2014 – Recession Becomes Depression;
Collapse of the Banking Industry

 

In the months following the Adoption of the 28th Amendment, only a trickle of jobs had become available. The bounty of Federally financed projects had dried up during the legal fight over the Jobs Act, so even though the Act could now be fully enforced in spirit, the political will of the Legislative to budget for these projects was all but gone. Officially, unemployment was still at an all-time low. In practice, the number of ‘Government Workers’ who could not collect a paycheck was rising rapidly, surpassing thirteen million by February 5th, 2014. In terms of what was to become known as the ‘practical unemployment’ rate, twenty-five point eight percent of the working age population was without a viable source of guaranteed income.

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In April of 2014, as unemployment spiraled out of control, a new foreclosure crisis struck the property markets. Loans that had been secured for housing were going into default at a massive rate, far exceeding the earlier crisis in 2008. The brief upswing in the economy the previous year had led to record numbers of homes either being built from the ground up, or, in cases of more developed areas, homes being revitalized in older neighborhoods. The optimism of 2012 had turned into horror by the summer of 2014, when the payments for loans made two summers before started to fall behind. The banks started to suffer from a glut of foreclosed properties, and, with the market essentially frozen, they had no way to sell the millions of homes they suddenly had in their possession. Assets on paper looked healthy, but in the reality of the industry, the assets held by a Bank only have value when they can be bought and sold. As a general rule, banks do not wish to be homeowners. With the severity of the economic depression, there was no one to sell the property to, and financial institutions that only a few years before had been deemed as being ‘too big to fail’ suddenly found themselves awash in increasing debt, with assets that depreciated each day they sat empty. As more and more people lost their homes, the foreclosing banks found themselves in Bankruptcy.

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It was early in the fall of 2014 when President Whills, in an attempt to get the economy under control, signed Executive Order 14652. This order used the powers and provisions provided to the Administrative Branch in the 28th Amendment to seize the massive amounts of property the failing banks had in their possession. Since property could only be seized through Due Process, the Administrative Branch waited until a full fifty percent of the banks operating in America had filed for Bankruptcy Protection; the Administrative used new Federal Bankruptcy provisions that had quietly been passed into law at the beginning of 2013 as leverage to demand forfeiture. While the banking industry had suffered a massive loss, only one third of them were able to restructure. Now free of the debt incurred by the housing crisis, traditional banks, in an effort to prevent a repeat of the previous default situation, stopped making home loans all together. The only remaining place that a person could obtain a home loan was the Federal Government.

On October 2nd, 2014, Whills signed Executive Order 14699, declaring the massive amounts of property now held by the Federal Government to be opened up as Section Eight housing. This was seen as a positive step by the many millions of people who had found themselves living in ghettos, abandoned buildings, and cardboard shacks. With the promise of new jobs, and a roof to live under, a spark of optimism returned briefly to the American economy. By Christmas of 2014, the practical unemployment rate had dropped from a high of twenty-seven percent down to twenty-one percent. This was to be the last drop in the practical unemployment rate until the Reformation of 2022.

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2015 – The Setup, the Deal, and the Assassination of Robert Whills

 

While America was in economic and social turmoil, the rest of the globe was not faring much better. With the American Market essentially closed for business, trade relations started to fail as other markets around the world found themselves with an oversupply of all the goods and textiles that would once have been sold in the United States. The Chinese were the first to completely collapse. With well over a billion people to feed, clothe and shelter, the Chinese Government officially stopped its ‘free market experiment’, and tried to reverse course to its earlier, more agricultural economic structure. This turned out to be a huge mistake, and within six months of the official policy change, China found itself embroiled in what amounted to a civil war, with the more developed, urban areas of the country raiding the rural farming communities for basic commodities like rice, milk, and even clean water. With the collapse of the Chinese Market, investors from the Far East started to cash in on the massive amounts of Government Debt they’d purchased in the form of American Treasury Bonds. While ‘cashing out’ before the maturation date meant that the bonds had little to no accrued interest, they did still have their face value. The international rush to cash in Treasury Bonds, led by the Chinese, reversed a decades-old trend in global financing, and brought home enough money for the Chinese Government to prop up its local economy. This allowed the civil unrest to end, but the damage had already been done. By 2017, Chinese cities were mostly abandoned, as people returned to work the land, just to feed themselves and their families.

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Finding the Treasury severely depleted by the Chinese pullout, President Whills scrambled to get together funds to pay the workers that still sat in furlough. While people had housing for now, food was another issue. With almost no family farms remaining in America, corporate owned farms refused to donate food to the starving masses. Millions of tonnes of food ether sat rotting in the fields, or was turned over into the ground, and written off as a business loss. Seeing an opportunity, Whills struck a deal with the largest of the commercial growers, providing Government Labor, free of charge, in exchange for the food needed to feed an increasingly hungry population. The Corporations agreed, and Executive Order 15713 was signed on April 4th, 2015. This Order allowed the Administrative Branch to provide those workers employed under the Federal Jobs Act of 2012 to be paid with food and shelter, instead of money. Pundits on the political left and right realized too late just what their complacency had brought, and a new form of slavery came back to the American landscape. With the practical unemployment rate reaching a whopping thirty-seven percent of the working age population, the middle class in America completely disappeared. A new economy started to take form, where the gainfully employed could purchase goods and services if they had the cash, and those ‘employed’ by the Government found themselves working endlessly for faceless corporations just to survive. And, as all this transpired, the top earners were taking an even larger portion of the profits being made on the backs of what amounted to slave labor. By August of 2015, it is estimated that the top one percent of wage earners in America were taking almost eighty-eight percent of the Gross Domestic Product as personal earnings. Instead of spending this massive amount of capital, the ‘one percent’ simply hoarded the money, which further crippled the economy for everyone else.

As bad as things had gotten, they were about to become much worse. On September 3rd, 2015, while speaking to a crowd of reporters in the White House Rose Garden, one of President Whills’ Military Honor Guards, Corporal Robert Johnson, (who was later found to have been given food earlier in the day that contained a powerful hallucinogen (3)), opened fire on the reporters, believing the President’s life to be at risk. While none of the media representatives were armed, the members of the Secret Service, as well as the other Military Guards, were heavily armed. Confused in the chaos of the smoke and gunfire, the remaining Honor Guards and the Secret Service agents joined the fray. When the shooting came to an end, forty-seven reporters and camera staff had been shot. Over half of those had been killed outright, and the rest were so severely wounded, they died later from their injuries. Corporal Johnson was nowhere to be seen; neither was the President.

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The Secret Service agents, using the codename of ‘Duckie’ for President Whills, called over their radios. Special Agent Randolph Starr testified later in court –

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“All you could hear was, ‘Where is Duckie? Is Duckie down?’, over and over. No one seemed to know where the President was. That is, until we heard new gunshots coming from the direction of the West Wing. None of the agents assigned there were responding, so when my team arrived, all we could see was just pure [profanity struck from record] carnage”.

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[Prosecutor] “Where was Corporal Johnson, Agent Starr? Was he still armed?”

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“We didn’t know where Johnson had gone, but It didn’t take us long to find the Corporal’s firearm; it had been discarded outside the Oval Office. The magazine had been completely exhausted. Next to the weapon, there were multiple trails of blood and gore – like someone had been dragging wounded men and women away for protection. So we were hopeful that, whatever was happening, Johnson had been able to get the President to safety. When we opened the door, we saw that wasn’t the case”.

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[Prosecutor] “What did you see, Agent Starr?”

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“Corporal Johnson had made a [profanity struck from record] pile of bodies, right in front of the President’s desk. And the sick [profanity struck from record] was sitting there, perched on top of the pile, licking the [profanity struck from record] blood off his hands”.

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[Prosecutor] “And where was the President, Agent Starr?”

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[Prosecutor] “Agent Starr?”

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“[long pause] He was… underneath.. Johnson’s left foot”.

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America had lost three Presidents in roughly a four year span, and the Nation was in chaos. Dwayne Mesbethe, the little known Vice President of the Whills Administration, quietly took the Oath of Office on a return flight from Spain, in the middle of the night. President Mesbethe spent his first two months in office simply trying to put together what had happened to his predecessor, but the frenzy of accusations and conspiracy theories effectively brought any administrative actions to a halt. It was in this environment that Senator David Duke (R, LA) formed a commission to investigate the crime, which took much of the pressure (and the spotlight) off the new President. Mesbethe, a former banking executive, had never divested himself from any of his stock holdings or board positions as Vice President. Initially under much scrutiny from both the Public and the Securities and Exchange Commission, Mesbethe stepped out of the spotlight with glee, and essentially became a recluse, remaining in the living quarters of the White House. He would not be seen again in public for over a year.

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