Chapter Nine
Random Associations
The majority of the functional distribution, therefore, happened outside cities. Much of it was illicit. That is, food convoys were ordered to Philadelphia and "broke down" before they got there. And set up distribution stations. And fed people that needed it and weren't going to try to steal it. And, often, turned bulk materials over to "local random associations" for distribution.
Okay, the gangs were, often, local random associations, more or less. Some of them, especially Hispanic and Asian, were at core familial based. (And by Asian I don't mean just Chinese. Note the Caliphate.)
But they were not going to be, in turn, acting as useful distributors. The food was used for internal power. There was a touch of that in places with the churches and other associations (VFW did enormous if unheralded good during the Time). They had the food and they made the choices who ate and who did not. Generally, this was not race based as was often reported. It was, to an extent, based on trust issues. But mostly it was based on the same reasoning that young lady in Blackjack used. Feed local emergency services personnel first. Feed kids and elderly next. Feed random associators next. Feed the grasshoppers last.
There was a degree of blending and bonding during the Time which was unprecedented in American history. Generally, for actual biological reasons, people do differentiate on the basis of color. (Yes, babies do not. Children, by and large, do not. The trait kicks in at puberty. It can be culturally adjusted, but it's a defined human trait. A white child raised among Chinese is going to trust Chinese over whites. True study. Another urban myth trashed.) And there were then and are now bigots on that score.
But due to societal factors, random associators had a fair slice of military personnel in their midst. And military personnel deal with all kinds of colors when they're in. It's hard to be in the military for any time and not become to an extent color blind. They may look at cultural factors, but they tend to look past color per se. The two are not equal.
(Had a bit of an issue on that part just before the last Iran deployment. We were having a hard time getting a widget out of one particular supply unit. I paid them a visit to try to sweet-talk. Ended up talking with the unit commander. Didn't get far. And then the fuck-head had the audacity to say "I guess you're just not part of the African-American mafia." So I laughed and admitted I wasn't. And then I turned the whole thing over to the IG. Along with my report of the meeting. About three weeks later the unit commander was on his way out of the Army.
By the same token, Colonel Richards, just about the best fucking battalion commander I ever had, was black. Culture is not the same as race.)
So when a white kid walked up to one of the white distributors and asked for extra food to take back to his family, he was judged on his social appearance. Did he have his pants hanging down to his knees and his ball-cap on sideways? Was he wearing an earring? Did he look "ghetto"?
He'd better be known to the people doing the distribution or they'd tell him if someone had a chance they'd take some over but right now it was line up or nothing.
A black guy walking up to a line of distributors from a very white church might get the same perusal. If, however, he was neatly dressed and well spoken, and especially if he offered to help, he was likely to be trusted. He might be given food for more than just himself if there was extra.
Yes, there were those that used that to their advantage. But by and large judging on the basis of culture for trust works.
It was not only white churches that got largess from military units who were, increasingly and against orders, turning away from downtown areas. Any random association that seemed functional and valid might get a drop of food and medicines. A fucking mosque in St. Louis was eventually considered the best place to drop shipments. They handled them evenhandedly and very efficiently. Charity is one of the few things that Islamics get right.
Larger associations formed, very very much "back channel."
Example:
A white church in suburban Boston was running low on food. Suddenly, a convoy destined for the center of Boston "broke down" nearby and had to unload most of its supplies. Convenient?
A black church in Arkansas had received a similar largesse, in part because the first sergeant of the National Guard company doing the delivery had family in the church and they were not interested in going into the portion of Little Rock they were destined for.
The two churches, widely separated, were "sister missions" to each other. That is, there was some reciprocation of ministers and support. That mostly came down to the more wealthy church having, over the years, given financial support to the less wealthy. And, yes, that is white and black. And even after the Plague they had kept in contact through several means.
In this case bread upon the waters, as Jesus said, worked out. The XO of the National Guard company had been a member of 10th ID. He called one of his old bosses and mentioned that he'd heard there was a church group doing good works but struggling near Boston. 10th ID was working the Boston area. Voila "breakdown."
Bread upon the waters. Random associations.
Where there was not direct interference, it was random associations that started to rebuild the country. The economy was just screwed. But that didn't mean people didn't work and businesses didn't function to some extent. It was strange. There was a labor shortage and at the same time high unemployment. It was like the cost of goods. There were many hands that wanted to work and companies that were opening or managed to hang on and stay open that needed to fill the slots left open by deaths. It took time, though, to get those two together.
Communications never went down completely. There were times when it was impossible to get a phone call through to certain areas. And the Internet was a spotty thing. Not so much because of the trunks but because of local providers, functionality thereof.
But commo was spotty and screwed up. And there would be various scares of a new plague breaking out. It did in places. Miami had a cholera outbreak, more deaths. L.A. . . . Well, despite the best efforts of Warrick, or possibly because of them, L.A. was fucked. Cholera, resistant tuberculosis, typhus, they all broke out. And then there's the water situation. But that's a sideline I'll see about covering later.
And whenever there was a scare, the phone lines went down. All the connections weren't in place and as soon as anyone who still had access to a working phone heard a rumor, or a news report, which was often the same rumor, that a new plague had broken out they called friends or relatives in the area. And commo went down.
So let's look at an example.
Let's go back to the suburban family. The father was a guy working at a local fueling center. Now, this is a pump farm where the trucks that fuel gas stations go to fill up. Sometimes they're owned by one oil company but fill up all the trucks in the area, regardless of whose gas it's supposed to be. Not usually, but it happens.
Anyway, working one those places is a semi-skilled job. At the very least, a knowledge of the basic safety and emergency response is useful.
By and large, such places stayed up. Fuel was central and critical. They might not be going to a dozen gas stations anymore, but they were providing fuel to somebody. The military bought from such stations, fueling their fuel trucks at them.
But they'd taken hits in personnel. One in three, more or less at random. And as things started to reform, they were getting more and more trucks wanting fuel. Sometimes they ran out; it had to come from somewhere and the distribution system was in chaos. But the bottomline was, they needed bodies.
Say that the first family was in suburban Cincinnatti and the fueling station was, too. The husband was dead and buried under pansies. They get to the point they need a new fuel guy. Everyone's working overtime, for sometimes no pay but the company is making sure they get food, and they're getting worn out. They need another body. A warm one. Not the guy under pansies.
So they put out the word. They need a trained fuel technician.
All sorts of people walk over to the place. It's a job, man. Jobs are scarce. And the fuel company is making sure its people and their families get fed. But these are just bodies. They need someone with experience handling big quantities of fuel. They're too overworked to train someone, much as they need the body.
In the suburbs of Beltsville, itself a suburb, there's a former webdesigner who, during a single stint in the Army, worked a fuel distribution point in Iraq. She is a trained fuel transfer technician and has experience. But the place that needs her experience is in Cincinnatti. She's more than willing to go there to get a job and assured food. Maybe a bit of money left over for more than bare survival. It's a job, man.
Say that she still gets some Internet access, somehow. (Libraries still had some functionality.) Say that she finds the want ad on MonsterJobs.com. (Which came back up in June of 2019 and stayed up to this day.) How does she get to Cincinnatti? Note the "she." Hitchhiking is a choice of last resort. Major league trust issues.
In this case, not quite a random association. She puts her experience on the website along with a phone number at her local association (the VFW in her case, yes, it's taken from a real person's experience) where she can be reached.
The manager of the fuel point sees the hit and nearly jumps for joy. If it's legit. They'd had lots of people who could talk a good line about being experienced. One who was very good at talking had nearly blown the place up.
They get in contact. He quizzes her. She sounds good. But so did the nightmare. But how to get her to him?
Hey, fuel moves.
Mostly it moves by rail to distribution points like that. But they also handle more minor materials such as volume grease and oil. The military term is "POL": Petrol, (gasoline for Americans) Oil, Lubricants. Oil and lubricants, to a great degree, still moved by trucks.
There was a fuel point, from another company, near Beltsville. It had all the people it needed, but it also had trucks going north. The truckers, in this case, were known quantities.
Calls were made. E-mails were exchanged. (The oil companies had ensured their own connections to backbones long before the Plague. They were going to be hooked tight into the Internet if anything happened. They also had satellite connectivity if even that went down. Oil companies tend to be planners, too.)
She met a trucker at the "other company" fuel point who carried her to the outskirts of Philly where there was a distro point still open. From there, with the knowledge of the distro point manager, she caught another ride to another point. And so on. She had someone who knew who she was, where she was going and when she was supposed to arrive at each point.
She wasn't, really, a hitchhiker. She was a commodity being moved for the good of the companies. And while the companies were cutthroat, normally the exact opposite of "random voluntary associations" they also understood scratching back. When a favor was needed, it would be called. They trusted the other company, especially in these conditions, to be good for it.
She reached Cincinnatti and went to work.
By the way, there was a certain ignoring of paperwork in those days. Green cards were not necessary. Social security numbers were not necessary. Pay, by the same token, was spotty. Really long-thinking companies like oil companies tried to keep their people fed and mostly succeeded.
But it was still maximally fucked up.
The point to all this is that you can have massive unemployment and still have a labor shortage. Even if things are sort of bumping along, sort of, maybe, the "disruption" means that bodies, parts and everything else that is needed to keep any business going is scattered in the wrong places.
What saved the U.S. was a lot of people at fairly low levels working very hard to keep things going using any means necessary to do so. Like moving a skilled worker around via trucks that had strict regulations against picking up hitchhikers.
What nearly killed us were people in positions of power who wanted things to work the same way as pre-Plague.
There were articles and news reports on various "irregularities." Okay, that was a minor one and mostly overlooked even though she didn't file taxes for the whole of 2019. (Thank God for the Amnesty Bill is all I'll say.) Hell, she didn't officially work for Exxon for most of 2019 . . . Oops, did I say that out loud?
J
(Wife edit. Thanks a lot. If you think you're getting any for the rest of the year, think again!)
(Hell, most of 2020 you worked for the feds! Back off.)
(And it was a nightmare.)
But the worst "irregularities" were "price fixing."
Sigh. The government could do price fixing but not companies. Especially not oil companies.
Sigh.
Look, things were total suckage. People were still dying. There were very few truly functional banks. Nobody could figure out if we were dealing with run-away inflation or runaway deflation.
So a bunch of managers getting together and saying "We need to call a truce" just made sense. Don't compete. Associate for the common good. Wait until things cool down to go back to stabbing each other in the back as hard as we can.
They had a far better idea of what valid prices were than Warrick. They knew their costs, they knew their inventories (and when the on-hand inventory was out, it was going to be a while getting more oil on a national level. There was no chance of getting out of the Middle East, I can tell you that. Not sure of deploying troops to cover the pumping and transfer. Which we got around to eventually.) They consulted, they planned, they projected, they shook hands and they set their prices.
And they got hammered.
Oh. My. God. The news media led the charge. The evil oil companies were screwing the American People. Profits were soaring as prices were fixed by an unnamed cabal.
So Warrick nationalized the oil companies and arrested the "conspirators."
And that worked real well.
At that point she was nationalizing so many industries, many of which were effectively defunct, that she didn't have government employees to run them. Sure, she could just say "all of you are government employees" but who bells the cat?
Okay, take the oil companies.
Running an oil company is, at almost every single level, a very complex business. Receptionists are about the only people who don't require hours and weeks of training before you can let them do anything on their own. One wrong turn of the wrench in a refinery can mean a big boom. Figuring out how to get just the right inventory to Peoria, Kansas, means having figured out which ten thousand gallons of fuel from which tanker at what point in its voyage is going to go there months in advance. Not exactly, but functionally.
What does "you are nationalized" mean?
Well, in the case of Exxon (oops, sorry) it meant choosing a crony to become the CEO with all the perks, pay and privileges. Said crony being, effectively, a tofu-eater. Notably, the person put in charge of Exxon had, upon a time, been a senior member of Greenpeace. And an "environmental lawyer."
Metaphors on that one are tough. I guess putting Osama Bin Laden in charge of the Defense Department works.
The crony brought in more cronies who brought in more cronies. Their job was to make the oil company less evil not make sure it ran efficiently. Profits were no longer their objective; "serving the world" was their objective.
Some of the "service" that was required of the company during the brief reign of what were and are called "the fucktards" were odd to say the least. Okay, so they had to be even more environmentally conscious than they already were. I'm not an oil guy, that would be someone I know and she's not a guy, (Thanks) but there's this thing called "the law of diminishing returns."
Look, refineries were already about as clean as they were going to get. Spills were a major response issue. Emissions were pretty low, all things considered.
Getting the emissions lower required engineering that was horrendously expensive and, at the time, unavailable. The refineries were having a hard enough time just continuing to function. Installing more and better emission systems simply was not an option. Who was going to make them? They don't grow on trees! They grow in China on trees!
But they had to get lower. And gas has to get cheaper. Oh, and you need to start contributing to various funds. Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Environmental Defense Fund. And pay these huge numbers of grasshoppers exorbitant salaries so that they can get back to their grasshopper lifestyle even though they're not actually contributing anything but bitching to the company.
And contribute to the presidential election campaign, by the way. I mean, I'm the CEO. I can cut a check if I want to.
First of all, there weren't profits for the first two years of the Time. There was also no infrastructure renewal, damned little maintenance and there was barely money to pay the workers. The oil companies had been providing fuel to major farm corporations in return for food that was then distributed down to, well, the level of a lady working in a refueling plant.
That was illicit collusion and had to stop.
Because most of the tofu-eaters didn't understand the oil business, or any of the many other businesses they were put in charge of, they were often flat ignored. They did so love meetings, especially meetings with obsequious and chastened oil company executives bowing and scraping and giving long PowerPoint presentations. They were taken to refineries and shown all the new "environmental improvement systems," many of which were cobbled together from spare pipe and flashy lights, and generally led around by the nose in the hope that grown-ups might get back in charge.
And in cases where they weren't ignored, or things fell apart anyway, the government then had to pick up the slack and actually try to run things. That worked about as well as any communist-run organization. And there were cases where workers rioted or quit despite the employment conditions or went on strike and had to be told "get back to work, slaves!"
Another lovely job of the Army. In that case, the rules of engagement were somewhat reduced.
The Army had long experience of mob control, though, if not in the U.S. And commanders tended to negotiate rather than open fire. The workers, many of which had a certain respect for the military, tended to talk things out as well.
(This, by the way, was slightly different than the case of the Long Beach Oil Terminal. In that case, the strikers were led by a very hard-core union group that stated that it had "seized the means of production for the people" and was less than willing to negotiate. Actually, they didn't want to negotiate, they simply had demands that had to be met or "the oil terminal would be destroyed." When President Warrick dithered the commander of SOCOM ordered Delta to deal with the situation. Delta dealt. The remaining strikers, with ten dead ringleaders being carried out by their heels, went back to work. The SOCOM commander was court-martialed as was the group commander who carried out the mission. Delta got gutted. But oil flowed. Ex-General Pennington is being bruited for the next secretary of Defense. Got my vote.)
Look, civilian control of the military is a very important thing. If the military doesn't obey their civilian commanders, sooner or later you get Generalissimo Jones trying to run things and making things worse. We knew that. That bedrock belief went all the way back to George Washington who, when some of his officers wanted to mutiny, ordered them to swear an oath to always obey the orders of the government, no matter how bad they seemed. It was the foundation of The Society of Cincinnatus. I'm not a member since I'm not descended from any of them. The S-4 in Iran was, but that doesn't reduce the importance of the concept.
But we were being told to do things that were clearly unconstitutional, and the Constitution is what we swear an oath to not the President, while simultaneously being told to do things that were suicidal.
Did we ever slip control, totally? No. But at first at lower levels then at higher and higher we started to ignore The Bitch. When told to do something clearly illogical, we tended to tune it out and do something more logical. Or at least survivable. We got people fed when we had the food. We distributed to groups we trusted. We were color blind on that but not culture blind and sure as hell not tactically blind.
On an actual functional level, we implemented the original Plan, even if we didn't realize it at the time.
We reacted, adapted and overcame.
Which, finally, leads to "let's talk about me."