Two Peasants and a President (9 page)

But the owners of the office across the street had successfully veiled the true ownership of their business.  Real estate, in fact, did make them a great deal of money.  But information was their real currency. 

14

In the well of the Senate

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have grown so accustomed to speaking of such astounding sums regards our national debt and spending
,
that I believe we are becoming numb.  The American people, to most of whom $1,000 is a good deal of money, have become glassy-eyed at the level of indebtedness that is being heaped upon their children and grandchildren.  There are some in this chamber who cynically rely on precisely that to continue to enslave future generations.” 

“Allow me to put this in terms that one of the hard-working wage earners who pay our salaries could relate to.  If a taxpayer were to spend one dollar every second of every day, it would take eleven and one-half days to spend one million dollars.  Spending one dollar every second of every day, it would take more that thirty-one years to spend a billion dollars.  Likewise it would take 32,000 years to spend one trillion dollars.”

“Yet every few weeks we ask our countrymen to allow us to spend that much in addition to the trillions of dollars in debt that we have already heaped upon them.  How in good conscience can we do that to our citizens and their families?”

“From 1791, the year in which the United States first took on debt, it took until 2002 to amass $5.98 trillion in debt.  That’s 211 years!  It took just seven more years to double that to $12 trillion.   And just one more year to reach $14 trillion.”

“A well known Marxist professor at a prestigious University and friend to some in this administration has said that the way to change the government, to get rid of the Constitution, and move to Marxism/Socialism is to collapse the system.” 

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are well on our way to doing exactly that.  I, for one, do not intend to let this great nation become a Marxist state r
e
gardless of what this president and his Marxist college professor friends want.  I do not intend to allow the far-left to dismantle the Constitution.  And I do not intend to allow some members of this body to continue to push our spending skyward until this nation collapses from its debt.  Today we are facing a threat the likes of which we have not seen since the 1930’s.  It is not coming from a Nazi Germany.  It is not coming from a Communist Soviet
Union.  It is coming from within this body and we must stop it now!” 

“Does anyone in this room actually believe that China continues to buy our debt because they believe we are sound fiscally?  Does anyone actually believe that our
treasury secretary has
been going to China to lecture them on floating their currency in order to make our products more competitive?”

“I’ll tell you what
I believe
he’s been doing.  He hasn’t been telling the Chinese a damn thing.  They’ve been telling him, telling him what they e
x
pect
us
to do if we want them to continue to fund this administration’s u
n
precedented expansion of the federal government.” 

“They expect us to cede to them the entire South China Sea!  All one million, four hundred thousand square miles of it - one of the most oil and gas rich areas on the planet.  They expect us to allow them to control waters that are twelve hundred miles from their coast and adjacent to the coastlines of
at least six
other nations.” 

“Several days ago, in the middle of the night, a modern Chinese Navy frigate challenged a Philippine naval craft tha
t was older than many of you. 
At the same time, a lurking Chinese submarine sank the Philip
pine ship with all hands aboard,
this only seventy miles off the shore
s
of the Philippines and more than seven hundred miles from China.” 

“China would like the world to believe that their frigate only fired warning shots across the Filipino’s bow, which is true.  They did not expect the world to learn that their submarine sank the Filipino ship.  This admin
i
stration was not planning on telling you that.  I just did.”

“Ladies
and gentlemen, it is time
we pick ourselves up and learn to live within our means.  It is time to tell this administration that we want a go
v
ernment that we control, not a government that controls us.  And it’s time we tell the Chinese that we don’t want anymore of their damn money!”

*******

By the time Senator Baines had finished his speech, the veins in the Senate Majority Leader’s neck were swelling.  His face had gone from its normal pallid pink to half-shades shy of purple.  He knew that every reporter in the capitol was at this moment rushing to file a story that would lead the nightly news broadcasts from Shreveport to Singapore.

There would be no sweeping this one under the rug.  The wily old Senate Majority Leader had weathered his share of storms, but this typhoon would spawn tsunamis worldwide.  In recent months Senator Baines had on several occasions shone a light on China, exposing back door deals and sell outs which had severely disadvantaged the United States, thereby upping the
level of anti-China sentiment dramatically.  Now the questions that would inevitably be raised by events in the South China Sea could threaten the presidency itself.

Rausch’s cell phone was buzzing angrily before he was even out of the chamber.  Fishing it out of his pocket he flipped it open.  The display flashed what he already suspected:  The White House. 

15

CBC Evening News

“We have breaking news to share at this hour,” the familiar voice of Gayle Mansfield announced.  Normally, her network had no problem i
g
noring a story that reflected poorly on the president or the administration.  In fact, there were many who had simply stopped looking to CBC for ‘news.’  But the vestiges of stature once shared by the big three broadcast networks still attracted t
he sublimely naive and gullible
to whom critical thinking is a foreign concept.  Ignoring another important story had left considerable egg on the network’s face when they were belatedly forced to report on events that had been widely discussed elsewhere.  So this time, they decided not to further
trash
their
own
ratings.  

“Republican Senator Virgil Baines, in a speech less than one hour ago, claimed that the Philippine warship lost in the South China Sea was in fact sunk by a Chinese submarine.  China has maintained that their frigate only fired warning shots across her bow as part of a campaign to assert sovereignty over an area of more than 1.4 million square miles.”

“China has also previously insisted that the Philippine vessel was in Chinese waters, in spite of the fact that the Filipino ship was sunk approx
i
mately seventy miles west
Palawan
, the largest island in the southern-western Philippines, and more than seven hundred miles from China.”

“Response in the Philippine capitol of Manila has been swift and vi
o
lent.  Rock-throwing mobs surrounded the Chinese embassy and only quick action by the military prevented further violence.  The Philippine gover
n
ment has requested an emergency session of the UN Security Council.”

“Calls to the White House and the Chinese embassy have not been r
e
turned.
We will continue to bring you breaking news on this story as we receive it.”

******

The president stabbed the remote with his thumb and tossed it on the coffee
table in the oval office.  “Damn
!
” he uttered.  His chief of staff and press secretary sat stone-faced.  The door flew open and the first lady burst in, slamming the door in the face of the Secret Service agent trailing her.

“That son of a bitch!  Who the hell does he think he is?” 

The timid and unctuous press secretary cast his eyes downward, hoping to avoid the attention of a first lady who had on more than a few occasions addressed him as a principal
might speak to a pubescent seven
th grader.  In truth, he was terrified of her and he had never seen her this ugly before.

“We’ve got to come up with a response, and quickly,” she said.  Looking over at the cowering press secretary she ordered:  “Out!”  Less than
six
seconds later the door had closed behind him.

“What’s Stuart doing?” the first lady demanded. 

“He’s sewing a
Boston
necktie,” the president responded, referring to an old
Boston
machine trick, something that could be hung around the neck of a political opponent.

“What kind of necktie?” she continued. 

“Let‘s just say it involves a hidden video camera,” replied the pres
i
dent.

“What are you planning to tell the press?”

In truth the president hadn’t come up with the answer to that question.  Obviously there’d been a major leak, but with the USS Hawaii still in the Pacific, that left only the Department of Defense and a few members of the cabinet and national security team.  The president thought he had a pretty good idea, but he was not yet certain and a cabinet shake up in the midst of a crisis would only make him appear more inept, not to mention dishonest. 

“If you’d get
out of my face for a minute,”
he shot back at her, “I might be able to come up with an answer.”  His chief of staff sat wishing he’d been expelled along with the press secretary.  As
was her custom, the first lady
retreated not an inch, and he was getting weary of being forced to listen to her frequent tirade
s
. 

“It was that b
astard, Benedict,” she ranted,
“he’s always wanted a show down with China.  I told you he was a bad idea.”

“Would you rather have seen him nominated for president?” the president asked.  There was no reply.

“It seems pretty clear,” the Chief of Staff said, finally summoning the courage to speak,  “if it’s confirmed that we knew about the sub, the Repu
b
licans will trumpet it all over Washington and the right-wing media will cr
u
cify us for being too cowardly to stand up to the Chinese.  If we climb on the anti-China bandwagon we can kiss an
y future investments goodbye –
end of expansion, end of administration.” 

“Unless we want to just sit around slitting our wri
sts,”
he continued, “there’s only one decision that can be made: deny everything.  We deny it.  China denies it.  Larimer denies it.  There’s not a damn shred of proof out
there that we don’t control.  That leaves Baines hanging in the wind with a preposterous, unfounded rumor.  And once we’ve tied our little necktie around his neck, his credibility will crumble and he’ll look like just another lecherous loose cannon.”

The first lady looked at the president as if to say: ‘You got any better ideas?’

“I’m starting to see a certain beauty in all this,” said the president.  “We destroy Baines’ credibility and the Chinese owe
us
for a change.  With us holding their dirty little secret, they have no choice
but to continue buying our Treasuries
.  Tell numb nuts, our beloved press secretary, what he’s going to need to say in his briefing.”

“Don’t you think you should
to address this personally?” s
aid the first lady.

“No, I do not!” replied the president, tiring of her interference.  “My involvement would just add credence in the minds of some.  It’s got to look like this whole thing is so preposterous that the president wouldn’t stoop to even speak about it.”

16

Embassy of the People’s Republic of China
–
Washington
,
DC

Call volume since the sinking of the Philippine warship had been higher than Ambassador Li could remember.   The switchboard was ove
r
whelmed
and, as was the embassy’s policy, it was simply shut down and a recording activated.  Those whom the embassy felt important enough had alternate numbers to use.

The Philippine government was pressing the UN for an emergency meeting of the Security Council.  Beijing not only repeated its official pos
i
tion that only warning shots were fired, but then it doubled down:  ‘China, having been the victim of repeated warlike acts in the South China Sea, over which it enjoys indisputable sovereignty, reserves the right to sink any foreign vessel entering Chinese waters without its permission,’ stated the official announcement from the Foreign Ministry.