Warrick was not present. Her VP was and gave a short speech praising the new Prez and wishing him good luck.
Warrick had to be removed from the White House more or less with force. Actually, her personal physician sedated her and she walked out under her own power. She just thought she was taking a moonwalk or something.
Chapter Three
Gosh, Here's a Thought . . .
A new Congress was in. The House of Representatives looked . . . somewhat different than before. It was incredibly white-bread. It was even short on females comparatively and it had never been a really heavy girl group. The Senate, of course, had less turnover. One election in six years. All the arrested Congresscritters who were up for reelection got reelected in a landslide and just about every Democratic senator got trounced. The new crop was also less than "collegial" with their Democratic colleagues seeing them as, essentially, lame ducks. The majority leader was not elected from the Old Guard. He was a former Congressman but he didn't play by the old rules.
Carson asked for six months of continuation of the Emergency Powers Act. He went to Congress and asked for it, doing a speech on the floor. He explained that he simply needed the same powers to undo the damage.
At the same time, the Joint Chiefs stood up and gave their retirement speeches. They explained that, as they saw it for the good of the country they had violated the honor of their offices. Gordon was great.
"Were I a Japanese General in World War II I would now cut open my belly to expiate the shame. There has been enough death. We ask to simply fade into history."
None of them have ever, that I know, written a memoir. I wish they had. I'm reasonably certain there was a group planning the coup and I'd love to have the inside scoop on it. The most I ever got from a pretty good source was "Task Force 629."
So far, nobody has ever geeked. Cowards. I admitted to creating the Kula Bar. How bad could it be to admit you were getting ready to take Warrick down? Hell, they should have given out medals for doing the tasking paperwork!
Carson got his six months. And my God was he a busy little beaver. Or, rather, his staff already had been.
They'd gotten the full list of seized farms from the USDA along with data on farm output relative to 2018. They also had a list of when farms were "family owned cooperatives" (we actually fell into that category, it was an actual line item under USDA rules) vs. really big farm corporations. And another list of farms that had been "moribund" due to the family or managers being killed by the Plague. And then there were the ones abandoned by "government cooperative associates" not to mention dead folk in them.
Hey, presto! Add a few good database geeks and you had . . .
A list of farms that were to be turned back over to farming corporations.
A priority list of farms to be turned back over to owners.
A list of farms that had been seized and turned over to new farmers but which were a) performing well and b) the owners were dead anyway.
The problem in many cases was finding the original owners and/or managers of the farms. That might have bit us in the ass but, well, there were fewer people to feed. And we had some time since what with the weather, ground breaking was going to take a while yet for most of the major crops.
People were dying, though, while he was giving his speech. And he knew it. Wasn't much he could do. Everybody who had a clue was already on the job trying to keep the death rate down.
Businesses were "denationalized." Money, at this point more or less fiat money based on our really junky bond rating, was made available to get them back on their feet. Warrick's coterie was out on their ass faster than you can say "tofu." Most of them couldn't be prosecuted for what they'd done because, hell, it was a valid executive order. Fucked up as hell, but that's what happens when that many factors come together.
The ag situation was still badly screwed. Everything was in short supply. India came to the rescue, again, with seed and pesticides. We actually ended up producing enough of the latter and herbicides by the time planting season came around. But they sent a couple of tankers full which were quite useful.
They'd also opened up the Persian Gulf. My buddy the mullah down in Abadan had "expanded his sphere of influence." Mostly through negotiation and occasionally with a bit of fighting he and the south Iraqi "moderates" had taken over most of the Gulf areas of former Iran. But the "pirates" in the Straits of Hormuz (the ones on the Iranian side of the strait) were armed with the weapons left over from the Iranian military and liked owning the Straits.
He didn't have a problem working with the "heathen" Indian military in straightening them out.
And, okay, we punched some Marines over there to help, too. As the general had said to me on the phone, we were still playing world's policeman to an extent.
Then my mullah friend said, effectively, "We've got oil and food. Y'all come on down!"
The "Fertile Crescent" was getting extremely fertile. The same change that was going on in Arizona was happening in the Middle East. Which is why the PU has become a net exporter of food. And, hell, everything else. I'm wearing a jacket right now says "Made in Persia."
And most of the minor little crap in the house says "Made in India."
India. Okay, time for the digression.
The Plague hit India hard. Real hard. Lots of vaccine distribution but it was Type One. Total death toll was right at fifty percent, which is a bit off the sixty but given their vaccine, spread should have been better.
Anyway, the thing was "where'd it hit?"
Well, everywhere equally. Right? Plague doesn't care if you're a king or a criminal.
Sort of.
Airborne spread flus have a harder time in hot environments. They don't last as long on surfaces, not even hands.
But there were large segments of India, especially the very poor, who were in very crowded conditions. And they didn't, by and large, get vaccinated. It hit those segments at a rate of about 60% with secondary effects adding another 10% or so.
Not to be coldhearted but what I'm saying is that it hit the least productive segment of their population the hardest.
India, since it climbed out of socialism and got with the mainstream, had two problems. One, it was overpopulated and undereducated. They were working hard on the second problem even before the Plague but the first was making the conversion hard. Too many new babies being born to poor people who couldn't help either through taxes or direct payments to get them educated meant more babies that weren't educated and couldn't get modern jobs . . .
It had a huge middle class, don't get me wrong. And they were functional and productive to their country and the world. Its middle class outnumbered the U.S. total population. But everything they did was against the inertia of this huge population of the poor. And other inertia.
Despite all the surface changes of modernity ("India is the largest democracy in the world!") there were still huge and very definite class differentiations. And if you weren't from a certain "class" there was little or no chance of you getting beyond a certain point. It was glass ceiling after glass ceiling after glass ceiling.
Don't get me wrong, most of the underclass wasn't going to produce Einsteins or Reagans. But it was going to produce some. But it wasn't going to happen as long as caste still ruled. And it did.