The Wrath of God

by Jim Balzotti

  The Wrath of God: A Novel by Jim Balzotti

  Published by Creation House

  A Charisma Media Company

  600 Rinehart Road

  Lake Mary, Florida 32746

  www.charismamedia.com

  This book or parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the publisher, except as provided by United States of America copyright law.

  Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.

  Design Director: Justin Evans

  Cover design by Ampersand Graphics, Stuart, FL

  Copyright © 2015 by Jim Balzotti

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Visit the author’s website: www.wrathofgodthebook.com.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: 2015952363

  International Standard Book Number: 978-1-62998-502-2

  E-book International Standard Book Number: 978-1-62998-503-9

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication.

  First edition

  15 16 17 18 19 — 987654321

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my children, Amy, Jeff, and Mike, who gave my life love and meaning.

  To my grandchildren, Adriana and Domenic, and my expected grandson, who have given me new wonder and amazement.

  And to the memory of my parents, Domenic and Marie, who instilled faith and love in my heart.

  And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth…

  And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?...

  And, lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood…

  For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?

  —Revelation 6:8, 10, 12, 17

  Foreword

  Hardly a day passes without something occurring that illustrates the interdependence of the world’s inhabitants on each other. Developments and events in one country can have consequences far beyond its boundaries. Those consequences affect the country and the developments or events which initially prompted the reaction elsewhere. Also, history teaches us that decisions and events influence future developments often when no relationship exists between them.

  When Republican Party members in Congress and President Obama and his fellow Democratic Party members in Congress were at loggerheads over the shape and amount of the US government budget and the level of US government debt in 2013, Jim Balzotti asked me what would happen if China, which holds a significant share of the US government’s debt, were to request immediate repayment. In answering his question, I had no idea that our conversation would cause him to write the gripping and provocative narrative that follows. While this narrative is strictly a work of fiction, a scenario along the lines presented is not completely outside the realm of possibility. The story also prompts the reader to think about issues human beings have grappled with for centuries such as religion’s role in a society’s functioning, whether divine influence shapes events, and the appropriate mix of self-reliance and government assistance in determining human actions. There are no clear-cut answers to these questions, but I believe they are critical to consider carefully in making decisions about proposed actions.

  I hope that readers of this book will find it as well written and thought provoking as I have.

  —Christopher W. Webster

  Chief, Developed Country Trade Division

  Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs

  Department of State (Retired)

  Prologue

  The year is 2028 and the world is at war.

  After years of deficit spending and government paralysis that led to the devaluation of its currency and widespread riots, the United States suffered a complete collapse of its government and has been conquered militarily by China.

  Religion has been outlawed upon penalty of death. Martial law has been instituted, with hundreds of thousands of Americans put in detention zones on starvation rations.

  All forms of media are now prohibited, and the main computer junctions controlling the Internet have been destroyed.

  Small bands of well-armed militias are resisting, with death squads of highly trained Chinese military units hunting them down. Public executions are common.

  China, with its smaller vassals North Korea, Venezuela, and Pakistan, launched a bold move to attain world domination, crushing any nation that does not surrender unconditionally.

  Fall 2024

  Washington DC

  The war between China and the United States did not begin with a single gunshot, troops invading, or bombs exploding.

  It began with a simple request.

  The People’s Republic of China had lent to the United States over a period of decades nineteen trillion dollars, and China wanted it back. All of it. Now.

  Requests like this, although hardly the norm, were always made through back channels and then only through senior diplomats in hushed tones with a great deal of formality. Perhaps over tea, but not this time. This was a well-thought-out, planned strategy by Chairman Chang. He wanted the world’s attention. Before the president was even notified, China leaked the request publically to every major news organization across the globe. Wall Street, which always reacted to rumors, plunged 580 points. Trading was halted. Talk radio hosts were flooded with calls from a panicking public, not quite sure what to make of it. Some callers angrily declared we should just not pay the Chinese and tell them to go pound sand up their butts. Almost all agreed it was the politicians’ fault for their liberal, wasteful spending patterns. Ambassadors from countries around the world called their counterparts in Washington trying to get any kind of response in order to gauge how such an event might affect their own countries. All other global news took a backseat to this new development. The Chinese had strategically contrived a tipping point in world history.

  Of course the United States did not have the money. Not a tenth of it. Not a hundredth of it. Not if you counted all the gold in Fort Knox. Decades of uncontrolled wasteful spending, along with an inability of politicians in Congress to either curb spending or put deficit reduction measures into place, risked plunging the United States into a fiscal black hole without the possibility of recovery. The result was an economy strangled by social programs that the government could not support. It was estimated that a third of the population was paying for the other two-thirds not to work. Congress would not raise taxes. Congressional members wanted to be reelected year after year. Raising taxes was a guaranteed ticket to getting thrown out of office. As a result, more money was printed and borrowed excessively. The debt ceiling was raised annually while political bluster reiterated that Washington needed to cut spending. When cutbacks came, it was to the space program, military defense, and government agencies such as the CIA, Homeland Security, FBI, and the NSA. At the same time, foreign aid increased. It took precedence over
funding domestic programs such as mental health, veterans, children, and the elderly. The average American could not reconcile the fact that our government had built roads and bridges overseas in hostile foreign lands yet the American people were being told we had no funds to fix our own crumbling infrastructure. The government’s mismanagement of Social Security was the most egregious offense. Social Security, funded by American workers, was running out. Constantly mislabeled as an entitlement program, it was in fact a retirement fund paid into by American workers over their working lives. Rather than being held in a separate designated account with a singular purpose, contributions were placed in the general fund, which was treated like a child’s piggy bank by politicians and special interest groups who couldn’t wait to dip into it with their greedy hands.

  The US Navy was at the lowest level since the 1960s; military bases had been closed around the world. The space program was halted and the once proud NASA completely eliminated.

  The government’s justification for severe military budget cuts was the focus and priority given to an unlikely threat of a terrorist blowing up a plane. In the interim, troops were not allocated to defend US borders that were porous, thus vulnerable. After all, wasn’t the world at peace? Were we not the United States, the most influential and powerful nation in the world? History’s lessons went unlearned. Arrogance overshadowed the reality of the rise and fall of nations due to incompetence and corruption from within. One needs only to look at England, Spain, Portugal, ancient Rome, and the great civilizations of Egypt as precedence. The Americans were arrogant but most importantly had grown soft. Soft and corrupt. The disciplines of hard work, individual responsibility, and small government were thrown by the wayside. Newly elected politicians moved away from the Constitution written by the Founding Fathers and regarded it as an inconvenient document.

  America was ripe for the taking.

  When President Mann was made aware of the request for the payment in full to China of the nineteen trillion dollars owed, he first thought it was a miscommunication, perhaps one of the many unfounded rumors for which Washington was famous. Everyone knew the United States did not have the money. How could they? It was such an outrageous request, it had to be erroneous. But when Chairman Chang personally contacted the Chief of State, he knew that it was a devastating reality. Chang tersely reiterated his formal written request. Simply put, the United States owed China a great deal of money, and China was calling in the note. Saying what he had to say, Chang abruptly terminated the call. President Mann assumed that this had to do with the grain deal the United States forced onto China during their drought years ago. He would be partially correct. In 2020, China suffered from a severe three-year-long drought. Seeking to buy grain to feed its starving population, China requested partial debt prepayment in order to make grain purchases in the world market. Washington’s only proposition was to barter a reduction of the Chinese debt for grain while overvaluing the commodity by 400 percent. It was an attempt to reduce the deficit owed China. America had the Chinese over a barrel with no other option but to accept. It became a shameful chapter in American history. No man or nation forgets the feel of a sharp blade being held to the throat.

  The president was notified that the White House switchboard was swamped with calls from persons claiming entitlement and demanding answers. President Mann summoned his Cabinet, the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, the Attorney General, along with the Secretary of the Treasury, and the chairman of CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investments.

  “Ladies and Gentlemen: I’ve spoken to Chairman Chang, who for all practical purposes is now the sole dictator of China. He assures me that the request is most real and has given us one year to come up with the money. That’s nineteen trillion, folks! He made it crystal clear that this is not an idle threat. We are challenged with a major power move against the United States, and I need to know what, if anything, we can do about it. The world is watching. I would like to hear from each of you in as few words as possible the exact ramifications of this demand. What are our options? We need a strategic position to counter this threat to our economic stability.”

  “As we all know,” Margaret Webb, the chairwoman of the Federal Reserve Board, confirmed, “we do not have the money. Or more accurately, it’s merely print on our T-bills, ink on pieces of paper. Chits, if you will. IOUs. And if the Chinese are calling them in, we simply can’t pay them. Maybe one trillion…tops. China isn’t the only country with our T-bills; numerous nations have invested in them to hedge against their own economies. There is no way we can pay them back, in either dollars or gold. If we should just print the money—which quite honestly, Mr. President, we’ve been doing for some time now rather than implementing austerity measures—we would devalue our own dollar. Think of it in terms of paying ten dollars for a Coke. Our money would become worthless overnight. We can’t borrow the money, since we have been borrowing from the Chinese and others all these years. We don’t have enough gold in Fort Knox to give them, since we’ve been selling that off quietly for years to pay off some of our debt. Thank God the public isn’t aware of that strategy!”

  “What if we don’t pay them? Stall them, Margaret?”

  “I doubt we could stall them long enough. As for not paying them, not a good idea. They could legally seize our assets worldwide. Embassies, ships, planes, military instillations—and most damning, all the foreign investments we have around the world. Our largest domestic companies have contracts with our government and are heavily invested in China. They could seize all our monetary as well as physical assets. If we appealed it, on what grounds I don’t know, and if it ever got as far as the World Court in Hague, we’d lose. Simply put, we borrowed the money. In a word, Mr. President, we are looking at the collapse of the US dollar. If the Chinese have done this by design, it’s brilliant. Most of the world’s economies are tied to the dollar. Ironically, one that isn’t is the yuan. Up until 2005 the Chinese yuan was pegged to our dollar, but it was removed and now floats in a narrow margin around a fixed base rate tied to a small basket of world currencies. It makes you wonder if this move wasn’t planned many years ago.”

  “So what can we do?”

  “If this demand is credible, they obviously want something. Give them grain, perhaps. In the meantime, begin turning over surplus property to them that no longer has any value to us. Stall them. We’re going to lose these assets anyway. They’ve made advances in their navy, but I think we could negotiate a release of some of our warships in lieu of dollars and…”

  “Give them our warships! My God, Margaret! Are you out of your mind? Are we really thinking this?”

  “As I said, Mr. President, we have no choice. Let them have a few assorted warships, even a carrier. Don’t forget, our standing army is in shambles due to budget cuts; after all, we don’t fight wars with soldiers on the ground anymore. We have the largest arsenal of nuclear weapons in the world. Give them the warships and planes. They could never use them against us. It would reduce a small portion of the debt.”

  “My God, Margaret! What else?”

  “Mr. President, what I would propose as the only viable option would also bring our country to her knees.”

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Drastic cuts. To the bone. We would have to eliminate all social programs. Welfare, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid…everything. Gone. No money to education, the arts, medical research and development…we would have to cut all government services to the poor, which quite honestly has turned our society over the years into a welfare state. Why should people work when they get paid to stay home? We even mail a check right to their house! All, and I mean all, disability programs have to go. Next we would have to attempt to raise additional money by offering very high interest rates on our T-bills, maybe 8 percent, which in itself is self-defeating. With the dollar in jeopardy of falling and taking Europe and South America’s currency with it, who would buy them? We’re having a hard time paying the interest on
the Chinese loan now, for God’s sake! If we raise interest rates, the borrowing rates all rise. Money becomes prohibitively more expensive. It would have a double whammy of us collapsing our own dollar. The cost of gas, food, credit cards, adjustable rate mortgages, rent all skyrocket. People are barely getting by now. The unemployment rate is up to 12.7 percent. It could climb well above 70 percent. What you would be looking at, Mr. President, is a depression that would make 1929 look like a hiccup in the economy. You could expect widespread panic and civil disorder. Mr. President, the Chinese are in a position to collapse the United States from within, and I’m just not sure what you can do to stop it.”

  “Something else, Mr. President,” said Brett Markus. Brett was the head of CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investments in the US, an agency that closely monitored and regulated what businesses or strategic property could be sold in the United States to foreign investors. “In the beginning of your first term, Congress relaxed rules on foreign investment and you signed off on it. In addition to the purchase of the Sears Tower, the Trump properties, we also allowed the sale of our largest energy corporation, Unocal, to the Chinese for $18.5 trillion, and Chevron for $11 trillion. They’ve purchased controlling interests in the Hoover Dam and some smaller hydroelectric plants. Bottom line, our top energy companies can easily be placed in a stranglehold at China’s discretion, which in itself poses great national security concerns. A flip of a switch and portions of America go dark.”

  “Okay. All of you, I need to be alone. Meet back here in one hour.”

  He thought back to 2016 when he ran for president as the outsider and successful businessman who would bring the much-needed change and a fresh perspective to Washington. His candid and unscripted words spoken from the heart touched many Americans, and although he was well known for his business acumen, and often graced the cover of national magazines and newspapers, he had never run for public office before, let alone the highest office.