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.