head and chanted “No not Shaun! No not Shaun!”. He shook it off and continued with what he had to say, it was his job. “I must inform you that Shaun Wilson is” he paused for an unexpected breath, “dead. He was apparently robbed after picking up his check from his employer, they beat him pretty badly, he must have put up a fight”.
She was wailing, barely able to stay standing while holding onto the door frame of the shack, her world had turned upside down yet again. He had been her only connection to anything like a normal human life and he was gone. Reggie had seen it enough times, it was hard to sleep at night. He handed her the envelope which she barely looked at and then he turned and walked away, holding back his own tears.
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Post by Attero Dominatus on May 23, 2009 16:00:57 GMT -5
Very good story! A chilling look into what could be our future, considering what Obama has done in merely 100 days and what he will probably still do.
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Post by Floyd Looney on May 24, 2009 23:14:35 GMT -5
He had always told himself that things would improve, his job would get easier, but he knew he was lying to himself. The only reason he still had this job was because he liked to eat and stay alive and have a place to sleep at night. What else was there in the grand scheme of things?
He dreaded getting back on the highway, he hated that he might see a crushed tin can of a car on the highway shoulder. That usually meant someone or someones have died. There were no hospitals or emergency rooms any more, not that people would have a chance after getting squashed. His grip on the steering wheel tightened, what was the world coming to? How did it get to this point?
Reggie remembered that the government had 'encouraged' banks and mortgage lenders to give home loans to people who had little chance of making their payments. He remembered the Congressional hearings accusing the industries of 'redlining' by not giving such loans in bad neighborhoods. For not taking the loss for the 'social good', in others words.
Reggie had been young and it sounded right and good at the time. It sounded like the right thing for the government to be doing. Quasi-government agencies had bought up this debt and mortgage loans were sold over and over in various ways until trillions of dollars were hedged on them, betting the loans would be paid in full in time.
The government was in debt to the tune of several trillion dollars officially and several times that 'off the books'. Much of this debt was sold to foreign governments who saw the country as being able to pay the interest ad infinitum. What if it couldn't anymore?
The Federal Reserve Bank had created easy money, easy credit for years and years and it was going to come to a head sooner or later. Something would have to be done to balance out this artificial expansion of credit. Sooner or later that credit bubble, as they were called, would burst.
Reggie hadn't a clue as to the intricacies of the delusion and the artifical nature of the entire economy based on debt. Nobody in the country seemed to know what would happen if the debt was called in for some reason, what if the new bonds were not bought?
Politicians wanted votes, they wanted to buy those votes with the money of the voters themselves, its been their scheme forever. Blame all the problems of the middle class on the rich, blame the problems of the poor on the middle class and the rich. Its a never ending cycle and its always useful for politicians to have scapegoats when their policies.fail.
It seemed that every time new taxes were imposed on big business and the rich that prices increased or something else happened to hurt and burden the poor or middle class. The politicians blamed it on the greed and evil nature of the businessman and the rich. They must be stealing the money from the masses, how else would they have gotten wealthy?
How was Reggie supposed to know about all of the things they never taught him in school and never mentioned on television? How was Reggie supposed to know that reality was nothing like what he had been told all his life? Well he was learning it now, in spades!
Reggie marveled at how many fewer trucks he saw these days than there used to be, as if the entire economy was ready to halt fot good.
Reggie remembered wondering where all those trillions were going, poured into the banks and mortgage lenders, then the car companies and other companies. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for what was going on.
Why would the government take our money in taxes and give it to companies that we did not want to do business with? If a company cannot fulfill its promises to its customers then let them go out of business and be replaced by a more efficient and more proactive business that the consumers would do business with.
Didn't that make more sense?
Why are we punishing successful companies that please the consumer and reward those that fail to produce a product or service the people desire? Reggie remembered when he first asked himself that very question. He was sitting at a traffic signal and glanced over to see a building, it was a welfare office. He had never compared welfare to the corporate bailouts until that moment.
He saw a man in a fur coat sitting against the hood of a brand new expensive car, its loud radio blaring rap music for the entire neighborhood to hear whether they wanted to or not, he had gold chains and rings on and was laughing it up. Three women, loose women by the looks of them came out and handed him envelopes and got into his car.
That man did not need that bailout. That man is richer than I am, he even has 3 workers to exploit and he collects their welfare checks! On the other side of the intersection he saw three men pouring concrete, their shirts stained with sweat, they were working hard to feed and clothe the man in the fur coat. There is something very wrong with this, Reggie remembered telling himself.
Reggie pulled off the highway onto the most pot-hole filled road he ever saw, it was like the surface of the moon covered with craters. It was a mine field for the tiny cars that were mandated now a days, it would be easy to break an axle or whatever these boxes had holding the wheels.on.
It happened to the cities, towns and county governments first. They simply began to run out of money and they had to make do with what they had. Cities and counties merged operations, unified their law enforcement agencies and courts, cut back on school days and hours, cut back on road repair. Parks didn't get mowed for weeks at a time, some were abandoned. Libraries opened fewer and fewer days a week, bought fewer books and sometimes were simply shut down.
The state governments followed rather quickly, they could not even pretend that they could support the local governments. They had to slash their own budgets for education and welfare. The welfare rolls doubled and then tripled from that, welfare checks got smaller and smaller as prices multiplied and stores shut down. More signed up for welfare as taxes were increased and revenues dropped as businesses simply could not operate at a loss.
Reggie realized he had skipped part of the story he was remembering to himself, he remembered reading about the bailouts and the government taking over car companies and how this was to somehow help the economy. He was supposed to trust that the politicians and their buddies knew what they were doing. Reggie realized he hoped they didn't because if they knew what they were doing then it was treason or something.
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Post by Attero Dominatus on May 25, 2009 2:21:29 GMT -5
Very good. Inspires me to work on a story I am planning my head about a vigilante who lost everyone he loved to the islamofascists, who control most of a post-economic-collapse America and Europe. This character knows he will eventually die, but he has vowed to take as many of his enemies down with him.
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Post by Floyd Looney on May 25, 2009 2:55:03 GMT -5
Reggie remembered a friend since high school asking him a serious question, even though he professed to believe the politicians and media that everything would be better soon. He had stopped while they were playing one on one basketball, holding the ball loosely and asked “Reggie, what if it all goes at the same time?”
“All what T?”
“The banks, the mortgage companies, the credit bubble, the national debt, the trade deficit man, what if it all goes pop at the same time?”
Reggie remembered how they stood there staring at each other for several minutes as it began to drizzle lightly. Reggie could have no other answer. He might not know exactly what or how those things worked but he had a pretty good notion of how bad it could get. “You mean national bankruptcy?”
T had nodded slowly. Reggie thought for a moment, he had heard this before somewhere or another ans it was a good guess. “They won't, they can't admit to themselves that they did it. That they killed a country. They will monetize the debt, print it all up. Twenty five hundred percent increase or more in circulating dollars, hyper-inflation. The hundred dollar bills will be worth a penny in todays measure, if not less. Then we pay off all the government debt and promises with worthless dollars”.
T looked as if he might faint. “What will they do to us? They said this was all about us, the poor man? They said they would make everything right, they'd even give us stuff, money. We have a brother in the White House and this is what we get?”
“We have never been their concern T, we are merely a voting bloc that comes cheap. Throw a few more baubles our way and we sing your praises as we starve to death. Thats how they see us T, I think thats how they all have always seen us. Not us negroes, T, I am talking about the people whom they consider beneath their concern”.
Chinese-made goods shot up in prices and then all but vanished from shelves, the Chinese no longer accepted the American dollar and they would not buy US debt unless the payout was in gold or other tangible assets. We really had little to nothing to trade, the Chinese masses would not work for worthless American dollars.
Christmas without toys, without lights for the tree came and went. School supplies were far more expensive, charities did what they could but they were getting few donations since a 25% tax on charitable giving had been imposed. The United States found it virtually impossible to get loans from the World Bank or the IMF. It had been us that had given them what funds they had in the first place, now we were not credit worthy.
The politicians continued to blame corporate greed and the free market system for the economic problems. Free market? It had hardly been free in several lifetimes. Freedom killed the economy some began to argue, saying that government could do it better. As if the listeners and viewers had forgotten the past decade and a half.
Reggie could not believe that people would agree but it was the only point of view heard on radio and television, so it was now common knowledge. The people seemed to repeat the words as a mantra.
The shutting down of power plants because of their bad environmental effects had plunged the nation into electricity rationing, although the price would still be higher because of new taxes on pollution, sometimes you got light for a few hours a day. Sometimes you wished you could have one hour.
Thr government took over the healthcare system to provide free healthcare for all and we know how that ended. It was the most expensive freebie in the history of the Earth, incredibly high taxes plus rationing of healthcare. You were lucky to even see a specialist several months after being diagnosed, lucky if you lived long enough to get treatment.
Doctors were getting paid little and it was soon apparent they were quitting in droves all over the country. Soon hospitals were shutting down, ambulance services became a luxury in the few cities where it could still be gotten at all. New undertrained doctors were attempting to fill the void but they seemed to kill more patients than they saved. Soon nobody dared go to a hospital, instead they tried to find a doctor who practiced in secret on the black market.
T's mother had been on dialysis when it happened that every dialysis operator in the region had quit and the nurses who knew how had also walked away. They tried to keep going by putting the other staff in charge but they ended up poisoning patients. T's mother had died just trying to find an open dialysis center. It was soon after that he had his last conversation with his best friend from childhood.
“I have to disappear” T had told him, “I cannot live like this, I'd rather live like a crazy man in the woods than this crap”. Reggie had nothing to say but T shook his head and asked “Did you try to get bread this morning?”
Reggie nodded, he had been near the front of the line with his ration card and his $15, but the man in the store didn't open. He simply pushed two small loaves through to the first two customers and then he shrugged. The bakery was now closed, the baker looked scared for his life, his eyes were rimmed with red and he looked so tired.
“Two tiny loaves! There are forty thousand people served by that bakery Reggie. The government is going to starve us and make us thank them at the same time. I cannot take another speech that lectures is to sacrifice and cut back for the common good. I can't take another speech about how prosperity is just around the corner. I can't take these lies anymore Reggie. I just can't. My mama died in my car because there wasn't no dialysis machines or people to run them, we had searched for days. Thats the same day when they told us how fair and equitable the healthcare system is now, how its so much better than it was before. Its all lies Reggie, every word they speak!”
Reggie hadn't seen or heard from T since.
The government was powerless to stop the criminals, the roving gangs of bandits that preyed on anyone with a scrap of food or anything remotely tradable. Sometimes they would kill a bum or a random person just out of pure frustration. The President declared that rumors were worrying people needlessly, it was all lies spread by the capitalist polluters, that things were better than they had been for a long time. Anything that was wrong was because of the sabotage of the capitalists and the rich.
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Post by Floyd Looney on May 25, 2009 2:56:20 GMT -5
I guess I was shooting for a modern "Atlas Shrugged" but not from the view of a striker, because there isn't really a Galt's Gulch.
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Post by Floyd Looney on May 25, 2009 2:58:46 GMT -5
This is 6 pages and he hasn't even reached the second destination yet!
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Post by Attero Dominatus on May 25, 2009 3:34:53 GMT -5
I guess I was shooting for a modern "Atlas Shrugged" but not from the view of a striker, because there isn't really a Galt's Gulch. Well you are doing a very good job of it.
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Post by Attero Dominatus on May 25, 2009 3:38:42 GMT -5
This is 6 pages and he hasn't even reached the second destination yet! Sometimes you just cannot compress events over a small span of pages. The latest battle in Vigilance now comprises four entire chapters and is only halfway done!
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Post by Floyd Looney on May 25, 2009 5:31:40 GMT -5
I posted one pagers to 2 other stories too
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Post by Floyd Looney on Jun 14, 2009 15:01:27 GMT -5
Reggie worked for Dunnam County, he was sort of their official documents delivery person, a position formed when the Post Office has vanished. It was a position he knew might vanish as early as the next meeting of the County Council, if they decided that mail isn't important enough to justify the cost.
He was the guy who would deliver notices of death, lawsuits and other things that Council members could not bring themselves to do. The next letter was from the County Department of Revenue for one Lydia J Stephenson, who lived in a former shipping container at Gypsum Field, hers was number 244.
Reggie walked through the maze of shipping containers that had become homes and, from the smell, latrines. He carried the manila folder tightly against himself. He smelled a terrible odor coming from the wooded area nearby and decided to get a closer look. Apparently someone had figured out how to brew sawgrass into a beer or something.
Then he saw several people sitting on a blanket, others were lying down. One of them pointed at Reggie and introduced himself as William Peet. “I am here to warn you, you government types aren't here say. The balding man was talking to himself, saying things that made little or no sense. Reggie decided the man was insane and began to walk awat.
“You know why the world ended?” the man asked, Reggie noticed the missing teeth and the very bad breath. “You know?”
Reggie shook his head and the man proceeded to tell him all about the grand theory from the mind of one William Peet. Reggie heard something about “faustian chickens” and then about “jaguars raining down from the sky”. Drugs, what was this guy on? Finally he heard “Islamic Jews” being at the center of it all. This made no sense at all to Reggie and he went on his way to find Lydia J Stephenson in a container marked 244.
He heard footsteps stomping on dried leaves and dead grass behind him, William Peet was going to let him get away this easily. Reggie thought the guy might have more stories to tell. May God have mercy on his soul. The strange little man, Willie Peet, simply took off running after screaming “Truth out”.
Reggie shook his head and kept looking for the container where Lydia lived, so as to do his job.
He remembered something he read on the internet, that there would never be another real election until after the next civil war. But no civil war had come. The person had written that the statists would rather rule of stinking pile of rubble than live in peace and prosperity without controlling it. That had certainly been true.
He thought of T, becoming a raider, a pirate and became angry. Then he pushed the anger aside and wondered if maybe they were correct. Could it be time to just help push this system into oblivion? Do they really think it was even possible when so many people were ready to just accept this situation?
How could anyone accept this? He stopped and laughed. I did. I did because it could be worse, at least I have a job. I've been so afraid to lose the job that I have become a tool of the statists, a cog in their wheel. There were probably millions who were afraid to lose what little they had if they stood up to the tyrants that had destroyed their country.
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Post by Attero Dominatus on Jun 15, 2009 2:26:05 GMT -5
Again, very good. William Peet's conspiracy theories reminds me of the crazy beliefs one can usually find at DU.
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Post by Floyd Looney on Jun 15, 2009 16:51:24 GMT -5
I model him off of a certain DUer who lives at a bar in Boston
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Post by Attero Dominatus on Jun 15, 2009 17:26:19 GMT -5
It did not occur to me at first (I do not read through the madness at DU as much as I did before) but I now realize who you are talking about.
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Post by VESTA on Aug 19, 2009 6:10:27 GMT -5
It did not occur to me at first (I do not read through the madness at DU as much as I did before) but I now realize who you are talking about. It is a problem to drive about delivering bad news to people and if you have the job, sometime you will need a bathroom or food. Best bet are the truck stops, huge buffetts and a place out of the cold. Our hero pulls up next to a big tandom truck in time to hear the woman hanging off the cab offer a BJ for a pack of cigarettes and the buffet dinner first. Our hero followes them into the resturant and notices most tables are full, just one 4 seater left. He sits down with the trucker and hungry hooker. There is a very long counter that seats perhaps 25 full to standing room for the armed securiety guards that all truckers now needed. Over half the truckers were of some race other then black or white. They never spoke to each other but by body language they were in fact doing the silent talk. A hand movement here a gesture there and a shrug of the sholders. All the Black and white latino and asians were sitting a far away from the other drivers as possible. Schools began to teach Spanish in kindergarden so that was understood and used as the OTHERS could not understand.
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