Second Term - A Novel of America in the Last Days (The End of America Series Book 1) (30 page)

SIXTY
THREE

INTERNAL MEMO

SIMPSON INTERSTATE, INC.

TO: VALUED EMPLOYEES-SIMPSON INTERSTATE, INC.

FROM: BROCK SIMPSON

SUBJECT: CORPORATE CHANGES – OWNERSHIP &
MANAGEMENT

As many of know, we have been
visited recently by an agent of the federal government. We didn’t invite him.
He just showed up. Why was he here? Not for what you might think. It is well
known in the trucking industry that our government, federal, state and local,
highly regulates what we do and how we do it. Drivers, vehicles, hours of
operation, charges, weights, use of electronic devices, hazardous materials,
intermodal equipment, logbooks, visor cards, emissions, etc., etc., etc.

I’m become somewhat accustomed to
federal regulations, however, but what I will never get used to is the
government telling me what I can paint on my trucks. As long, as it’s not
obscene, what right does the government have to tell Brock Simpson what I can
place on Simpson Interstate trucks? Well, that’s the unanswered question after
we were visited by a “CCC Conservator” a couple-three weeks ago. You know these
green-shirted guys and gals, you’ve seen them on the streets and in the malls,
I hear they’re even in our churches. Now they even come to private companies’
board meetings.

They think they can enforce that
new so-called anti-hate speech and so-called anti-hate weapon bill, by just
their word alone. If they don’t like my words, or the words on my company’s
trucks, they supposedly can just tell me and I’ve got to do what they say. If
they don’t like my words they can fine me and my company a gazillion dollars.
If I fight the fines, well, that will cost me another gazillion dollars paid to
my lawyers. Great system, hunh?

What if my independent American
spirit tells me that I won’t do it? What if I tell them to get lost, I’m not
paying their exorbitant fines and I’m not changing my words on my trucks?
That’s where it gets really frightening. If I don’t pay, and I fight them, they
can file criminal charges and try to imprison me, or my board members
(including my dear wife and sons). All just because they don’t like what they
call “negative attacks on public officials”. What a load of baloney (my wife
cleaned this part of my memo up).

So, why I am I writing you, the
employees who have made this company a success through the years? You deserve
to know that I just signed a Letter of Intent to sell Simpson Interstate to a
Minnesota freight company that’s slightly bigger than we are. I asked for job
security, as much as one can expect in today’s market, for those of you who
have been with me for five years or more. The final contract will spell it all
out, but it looks like that part of the deal will be included. I’m telling you
this now because word of this sale will leak, it always does, and I don’t want
our best people jumping ship. It looks like most of you will be OK with the new
owners, and not too much should change.

One quite obvious change, of
course, will be that the Simpson family will no longer be running the store.
We’ll miss you all, and we’ll never forget how hard you all worked to put us
where we are today. Do I have to sell? No. I could stay and fight. I thought
long and hard about doing just that. Most of you know I hate to lose and I
don’t give up. Like Churchill said, right? “Never, never, never give up.”

But, Winston, sometimes you gotta
decide what’s most important in life. When my attorney told me that my wife,
Delilah, who is a company officer and director as you may know, could be
charged with crimes for what I put on my trucks, I knew I could never live with
myself if I let that happen. So, Mr. President and your fellow bureaucrats, you
win. No more words you don’t like on our trucks, which will now belong to a
company that fully understands what they won’t be allowed to do, after our
experience.

What are we going to do now? I’ve
located a medium sized trucking company in New Zealand for sale at a decent
price. I understand that they speak a form of the English language there, that
the people are great and that the nation believes in free enterprise. I’m
looking forward to it. Come visit us and the Kiwis. See ya all down the road! Brock
(and Delilah)

SIXTY
FOUR

Journal
Entry / Letter from Jail

To know Ralph Snyder
is to love him. Sort of. I think.

Why the ambivalence
you might ask? Good question.

Ralph is now one of
my best friends, but it wasn’t always that way. As I mentioned earlier, as you
know, journal (they say you’ve been in stir too long when you start conversing
with inanimate objects, like diaries and journals), I met Ralph at that Rotary
meeting where I met Fred Rose, who wasted no time introducing me to the Lord.
Fred invited me to his Bible Study and Ralph asked me to attend an organizing
event, the same week, for a new political organization in east Texas. I’d never
heard of a tea party, except the obvious ones, like tea and crumpets with the
Queen, or with the Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland.

I soon found out at
the meeting held at the American Legion Hall that crumpets were not what they
had in mind. No, but they were interested in hot water. But not for brewing
anything, except exit parties for the politicians who were increasingly getting
our country into the soup. How’s that, journal, for a mangled mixed metaphor?
(Another sign of slammer fatigue is laughing at your own pitiful jokes.) Well,
you get the idea. There were about twenty or so east Texans there and I can
quite honestly say these folks were the most serious people I had met in a long
time. I don’t mean that in a negative way. They had a sense of humor, they
recognized what they were up against, but they were obviously willing to
sacrifice, really sacrifice, their own time and treasure to try and rescue the
nation before it was destroyed by people without any apparent self-control when
it came to sound fiscal public policy. Serious folks.

Ralph, as it turned
out, was the main instigator of that organizational meeting. He called the
meeting to order and simply stated that America was on an unsustainable path to
destruction of its currency, its economy and our way of life. He said that
since the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, the price of about
everything has shot up. He told us that China owned the U.S., because it was
buying billions of dollars of our debt. He said that almost 40% of what
Americans spent every year in goods and services is subsidized by other nations
or the Fed picking up our debt instruments. He asked what will happen when they
open the bond window some day at the U.S. Treasury and no nation wants to buy
any American debt?

Others added
additional horror stories of excessive federal debt and spending on all manner
of wasteful and frivolous projects. One lady said she didn’t think being in
debt 16 trillion dollars plus is what any of the founders of America conceivably
thought the central government would ever be doing, even adjusted for
inflation. Which is another point someone made. He said that since the time that
Congress created the Federal Reserve System, which is owned by private banks,
and allowed it to issue the official U.S. currency, the value of that currency,
due to inflation, has fallen by more than 95%. Not a very good record of
accomplishment, we all agreed.

Once we had gotten
our concerns off our chests, Ralph asked who was willing to actually do
something about it. Everybody there raised their hands and the tea party
movement in east Texas was born. I guess I may have mouthed off more than my
share, because when it came time to organize formally, I got elected President
of our east Texas group. Well, it didn’t take long for other tea party
organizations to spring up across the State of Texas. Then, Ralph coordinated a
meeting in Austin of the leaders of the various local tea party groups.

By the end of the week
end we had a full-fledged state-wide tea party organization. Yup, journal, you
guessed it, yours truly running my mouth again, I ended up as Co-Chairman of
the State Tea Party group. I wouldn’t be using a stainless steel toilet today
if I had managed to miss that Austin organizational meeting, which eventually
led to my late October political speech, oops, wrong title evidently, as the
President and half of DC call it my Austin Hate Speech.

But that speech was
no such thing. I still marvel at how I can be an enemy of the state for
engaging in political dialogue about issues of the day. But, of course, almost
all political prisoners could say the same thing, whether they are imprisoned
in China or Cuba or the Sudan or any number of nations that allow speech
suppression. We all got this elevated status by saying what we think, when what
we think wasn’t acceptable to the powers that be.

So, how did I get
here? Whenever Ralph visits me, which is as often as he is able with his busy
schedule, I remind him that I’m here because of him. We both get a good chuckle
out of it. We like to spend time trading jail house humor. Ralph told me once
he had seen a sign on a bail bond agency on the way to my prison that said, “We’ll
Get You Out of Jail, If It Takes Twenty Years”. One of my favorites was about
the dad who wrote his inmate son and said he didn’t have anyone to till the
garden now that his son was in jail. His son wrote back and said ‘don’t do that
dad, that’s where I buried the bodies’. The prison censors read the letter and
alerted the local police who dug up the garden trying to find the bodies, which
didn’t exist. His son then wrote his dad, and said, ‘that’s the best I could do
from here, Dad, enjoy your garden.’

Most prison humor,
I’m sorry to say, isn’t that clean. Things can get out of hand in a setting
like this, and this is one of the better federal prisons.

So, if you go to a
Rotary meeting and meet two guys for the first time, one may lead you to the
gates of heaven, but one may lead you to the gates of the slammer. You just
never know. Any way, if you get to read this someday, Fred and Ralph, love you
both. You’re my buddies, you’re my pals.

SIXTY
FIVE

Letter
from Prison - Journal Entry

I’ve learned in the
slammer that news among inmates travels at warp speed, particularly if it
involves criminal acts on the outside. Professional curiosity, perhaps? Thus it
didn’t take long after the Montana Standoff, as I preferred to call it, ended
in a blaze of gunfire that we all heard about through the prison grapevine.
Normally, we didn’t have daytime access to a television in my wing of the
federal prison, but for some reason, the word was passed down, and the guards
let us go to the rec room to watch the coverage. Once I saw what happened at
Helena I figured they were eager to have us watch, particularly me I think, as
a political prisoner. They wanted me to see that resistance to the federal
government was futile. That the feds would always win, always.

I don’t know Gunning
Bedford, Jr., nor any of the other occupiers of the Montana State House. Never
met any of them, but I certainly admired their guts for being willing to make a
statement. Should they have carried guns with them out on the balcony?
Undoubtedly, no. That was a tactical error that cost two of them their lives.
The media reports on the recently retired soldier who was shot in the jaw
weren’t very good, though he will live, they said. Hindsight is always really
good, so we all know that they should have released their video, left their
guns on the Colonial flag in the building, and turned themselves in for short
stints in the vertical bars Hilton.

My heart sunk when I
watched, and re-watched, the video of three brave men paying a very high price
to assert their American right to keep and bear arms. The media were apparently
prevented from interviewing the soldiers, but the video clip showing a Colonel
throwing up behind his transport vehicle told me all I needed to know about his
view of what he felt he was ordered to do.

Except for Fox News,
I didn’t see any other media question the use of the military in a domestic
peacekeeping capacity. Fox’s White House guy, whom I think is smart and also
tough, insisted at the White House media briefing that the President’s Press
Secretary answer his question on what looked like a violation of the posse
comitatus
statute. The President’s press guy hemmed and hawed, then,
looking at his briefing notes, referred the media to an Order signed by the Secretary
of Defense, supposedly several days ago. The Fox guy said, well, that’s nice,
but what does it say? Again, he answered with his nose buried in his notes,
like he didn’t want to look anybody in the eye. He then mumbled that the
SecDef, government-speak for the Secretary of Defense, had withdrawn a prior
SecDef Order that had applied the posse comitatus
statute, but without
explaining what it did.

I almost fell out of
my metal prison folding chair. Say what? With the stroke of a pen it’s okay,
it’s legal, to use one branch of the military in internal domestic US
disturbances? The Fox guy, likewise, was visibly taken aback, and blurted out
something like, “Are you serious, Mike? Are you saying that the Act of Congress
in the 1800’s has now been withdrawn by the Pentagon? What a crock of”…..or he
said something like that. The President’s Press guy, nodded his head, mumbled
something else we couldn’t quite hear, and said the news conference was over, and
walked out. 

Normally, that kind
of performance would have guaranteed massive media reaction. But, as I wrote
above, only Fox ran in a big way with the story. The lame stream media, that is
the main stream media, almost totally spiked the story. Totally. It doesn’t
take a genius to figure out why. If the peasants and the hay shakers out in the
boondocks figure out that this White House is abusing its power, they might
pick up their pitch forks (they don’t have any guns anymore, right?) and march
on Washington. Take the place over. Can’t have that, so they try to make it
“legal” (I write the word in this letter/journal in quotes) for the military to
be used against American citizens.

Who will oppose it,
even if they know about it? The military won’t object, they are under command
and control from the Commander In Chief. The Department of Justice won’t
object, same basic reason, it’s what the boss wants. Any private citizen would
have his law suit tossed by the federal district court judge who would rule
that the citizen lacks what the lawyers call ‘standing’, that is, no basis to
be in court. Congress could expand the statute, but that’s not going to happen,
with control of both Houses by the President’s party. So, my fellow American
citizens (I write hoping that some will eventually read these words) you are no
longer living in the land of the free. Your duly elected government has decided
that if you get out of line (and they decide where the line is) you are looking
at the barrel of a military gun that you bought and paid for originally to keep
you free from foreign aggressors. Now, it’s “domestic aggressors” or “home
grown terrorists”, even though most are peaceful protestors, who are the new
target of our military. Americans under siege in their own land. How does this
differ from what Soviet citizens faced? What a frightening situation. Sorry,
journal, sorry, outside reader, but I’m really, truly upset, and I think for
good reason.

How did it come to
this?  What could we have done to prevent the wholesale destruction of our
rights? Oh yeah, I know. We could have denied the President a second term. That
would have done it. I tried, I certainly tried, and
look where that got me
.
Depending on how the trial goes, I could be a free man, or, alternatively, if
the White House, and its Department of Justice, and the federal judiciary
(based on past court rulings in my case) have their way, I’ll become a long
term guest of the federal government.

One side note to
anyone who may read my letter from jail.

The prison grapevine
says that Gunning Bedford, Jr. is being transferred to this prison, with his
case venued to the same judge who has my case. Things may be looking up, after
all. Gunning and I might get along quite well.