Chapter Eight
Let Them Eat Cake
Food distribution centers had been set up in some areas. But they, by and large, had not gotten to small towns like Morrisville, VT, or Blackjack, GA. Never really did. Those areas were supposed to be producing the food, not drawing on it.
Initial movement during the Plague had been out of the cities. As the summer (what there was of it) kicked in, the movement was back. There wasn't any food in the countryside. Oh, there was, just not what most people recognized as such (yet). And the locusts wanted the government to feed them. Which it did. I wasn't on that detail but I've heard the stories.
Food distribution was very much on the classic methods used in Africa during famines. People got in long lines and were given some basic food materials. Semolina (cream of wheat for those of you who don't know the name, couscous for the hoity toity) was a base distribution as was cornmeal and beans. Why those? You could put it in a pot and boil it up and eat it. That simple.
"How can I boil it? I don't have a pot!" "I've got a pot, where's a stove?"
The answer is "find a pot, cut down a tree, boil the fucking water."
Believe it or not, there were still "environmental activists" being interviewed on the news who were complaining about the ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE that was being done from this sort of distribution. Trees were being cut down. (There used to be these things called "greenbelts" around subdivisions. I kid you not.) Fires were adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. There were even lawsuits seeking injunctions against fires used for cooking food.
Due to the way that the population had ebbed and flowed, most of the food distribution centers that were getting heavy traffic tended to be in the outer edges of cities. Central areas had some commerce as well, but people were clustering out of cities and, well, there were "issues" in the cities. Which wasn't good for the economy. Cities were and are the mitochondria of the economic animal.
But that's where most of the people who were coming to the food distribution centers were. And they included the "random associations" from suburbs. Side note again.
According to orders, the only people who got food were those that came to distribution centers. The Bitch again. I'll get into her hate affair with her crisis management specialists, including the head of FEMA, later. But that was the Rule.
Very few local officers paid attention to it. The majority of the distribution was going through the Army and what remained of the National Guard and reserves. The NG had had widespread desertions when they were called up. Go take care of others or stay with your family? About 20% chose the latter. There were also screw-ups with their vaccination program. They ended up at about half strength.
Oh, why weren't there more widespread desertions in the Army? There is no better place to be in an emergency (generally, we still haven't gotten to me, right?) than the Army. The Army always gets fed. Rations may be short, but it gets fed. And it generally takes care of dependents.
Dependents near bases went to the units when things got bad. They got some medical care, unit family support groups gathered in "less than random" associations and, well, supported each other. The troops were away. Rear area detachment personnel weren't going to turn away their wives when said wives turned up with kids in tow, hacking and coughing. (And in some conditions girlfriends or even "close personal friends" of the same sex. You can turn a blind eye to all sorts of shit in an emergency.) But even the dependents, those that lived on or near base, mostly got innoculated. And while power might be out in the local town, it stayed up on bases. There was food, water, shelter, medical care and clothing. As things started to get humming again there were even jobs.
There's a reason for this. See the difference between the National Guard and the Regulars. The Regulars stayed on the job in droves, less than five percent desertions, no matter how nasty those jobs were. (Body clearance in Miami was high on the list according to a buddy in the 82nd. He's challenged by a couple of officers in my unit who were involved in breaking up the food riots in DC. Clearing already dead people in hundred degree heat or killing American citizens? Tough call. I didn't get to find out, fortunately. Sort of. But, truth to tell, I actually enjoyed Detroit. Sometimes you can do good works in very bad ways.)
The point being that most of the work at the grunt level was not being done by FEMA, which never had many bodies, or even by the National Guard, which should have had many more bodies, but by Regular Army units. They'd been flown back starting in April when it was clear things were going to hell in a handbasket. At first the generals stuck with the pre-disaster plan until they got ordered to follow the Bitch Plan under Emergency Powers.
Okay, okay, damn. Sooo much to cover.
There was a Plan. Like all emergency plans the Post Catastrophic Disaster Emergency Rebuilding Plan left out, well, the Emergency. But it was a plan. It was a plan nobody wanted to implement but it was a Plan. It amounted to nationwide triage.
Triage is a word that comes from the old French word "trier" meaning "to pick or sort." Triage on a battlefield (where the word originated in the Napoleonic Wars) came down to three choices: Those that don't need help right now, those that can survive if they get help right now and those that are probably going to die whether they get help or not. Three choices. You send the bulk of your resources, doctors in this case, to the cases who had to have help right now, but that were probably going to live if they got that help. The lightly wounded could wait until later. And for those for whom there was no help, you sent no help. You put them together hopefully somewhere far enough away from the rest that their groans and screams wouldn't bother anyone and you Let Them Die.
It was an ugly, ugly, ugly plan. Basically, the Powers That Be, notably the military and FEMA, would determine zones that were recoverable fast. Energy would be concentrated on those zones first. As they got back on their feet, they would be used to springboard movement into zones that were just so totally fucked up they hadn't been recoverable. Lightly wounded (not many of them, NYC comes to mind) would be more or less on their own.
So now we turn once again to the Bitch. Tum-tum-ta-dum-tum, Hail to the Chief and all that.
She's been going quietly insane in my opinion. The news media did not agree. The Democrat Congress did not agree.
Everyone else in the world fucking agreed.
In March, in the midst of the worst of the Plague, the Congress had passed the Biological Crisis Emergency Act, effectively surrendering power to the President "for the duration of the biological and economic emergency."
Biological and economic.
What is the definition of an economic emergency? Okay, the world's economic turbine coming apart like an explosion is one definition. But what constitutes the end of the emergency? According to the news media, blips in the stock market pre-Plague were "emergencies." A quarter point rise in the unemployment index was "an emergency."
Okay, okay, fifty percent unemployment, as far as anyone could determine, (and, remember, thirty percent population drop) was an emergency. But at what point did it stop becoming an emergency?
Fortunately, they put a sunset date of one year from its signing for it to end but there was a proviso for an automatic renewal with a simple majority. And there was no stated limits. It suspended just about every right a person could have. Notably, habeas corpus and property rights.
Okay, there were "issues." There were a lot of dead people and stuff that was lying around that could be used. Factories that had been owned by families, the local members of which were dead and the distant ones unreachable. Or, hell, the corporation had just shut its doors and was in receivership. Farms that were lying fallow due to the Plague. Fine, whatever. There's a term called "eminent domain" for those. Basically, if there wasn't an immediately recognized heir or owner the government could and should take it over. Then sell it to someone who can run it.
The Emergency Powers Act cut through that. It also meant that there were no legal roadblocks to forced immunization. (Not that the Bitch ever got around to that.) And there were areas where social order had broken down completely. They were supposed to be placed in the category of "let them die" but . . . There's the Bitch deciding what is Right and What Should Be Done. Despite experts who were advising her that SHE HAD CHOSEN for their EXPERTISE.
Bush had been lambasted for his response to Katrina and New Orleans. Incorrectly IMO; the people who really cocked up were the local authorities. Look at Mississippi if you can find the information. There were entire counties that were wiped out. The storm surge that hit the Mississippi coast was higher than the tsunami that had hit Indonesia. There were bodies on top of a Walmart. They just picked up and did what they could. They called for Federal assistance right away, they followed their pre-disaster plans.
But the bottomline was Bush got hammered. And one of the things he got hammered on, justifiably, was his choice of head of FEMA.
I won't get into the hundreds of thousands of words I've read on that particular issue. Bottomline was that Michael Brown was not the guy to lead the agency. For so many different reasons it's scary.
But FEMA's actual response was as near textbook as you could get. Mostly because Brown realized he was totally out of his depth and let his people handle it.
The problem being, nobody really understood disaster response in the media. And they fucking hated Bush. Even Fox didn't really like him.
Look, in a local major disaster like that, FEMA wasn't even supposed to be up and running for seventy-two hours. Three days. That was after they were requested by local authorities.
But on day two, hell with the skies barely clearing, people were asking "Where is FEMA?"
FEMA doesn't actually have all that many full-time employees. Disasters, by their very definition, don't occur all the fucking time. So most of its response specialists are contractors who do other things, or are retired and hang out, waiting for the next response.
They had to be called in. People had to go in and find areas to set up. It takes time.
Even then, they don't do most of the work. They coordinate the work. More contractors, and military, and local government do the actual work. Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Asking "where is FEMA" in a disaster is like asking "Why aren't the managers here?" The managers are important, don't get me wrong. But they don't get the bodies cleared.
So Bush was roundly criticized for responding in damned near textbook manner. Despite Michael Brown.
Warrick, though, knew it was a major political point. So even during her campaign, she found a person that she said was to be her head of FEMA in the event of her inevitable election.
Brody Barnes was a former Army colonel. He'd started as a tanker but then got into specialized areas of what's called "civil affairs," that is dealing with problems of a local populace.
He'd been an unnoticed but major reason that the rebuilding in Iraq, which went way better than the media ever could realize, went as well as it did. His main degree was industrial management so he wasn't an engineer but a guy who understood how to get very disparate parts of a complicated system to start working together.
He retired at twenty years and got a job almost immediately as assistant director of the California Emergency Management Agency. The director was a politically appointed position. A year after Brody joined, the director "voluntarily" resigned and Brody was appointed by the Republican governor. Like similar positions in the federal government, it required the consent of the very liberal California Senate. He passed the vote with acclaim. He was definitely a rising star.
By the time the election of 2016 rolled around he'd dealt with multiple major brushfire outbreaks, three minor earthquakes, mudslide seasons aplenty and one fairly major earthquake. He also looked good on TV. Square-jawed, soft-spoken, dry sense of humor, good soundbites.
He accepted the nod as a potential FEMA head and spoke widely in favor of Warrick. He liked her domestic policies. When asked about her military policies he politely declined to comment. Not his area. Ask someone else.
He was appointed head of FEMA one month after Warrick went into office. He was head of FEMA when the Plague hit.
He was one of the people with testicles trying to get Warrick to stick to some sort of plan. Wasn't happening.
You see, he had been a convenient tool to aid a close election. But he wasn't one of Warrick's inner advisors. Not that Warrick listened to them much. She knew what was Right and so on and so forth.
Warrick had Her Plan. And everybody else was going to follow the Warrick Plan.
The first part of the Warrick Plan was the distribution Plan. Pancake.
The second part of the Warrick Plan had to do with the economy. Okay, Wall Street fucking tanked. It made Black Friday look like a minor blip. The Dow was riding high at nearly 16,000 points before the first word of H5N1. By the time trading was "semipermanently suspended" it was below 5,000.
Well, if corporations couldn't handle a minor matter like a plague that had wiped out their workforce and their customers and their distribution systems and the economic underpinnings that they depended on for sustenance, they would just be nationalized.
How, exactly, she expected that to help was never quite clear. They were to be nationalized. The Government, in its infinite wisdom, would take over their facilities and get them back in running order.
Banks closed. The one smart thing she did was stop all foreclosures from banks. The stupid thing she did was continue to permit tax seizures. The idea of tax seizures is that the government grabs the goods of a person or company who refuses to pay taxes. Then they sell them.
There were effectively no buyers. Oh, there were some. That money in the stock market had gone somewhere. Mostly it had gone into the first people to bail out. They were sitting on money in various places. Some of it evaporated. When banks closed, if you had more than the federally protected maximum in it, it disappeared. Not exactly but it was tied up in loans that, for the time being, couldn't be recovered and might never be. But the truly rich were covered on many fronts and held onto portions of their assets. And they then used them to buy up properties at firehouse prices. Some of them were in eminent domain because there were no heirs. But the government was seizing a lot of stuff that was because people suddenly found themselves unable to pay taxes on it.
Farms, factories, equipment, there wasn't a huge market but there was a market. The problem being that just as basic necessities, food and clothing, were getting astronomically expensive, things like a dump truck were going for pennies on the dollar.
The next thing she did was declare a fixed price on commodities. Oh. My. God.
Look, in a free market economy stuff sells for what people are willing to pay. If the commodity, pork bellies for example, is in big supply and low demand, it sells for less. If the commodity is in big demand and low supply, it sells for more. Supply and demand.
Go back to the seizures. A loaf of sliced, wrapped, packaged bread in the few remaining open grocery stores, if you could find one, was going for ten dollars. Knew somebody who had paid $500 for a pound of coffee. You could buy an F-350 pickup truck in nearly mint condition for not much more. The supply of useless vehicles was high. The supply of food was low.
Supply and demand.
The Bitch decided that she was going to put a stop to that and ordered all basic commodities to be repriced at pre-Plague levels.
Which just meant that people who had any money left stripped the shelves and because it was costing more to produce a loaf of bread than ten dollars, the few remaining businesses that were making bread went out of business. So there was no more bread.
Ever hear the whole thing about Marie Antoinette and "If there is no bread then let them eat cake." She wasn't a cold-hearted bitch as is normally thought. She was a liberal airhead.
Think I'm wrong?
There was a famine going on at the time, a Malthus special combined with, hey! look! a global cooling event. The French agricultural economy had reached its carrying capacity just as there was a turn-down in the thermostat. One bad harvest and people were starving. The king ordered that the price of bread in Paris and other cities be fixed at a certain level so that people could afford to eat. The only problem being the farmers, who had limited supplies from the bad harvest, weren't willing to sell it to the bakers at the cost necessary for bread to be that cost. So the supply of wheat ran out for bread.
The king had also decreed that if there was no bread flour, then cake, which was from much more expensive (less supply) flour, was to be substituted.
So she was making, within the "command economy" mindset, a perfectly plausible statement. If the bakers aren't making bread, then the poor get to eat cake.
The only problem being, there wasn't enough flour for cake, either. And either way the bakers were going to go out of business.
There were stores of grains still in silos. It could be argued that locking in their price to what they were worth pre-Plague was reasonable. Except that the people who owned them now had much higher expenses across the board. And if they went out of business, somebody was going to have to run the silos. Okay, the government. Are we going to get to full communism? If Warrick had her way we would have.
But even if you fixed the cost of those, that didn't get it to mouths. You had to transport it. The fuel delivery system was shot. (Take our dead husband in the suburb and multiply by fifteen million.) What fuel was available was expensive. Law of supply and demand.
Okay, then fix the price of fuel!
Truckers had gotten hit hard by the Plague. By definition, they traveled and were exposed all over the place. So there were fewer truckers. And most of them were independents. There were fewer loads, but there were way fewer truckers. They could pick and choose their cargoes and if they had one that was willing to pay more, say a load of critical components that a company was willing to pay through the nose for, rather than, say, a government priced shipment of food, they went for the filthy lucre.
Seize the trucks!
Thus was the Big Grab started. And it went on and fucking on. Sure, she had the Right under the Emergency Powers Act. It was, however, very fucking stupid. It did more lasting damage to the economy than the Plague. We're still trying to unfuck it.
There's a personal side to that but I'll get to that. I promise.
But while the Big Grab was still getting rolling, and understand it was never quite a full governmental program, just an ad hoc response as things came to the Bitch's attention, the Bitch implemented the next stage of her Plan.
There was to be no triage. Not as such. Areas that were recoverable weren't to be designated. Areas that were write-offs weren't to be designated. She and her advisors would determine which areas were to be concentrated on, first.
Well, go figure. Looks like the blue states won out big-time. And especially blue counties.
Only one problem. If Brody Barnes had been asked, his contention was "they're mostly gone for the time being."
Go back to the trust thing. Think about multiculturalism. Look at Morristown vs. Blackjack. And blue counties tended to be heavily urbanized.
The cities were just a fucking wreck. At least for a time in almost all urban areas "essential services" broke down. Essential services are Maslov's hierarchy. Food and water are the big two. Security isn't really mentioned but before food started to run out looting became a major issue.
Ah. Looting vs. scavenging. In a disaster situation, there is a difference between looting and scavenging. Scavenging is a person coming out of a Winn-Dixie or Meijers with a shopping cart filled with canned goods and bottled water. Looting is a person coming out of Walmart with five TVs.
You help scavengers, you shoot looters. (Okay, okay, shoot me. It was too good to pass up! But I'm getting ahead of myself again.)
Inner city neighborhoods that had been the target of "specialized policing" were the absolute worst. These were the grasshoppers gathered in force. Trust barely existed within family groups. There was little or no social cohesion.
After the first wave of the Plague they were free-fire zones. I'd have rather walked down a street in Qom butt-assed naked than drive through South Detroit in a Stryker.
But not only were those areas where the bulk of her voters came from, they were where the news media was. If it bleeds it leads and it was bleeding hard in South Chicago, Detroit, Watts, East L.A., Washington, DC . . .
The worst spots were to be the target of the most concentrated effort.
There's a military term for this. It's called "slamming the wall." The basic concept is that if you take your enemy's strongest position, it will break him. It's also called "suicide." Porkchop Hill, the Somme, Coldwater Harbor. Historical examples of "slamming the wall." Also historical examples of highest casualty assaults. And none of them did a damned bit of good in the end.
Neither did pouring vital supplies into the free-fire zones.
And then there were the Rules of Engagement. They went way beyond "do not fire unless fired upon." Warrick was, after all, a lawyer. Written out, they went to five pages of flow diagrams. They were worse than the ones issued towards the latter part of the Iraq Campaign. Essentially they came down to "do not fire." Period. If you shot anyone, for any reason, you were probably going to jail.
Soldiers were prosecuted, during that period, for firing upon people who were actively firing at them. Guys went to Leavenworth who had bullets in their body-armor. Dozens of food shipments were lost to gangs that forced the soldiers to turn them over. It was that or have a fire-fight. And they were not permitted to fire. When it was more or less one on one, and it often was, not firing first meant heavy casualties. The leaders, and I don't blame them, were willing to give up the shipments rather than take the casualties.
Units were required to "maintain a minimum presence of force." That is, they weren't supposed to ride into the neighborhoods like an invading army. No matter how violent they were. Habeas corpus had been suspended but you couldn't tell it if you were a soldier. Unless, of course, you were up for punishment. Then you hadeus no corpus.
And some very heavy weapons had gotten into the hands of these gangs. One Stryker was hit and destroyed by a Javelin while escorting a food convoy. Most of the units doing the escorting didn't have Javelins issued. (A Javelin is an anti-tank missile. More about those, later, too.)
So while the red counties, the rural counties and smaller cities that made up "fly-over country" were organizing and recovering and hoping for some help, however little, the "blue" counties, many of which had gone completely bat-shit, were having food and medical supplies and emergency supplies shoveled into them like coal into a furnace and for about as much result.
Okay, they were not all losses. Notice I didn't mention Harlem, Queens or the Bronx. That's because they didn't ever get that bad. Not even close. Part of that was because the mayor refused to let it get that bad. Mortality had been incredibly low. Less than 20% and that, frankly, tended to be among grasshoppers. Police presence was high and the local National Guard unit had been turned into something closer to the New York militia. When they were ordered to displace to handle problems in New Jersey—Newark was one of the war zones—the orders were ignored.
Food shipments got to where they were supposed to go. Bodies were collected. Order never really broke down in New York. It's possible for at least a local government to maintain near normal conditions even in densely populated areas, even in a disaster as bad as the Plague. But it took strong and effective leadership. People have got to trust. Let's all work together said "I'm trusting you to trust me to not screw you." Enough people got the idea that it worked. The few "random associators" among New Yorkers supported the mayor. And the "King" types were willing to follow a strong man in a time of trouble. Call it a cult of personality.
Like I said, if Cranslow runs for President, I'll work with him. He's even a fiscal conservative. What the hell.