299 Days: The Preparation

Chapter 29 It’s Going to Get Ugly.

Grant was sick of the government assholes at work. It was getting ridiculous. Jeanie was trying to fend them off and get Menlow pointed in the direction of reform, but she wasn’t willing to do anything that jeopardized her job.

Menlow had secretly started running for governor long ago. Although election day was still years away, his actions were already becoming calculated, as he prepared for the race. There is nothing more spineless than a politician running for a higher office. Menlow was so busy trying to make all the government people, and all the other left- wing Washington State voters, happy that he had long since abandoned his pledge to reform the State Auditor’s Office into a force for exposing corruption. It was pathetic. Grant felt stupid for believing in him.

Grant was looking for a way out of government employment. He had toughed it out for longer than he expected to be there. He had helped many citizens when he was there. He got so much more done on the inside of government, even for that short period, than he could have from the outside. But, he’d been thwarted. It was time to go back to WAB.

The Matsons were hosting the annual Fourth of July party with Tom, Brian, and Ben from WAB. When Menlow found out that Grant was having the WAB people over socially, he was a little concerned.

“Do you think that’s a good idea, Grant?”Menlow said with grave concern. “I mean, WAB is pretty partisan.”

“Yeah, partisan for your party,” Grant said. “You are a Republican.”

It was becoming increasingly socially awkward to be a “conservative” in this liberal town. The liberals weren’t screaming or throwing things, but there was definitely a separation between them and those who were conservative. Only fellow liberals were allowed into this mainstream world. The WAB guys talked about this over too many beers at the Fourth of July party.

This was the perfect time for Grant to ask for his job back. After they started talking about what a piece of shit Menlow had become, Grant simply said to Tom, “Can I come back to WAB?”

“About time,” Tom said. “Same salary and everything?” “OK,” Grant said. “You drive a hard bargain.” That was it.

Grant was no longer a state employee. It felt liberating. They celebrated some more.

Now that they were good and drunk, Ben had an idea. A conservative think tank in town (the only one) had a full studio for making political podcasts and doing radio shows. WAB knew them well. Ben suggested that WAB get together and start a podcast called “Rebel Radio” to begin describing all the corruption they were seeing.

It would be more than just a show about state politics; it would have an edge. A “Don’t Tread on Me” edge.

“How about a show on the coming collapse of California?” Tom offered.

“Yeah, and how public employee unions are looting the treasury of this state,” Brian suggested.

“We need to have a show on Baby Boomers and how they voted themselves tons of shit and now the rest of us need to pay for it,” Ben said.

The show topics started flowing like all the beer. Brian was writing them down.

The conservative think tank was happy to produce the podcast, but secretly. Their sound engineer could easily electronically alter each speaker’s voice to make them unrecognizable. It didn’t sound like an artificial robot, just like another person. It was amazing. The sound engineer made Grant’s average radio voice sound rich and deep. Hiding their voices was important because the identities of the podcasters and the think tank had to remain a secret.

They knew that Rebel Radio was going to say some unpopular things that would make some very powerful people mad. The WAB guys still had to lobby legislators for their small-business members. This “Don’t Tread on Me” edge to Rebel Radio would terrify the spineless Republicans they had to lobby. The think tank was especially interested in not having anyone know they were involved with Rebel Radio because they had a tax-exempt charitable status. They knew the IRS would yank it if they put out opinions like this. Of course, it was perfectly legal for them to do this but the IRS had been “interpreting” the tax-exempt laws pretty harshly against conservative groups.

A few days later, Grant resigned from the State Auditor’s Office. The resignation was anti-climactic. He didn’t even go into Menlow’s office and talk to him like he used to. He just wrote a letter and put it on Menlow’s desk. The letter was polite and didn’t go into all the details. It just said that Grant was going back to the private sector after he had assisted the Auditor with his reform goals. It was bland but Grant didn’t care. He just wanted out.

The two-week period at the State Auditor’s Office between resignation and his last day was weird. The bureaucrats there started unloading on him since they knew he was leaving. All kinds of little things that had been festering for a while came out. A few of his soon- to-be former co-workers actually raised their voices with him. He couldn’t wait to get back to helping people for real again. He also couldn’t wait to start broadcasting Rebel Radio.

A few weeks later, Rebel Radio was taped. The show consisted of the WAB guys knocking back a few beers on the air and just saying whatever they thought. No holds barred. Exactly what they thought. WAB knew things that no one else knew because they were insiders. They knew exactly how bad the state’s finances were because they got the briefings. They interviewed citizens getting screwed by government; the stories were amazing. No one else was saying the things they were saying.

The number of downloads grew each week. It was becoming a pretty big deal. Most of the listeners were in Washington State because they described facts specific to that state, but they were noticing downloads from computers in other states, too. Rebel Radio tapped into something out there: rage at increasingly unjust government. They had fans, at least among the little people out there getting screwed, who had no one else telling them exactly how things were.

Rebel Radio wasn’t loved by all, however. It made the State Auditor’s Office look bad because that agency was supposed to be helping people, but Rebel Radio described why they weren’t. The people in the State Auditor’s Office made no secret that they would shut down the podcast if they could. It frustrated them that they couldn’t. They were so angry at the criticism that it was a little creepy. They really, really hated the people doing Rebel Radio, especially Grant. Despite the voice synthesizer, they suspected that Grant was one of the podcasters and hated him for sharing his inside knowledge of their failures.

The Governor’s Office openly talked about how they could legally shut down Rebel Radio. No one in state government could come up with a way to shut them down. Things were getting mean. In the past, it would have been absurd to say that the Governor’s Office would be talking about how to silence criticism, but things were getting nastier and nastier.

The state budget deficit was ballooning. The “recession” meant less economic activity, which meant less tax revenue. Despite far less taxes coming in, the state kept spending money. And more money. Washington State was a smaller version of California: chasing out businesses, falling tax revenue, and massively increasing spending.

The people doing it were being re-elected by huge margins. The voters loved having more stuff. They could not comprehend the debt they were running up. Besides, the “rich” paid for it all, right?

In these tough times, the government employee unions demanded more money. They insisted on pay raises. They even wanted more for their gold-plated pensions. They said that with the losses in the stock market that had previously paid the interest on their pensions, the state must put in more money so they would not suffer a decline in pension payments. In the mind of government employee unions, the taxpayers needed to pay more to them so they wouldn’t suffer any losses from the stock market — like all the taxpayers had. The Legislature and Governor, all elected with the money donated by the unions, were happy to do so. The voters, at least enough of them to swing an election, seemed to be OK with it. Actually, voters in the largely agricultural eastern half of the state were not OK with it. But the conservatives in Eastern Washington were just a small part of the population, so they didn’t count when it came to politics. Most voters in Washington State had been told for several decades how underpaid public employees were (which was no longer true), so many of them thought the recession was a chance for the unions to “catch up” with the private sector on pay and benefits.

Of course, with unemployment going up, the government scrambled to create more “safety net” programs. State unemployment benefits were increased. The federal government was handing out several billion dollars in aid to the state. That would allow all this spending without any consequence. For a while, until eventually even the feds realized they couldn’t keep shoveling money to the states and started cutting back on aid. Now what? The state budget deficit would be about half of all the money they had control over. About half of the state budget was spent on federally mandated things like Medicaid, and the state portion of other entitlements that couldn’t be cut. Half of all the money? No more federal money and no more accounting gimmicks. The state had to, for the first time ever, actually consider cutting.

State workers were asked to take furloughs, which was a week or two off each year without pay. “Essential” services, about 40% of the employees, were exempt from the furloughs.

Union representatives responded as if state workers were being executed in the streets. They ginned up huge protests and angrily demanded a stop to the cuts. Most people in the dwindling private sector looked on in amazement. They had either been laid off or knew plenty of people who had, but these government employees were going nuts over taking a tiny pay cut.

Instead of making real cuts, the government demanded more money. It raised every tax it could. It started charging “user fees” for the most absurd things. Every government permit — and there were hundreds of them needed to conduct daily life — came with a price tag. Registering a car now had a new fee of several hundred dollars. Fire departments started to charge to respond to 911 calls. Counties started to require inspections of appliances to ensure they were energy efficient and charged a hefty “inspection fee.” Cities started charging a license fee to owners of dogs, threatening to take unlicensed dogs and euthanize them. It was like the government thought it was entitled to as much of the people’s money as it demanded. Grant remembered the meeting at the Governor’s Office when they said exactly that.

But the people, for the most part, just stood by and watched. They didn’t want to get involved. A surprisingly high number of them were getting government money in one form or another. Almost half of households were dependent, in whole or in part, on government benefits. They wanted to keep theirs.

The rest of the people who weren’t getting government benefits didn’t want to rock the boat because they didn’t want to be “extremists” or be called “greedy.” Besides, they had enough to eat (actually, too much, in most cases), there were plenty of good reality shows on TV, and they didn’t really understand politics, anyway. All they knew is what they learned in school: government needed more money to do great things for the little guy and business was greedy.

People assumed that the WAB would be looking out for big business. Not true. Big business and small business had radically different interests. Big business could get the government to write regulations and tax laws to put their small-business competition out of business. Big business was run by CEOs who, by and large, were products of the liberal education system and the Seattle cocktail party circuit where one chats about how awful Republicans are.

Small business, on the other hand, actually wanted government to be limited. The taxes, regulations, and stupid paperwork requirements were killing them.

Big business and government got even cozier during the “recession.” At the federal level, the Administration, with ample help from the Republicans, bailed out GM, Chrysler, AIG, Goldman Sachs, and just about all the other big corporations.

The same was true at the state level, but the help was in different forms. Big business in Washington State got all kinds of state contracts for “stimulus money” projects to build roads and government buildings, and to buy many things big business sold. For example, the big car dealers’ association got the state to buy millions of dollars of “fuel-efficient” cars for the state motor pool, which didn’t actually need any new cars. Big business returned the favor, donating almost all their corporate contributions to the ruling Democrats and the few Republicans in office. Big business would help the politicians in other ways, like PR stunts disguised as meetings between business leaders and the Governor with the business leaders praising the Governor. The state returned the favors by imposing requirements on businesses that only large employers could afford to comply with, thus reducing the number of small businesses and thereby reducing the competition big businesses faced.

This was soft fascism; government and large corporations helping each other to the detriment of everyone else. It was still fascism though — just without the little mustache and the genocide.

“Are we the only ones who see what’s going on?” Grant asked Brian one day.

Brian sighed. “Pretty much. Most people don’t know or care what’s going on. They’re pathetic. But they’ll get what they deserve.”

Grant decided to have “the conversation” with Brian.

“You know, Brian, this whole thing is going to come crashing down,” he said. “Soon, too. Maybe a year, maybe five. But, soon.”

Brian looked relieved. Finally someone was saying what he was thinking, but he thought it was too outlandish to say out loud. “I know,” Brian said. “The government is out of money and they can’t stop spending. The only thing that will stop them is bankruptcy. It’s going to get ugly.”

They talked about the civil unrest that would come from the cuts and the protests of all the people dependent on government money. They talked about how the government would crack down on dissenters like them. Not haul them off or anything, just start auditing their taxes and that kind of thing. Soft fascism; not the little mustache stuff.

Grant didn’t tell Brian about the preparations he had been making. It wasn’t time yet. But he did say to Brian, “If things get crazy, we need to stick together. You, me, Tom, and Ben and our families.”

Brian nodded, solemnly. He couldn’t believe they were having this conversation, but he was glad they were.