America: Course Correction

By Janice Van Cleve

No matter how you look at it, the United States is in trouble. Endless foreign wars, staggering national debt, disintegrating social safety net, illegal immigration, drugs, corporate crimes, outsourcing, and on and on. Whether you are conservative or liberal, whether you are a tea bagger or an intellectual, it is clear if things dont change, America as we know it will fail.

What would you do about it if you had supreme power? What if you were dictator of the United States? What would you fix? How would you fix it? Most important, how would you leave so that the country could return to a constitutionally elected government?

This is the fictional record of a dictator who tried to fix America. Some consider her a savior. Others consider her a monster. How did she do? You be the judge.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 8, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462885879

Janice Van Cleve

Janice Van Cleve is a journalist, story teller, world traveler, political activist, consultant, and Wall Street investor. She holds a Masters Degree in History with a minor in languages. She served as a military intelligence officer in the US Army, a systems analyst for several corporations, and retired from Microsoft at the peak of the dot com bubble. Her philanthropy is focused in the areas of archeology, music, environment, and the homeless. She has studied empires ancient and modern and the governmental systems of nations overseas and here at home. Politically she identifies as a Progressive but she refuses to swallow any ideology uncritically.

Book preview

AMERICA:

COURSE CORRECTION

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JANICE VAN CLEVE

Copyright © 2011 by Janice Van Cleve.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011909496

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4628-8586-2

                  Softcover                                 978-1-4628-8585-5

                  Ebook                                     978-1-4628-8587-9

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This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

EPILOGUE

PREFACE

In the wake of the Great Recession of 2007—which has not ended yet—it comes as no surprise that only now are the books and movies, exposes and I told you so articles making their appearance. Yet the recession is only one act in a long series of acts that had their roots in deregulation, the concentration of wealth, corporate consolidation, corruption, and misguided ideologies that have been waxing for almost half a century. Nor unfortunately is this recession the last act. The Wall Street banks are now even bigger, the deficit is even more staggering, and jobs aren’t coming back.

With the administration, the congress, the supreme court, and now even the ballot box—thanks to the Citizens United decision—totally owned and operated by the corporate machine, correction of this downward spiral is, I am afraid, beyond the capability of our dominant, dormant and largely dysfunctional two party monopoly. It is no great stretch, therefore, to see that only a dictator ruling with violent force can break this cycle.

What follows is a fictional story. It presumes that a leader did emerge who was able to galvanize a significant segment of the population. She wins the attention of the media and ultimately convinces the armed forces to seize the federal government and quickly establish control across the nation. She corrals the media and forces them to broadcast her messages in which she lays out her agenda to reverse the decline into which the American Empire has sunk. With all the apparatus of the federal government at her command, she pushes her reforms through the congress and enforces their implementation through military arms and police agencies.

The story is set in a time not too far in the future from our own. The names of the actors are mostly fictional. The guilty, however, are taken directly from actual current news and are named to their disgrace. The format of the story is a series of her speeches.

My intention is that this book will shock, inspire, and provoke Americans left, right, and center. I hope that it will anger them enough to connect the dots for themselves. While I hold out little hope for a popular uprising in this country or a strong dictator—and no hope at all for a solution from our current political system—I do see a glimmer of light.

Who knew that the glimmer would come from of all places, Tunisia?

Janice Van Cleve

April 2011

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

In the 2004 film, What the Bleep Do We Know?, a young boy on a sidewalk basketball court asks the star How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go? That is a perfect analogy to any effort to dig down into our American political system. The world as we think we know it is not the real world. Deep down in the rabbit hole there are mechanisms that actually do mesh with other mechanisms which really do make things happen in the real world. Getting down into the gears can get confusing, disturbing, and downright demoralizing. It can also be quite instructive!

Michael Moore pointed the way. Fahrenheit 9/11, Capitalism: A Love Story, and Sicko exposed the tip of the iceberg of corporate corruption. He demonstrated how money and the greed for more money controls our country. Other movies such as The Future of Food, Inside Job, Frontline: Breaking the Bank, Frontline: The Warning, Casino Jack and the United States Of Money, and others cut to the chase to reveal how the mechanisms of the real world down there in the rabbit hole work. These all helped and inspired in the writing of this book but the list would not be complete without these other resources:

The Constitution of the United States

The Economic Interpretation of the Constitution by Mary & Charles Beard

The Economist magazine

Bloomberg Businessweek magazine

The Wall Street Journal

What’s the Matter with Kansas? By Thomas Frank

Keith Olbermann

The New York Times

The Los Angeles Times

CREDO

Time & Newsweek

AM 1090 Progressive Radio

Eat the State e-newspaper and all the incredible information on the Internet

Many of the ideas presented in this book have been tumbling around in my head for a long time. I recalled the Savings & Loan Scandal, the Enron rip off, Wall Street insider trading, the WorldCom fraud, and Countrywide’s predatory lending. I began to see how they were all connected. I discussed and debated these things with friends and foes of all political stripes. Many of the ideas that found their way into these chapters previously appeared in articles I had published earlier and other ideas have come to me through email dialogues. I am grateful for all of it. I have learned more than I wanted to know, but not nearly all that I needed to know. I have not footnoted the data elements in this text because footnotes dry up the readability and it is more important for my readers to do their own research and connect the dots for themselves.

My thanks to all those who have shared their ideas, their time, and their arguments with me in the course of generating these ideas. Special thanks to those who read through the manuscript before it went to press. All errors and omissions are my own.

PROLOGUE

When President Reagan brought our embassy people back from Iran, stopped inflation, and ended the Cold War, I was relieved. I thought everything was going to be okay. I heard about his deregulation policies but all that was too far away from my practical day to day concerns. I did not realize then that Reagan was unlocking the cages and unleashing the corporate carnivores upon the complacent body of America.

After Reagan, Bush Sr. was a dim flicker and anyway he was quickly replaced by Hillary and her husband. Again I thought everything was going to be okay. I did not notice that the people around Clinton were the same neocons that had been around Reagan. I did not know that all the leading positions in the Federal Reserve and in the Treasury from Greenspan on down were Goldman Sachs executives. Conservatives seemed to rotate in and out of academia, the administration, and their plush corporate suites with unnatural ease, all the while bringing in more and more of their own kind behind them.

It did not take long for the neocons to spring their trap. They declared their so-called Contract With America and seized Congress in 1994. While hamstringing President Clinton with the Whitewater investigations, they aggressively enlarged on Reagan’s deregulation agenda. They expanded interstate branching for banks with the 1994 Riegle-Neal Act. They allowed mergers between banks and insurance companies with the 1998 Citicorp-Travelers deal. They tore down the wall between investment and commercial banks with the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. They strung along the social conservatives by placing restrictions on abortion, passing the Defense of Marriage Act, and passing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. The Clinton Administration was a thin shell under which the neocons consolidated their power.

Yet the neocons themselves were only a thin shell under which the corporations consolidated their own power. Bank deregulation, the World Trade Organization, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the consolidation of the Fox News Channel, shipping jobs overseas, big box stores swamping small retailers, etc. all spurred the growth of the world economy under corporate control. When the neocons stole the 2000 presidential election, the shells were dropped aside. There was no longer any need to hide. Bush Jr. was so vapid and transparent that the machinations of Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rove, and the other neocon operatives in his administration could be seen right through him. In their arrogance, they did not even care that we saw what they were doing.

Bush Jr. famously told his wealthy supporters, Some people call you the elite. I call you my base. When they had squeezed the economy dry, gobbled up all the mortgages, profited from the wars, and outsourced the jobs, they even tried to privatize Social Security to feed their insatiable appetites. As their obedient servant, Bush Jr. promoted this notion and when he got nowhere he grumbled, This job would be a lot easier if I was a dictator.

He came dangerously close to becoming a dictator in fact if not in name. Using the tragedy of 9/11, he launched the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Administration, illegal wiretaps, the Guantanamo gulag, kidnappings, torture, and military commissions. He declared a War on Terror, an Axis of Evil, and a crusade against Iraq. He justified his unilateral actions by proclaiming that he was The Decider.

Through fear and intimidation, through wars overseas and sweeping executive powers at home, the Bush-Cheney administration avoided impeachment even when the Democrats regained the US House of Representatives in 2006. Cowed and compliant, the Democrats had become as much wholly owned subsidiaries of the corporate machine as the Republicans were. Frustrated and angry, the people were ready to heed the call of the young black man from Chicago who spoke eloquently of hope and change. Yet when he got into office, President Obama surrounded himself with the same kind of people that had surrounded his predecessor. He continued the wars, the bailouts, and the tax cuts. He even appointed Jeff Immelt, CEO of General Electric, to lead his Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. This was is spite of the fact that GE made $14.2 billion in profits in 2010, yet paid no corporate income tax. To add insult to injury, GE took $3.2 million in tax credits from the American public, cut benefits for its own workers, and gave Immelt a 100% pay raise. Hope and change? Hardly. It was déjà vu all over again.

The ultimate blow came from the Supreme Court. On January 21, 2010, the court crowned the cancer of corporate control by elevating corporations to the ultimate status of full citizenship and elevating their money to the ultimate status of free speech. The decision, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, finally removed any pretense that the government of the United States was any longer of the people, by the people, and for the people. Democracy was utterly and finally replaced that day by a Corporatocracy.

The analogy between the decline of the Roman Empire and the decline of the American Empire has been drawn many times. There was the same accelerating gap between the wealthy and the rest. Public services became privatized. Hired security guards replaced police. Public education disintegrated into private schools. More and more military functions were turned over to mercenaries. The rich and powerful focused less and less on the welfare of the state, choosing instead to devote their attentions and energies to their own enrichment and power. They bought senators and governors who passed laws to their advantage. They bought judges and magistrates who made rulings in their favor. They excused themselves from the burdens of public expenses, allowing those to fall upon the shoulders of the lower classes or to be discontinued altogether.

The masses then and now lost confidence in their institutions and in their government. Desperate for answers, they turned to demagogues and preachers who offered false hopes and scapegoats instead of solutions. No wonder radical religions flourished in the last days of the Roman Empire. No wonder radical ideologies are flourishing in the last days of the American Empire.

When any government disintegrates to this degree, democracy fails and ultimate power is open for the taking. In Rome, various generals rallied their armies and marched on the capital. Constantine, Maxentius, and Maximus all in their turns seized the government and ruled as autocrats.

What would happen if the US military marched on Washington DC? What if the military installed a dictator in America? Could he or she break the power of the corporations? Could this be done and still save the Constitution?

CHAPTER 1

Establishing Control

White House, East Room—Monday, January 6

In the center of the east wall opposite the entry is a small stage with a podium. There is no presidential seal on the podium. Replacing it is an etched brass plate bearing the first words of the Constitution, We the People. The podium is flanked to the rear by an American flag on the left and the flag of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the right. To the right of the stage stand the Joint Chiefs of Staff in person. To the left stand the chiefs of several intelligence and security agencies. To the left of them are two straight backed chairs. Television crews and their cameras form a broad semi-circle on both sides of the room’s entry.

A woman walks in followed by the President and the Vice-President. The Joint Chiefs snap to attention. She takes center stage behind the podium, while the other two take the chairs off to the left. The Press Secretary counts down 5—4—3—2—1—Live!

"Good evening, my fellow Americans. My name is Allyson Keene and I have been installed as dictator in charge of your federal government.

"By now you have heard about the military coup that took over Washington DC last Saturday. At O-six hundred hours on that day, elements of the United States Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines converged on the city and seized control of all three branches of the federal government. Assisted by the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, the Department of Homeland Security, and local police forces throughout the country, we are establishing control of all federal government functions. The New York Stock Exchange and all the other exchanges have been closed for the next two months. The Federal Reserve board has been called into session to manage the financial markets during this initial period of change.

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"The President and the Vice-President are here with me in this room as we speak. They and their families are safe and unharmed. They will continue the formalities of their offices but the burdens of decision will rest upon me. I realize that this places them in a most awkward position and represents an embarrassing interruption of their political careers. However, I am determined to maintain the forms of a democratic and constitutional government if not the actual practice. I shall employ them as my closest advisors and while the luster of their office may be overshadowed by my rule, the luster of their intelligence and counsel will hopefully shine as brightly as ever.

"Most of the members of the cabinet have been located and have been returned to their offices under guard. They are still able to do their work but only under strict supervision. The justices of the Supreme Court have been escorted back to their chambers where they will continue to hear cases and pursue their deliberations in comfort, but their freedom of movement will be curtailed. The police are rounding up the members of Congress from their brothels and bars and stadium box seats and are returning them to the Capitol building.

"On behalf of the President and of the military, I offer my sincere condolences to the families of the Secret Service agents who died in the line of duty protecting the White House during this coup. James Fowler, George McNeill, Judy Felton, Adam Wisk, Mary Taylor, Bob Flint, and Carl Kramer gave their lives in service and dedication to the mission to which they were appointed. They were outnumbered and overpowered, yet they stood to their posts and bravely gave their last ounce of energy and strength to their country. They will be remembered in the annals of