299 Days: The 17th Irregulars

by Glen Tate

  “How can you trust me to not rip you off?” Joe asked.

  “We’ve known you for years here,” Bruce said. “Besides, if you wanted to rip us off, you could do it now.”

  “And,” another banker said, “Everyone in town knows that you and your guys are the only security in town. If we try to set up a bank without you, it’s pretty obvious that you could ride in and take all the deposits. Having ‘security by Joe’ is what people need to see so they’ll have some confidence in the security of their deposits.”

  “OK, you guys trust me,” Joe said to them, “but how do the rest of the people in town trust me not to take their stuff?”

  “Same reasons we have to trust you,” Bruce said. “Hey, people need to trust us. If they don’t, then they don’t have a secure way to get their deposits to us and they don’t have our bank notes to use. If they don’t want to use our services, that’s fine. They’re on their own. They can try to buy a piece of land or a factory with ammunition if they want. Good luck with that.”

  “Yeah,” another banker said, “we have a profit motive in making sure people trust the bank. We’ll do lots of things to increase people’s trust, like let people come and see our assets. So they don’t think it’s some myth like all the gold bars in Ft. Knox.” That was a reference to the FUSA’s claim that there was enough gold under guard at Ft. Knox to back up the dollars in circulation, which was a complete fantasy. At the beginning of the Collapse, it was revealed that there was no gold there.

  “This will be a community bank,” one of the other bankers said. “It will be by us and for us. It’s local. We’ll only prosper if our customers do. It’s that simple.”

  “Trust?” the first banker said. “Sure, we’re asking people to trust that we won’t take off with all the gold and silver, but people had to trust that those old FUSA dollars were worth something, which was a much bigger leap of faith. A piece of paper is ‘worth’ whatever amount was printed on it. Really? We all saw what happened when people figured out they couldn’t trust those dollars. I think we’re asking people to trust us much less than that.”

  Joe nodded. He wanted to be part of this, to help people in his area by having a bank. He also wanted to make some money. He could have started stealing and running protection rackets long ago. Everyone in town knew that. He was a good man who used the incredible power he had very sparingly and only for good.

  “OK,” Joe asked, “so how does the bank make any money?” He knew the answer, but asked anyway.

  “Well, eventually by loaning money,” Bruce said. “But that’s a ways off.”

  “What?” Joe asked. Banks made money by loaning it. How come they weren’t going to do that right away?

  “We won’t loan money like the old banks,” the first banker said. “They did ‘fractional reserve banking.’ That’s where they only had to have a tiny fraction of their deposits on hand and could loan huge multiples of their deposits. So, if an old bank got a deposit of $10,000, they would loan out a million. This is why the old banks couldn’t come close to paying every depositor. Remember the long lines right before May Day when word got out that the banks would be closed in a few days? Those banks never had anything close to the amount of cash that they owed depositors. We’ll be different. We have to be or no one will deposit with us.”

  “We will have the money on hand to cover the notes we issue. Period,” a third banker said. “We might loan a small percentage of our money eventually, but we’ll never get into that fractional reserve banking nonsense like they used to.”

  “Joe,” Bruce said, “loaning money won’t be the main way we’ll make money. Instead, we’ll basically be a safe deposit box. We’ll charge a fee for safely keeping the deposits. I think people will gladly pay to have their valuables safely locked up instead of worrying about gangs coming to their homes or business to steal…or worse. They’ll pay quite a lot, actually. People are paying you for security contractors now. Looking at this as a business person, what good is having stuff when it might get taken? People will pay something to have their things safe.”

  Bruce continued. “Then, when the rebuilding starts, there will be a huge demand for credit. There will be so many businesses starting up. People will pay fairly high interest for a loan. We’ll loan part of our assets—but only part, like maybe a quarter, max. We’ll only loan to people we know can pay us back, like a solid business starting up in town. We’ll earn interest on the loans. We’ll pay people a little interest on their deposits and we’ll keep the difference between the interest we charge on loans and the interest we pay on deposits. Plus, we’ll still make money for the safe deposit boxes.”

  “But let’s be honest,” another banker said. “We’re doing this because we want to have some security and economic growth in our town. If we make any money, it won’t be for years from now.” All the bankers would deposit their own wealth into the bank and use that as seed money for the bank’s expenses. It was an investment for them.

  This plan to start an honest bank made sense. Joe realized he had quite a business opportunity here. “So,” he asked, “you would pay my company from the safe deposit charges now and maybe interest later?”

  “Yep,” one of them said. “Directly from the safe deposits, as in you physically keep a portion of whatever items a person gives the bank as the safe deposit fee.” They started to talk about what percentage Joe’s company would keep. That discussion lasted several minutes, and ended with Joe keeping 50% of the safe deposit fees for the first year because the bank’s major expense, at this early point, was for security. It would take many of Joe’s guys and equipment to secure the bank. It would be a fortress.

  Joe was beaming inside. All of his hard work and preparations had put him in a position to essentially be a 50% partner in a bank without investing a dime, just giving his guys some work. Before the Collapse, he had worked so hard at a traditional business, only to have the government shut him down. Now, no government could shut him down, and he didn’t have to pay any taxes. He would have never thought people could do quite well after a society collapses, and that they could do it honestly, without having to rob and kill for it. But it made sense: in every human situation, some people do well and others don’t. Most of the population was doing horribly. It was inevitable that some people, the prepared and smart people, would actually prosper from the Collapse.

  He extended his hand to Bruce. “Deal,” Joe said. That was how business was done now; a group of local people who knew each other, a handshake. In so many ways, the Collapse was like pressing a giant reset button to the way America originally was, and to the way the country became so prosperous before it went insane.

  One of the bankers came up to Joe with three cigar boxes. “Hey, Joe, I know you like cigars. Consider them a signing bonus.”

  Joe smiled. “I got about seventy guys who would love a cigar. It’s a pleasure doing business with you, ladies and gentlemen.” That’s how Joe Tantori got into the banking business.

  Chapter 185

  Commissioner Winters

  (July 9)

  Ed Winters couldn’t sleep. Again. He was sleeping in a bed in a spare conference room in the courthouse. This is weird, he kept thinking. He couldn’t get past the oddness of a bed in a conference room. Or sleeping at his office. It just wasn’t right.

  He felt like he was in a jail, but he was glad to be there, given the alternative, which was getting killed “outside the wire,” the area outside the fortified courthouse. Outside the wire is where all those pathetic animals—the townspeople—lived.

  Winters tossed and turned some more. It was no use. It was 3:45 a.m. and he wasn’t going to get any sleep, which was amazing because he was so tired. He got up and walked down the hall to his office. It was just so weird getting up from bed and already being in his office. It made time blur together. There was no “work day” and “home.” It was just one big, run-together blur of working.

  County Commissioner Ed Winters was in his e
arly sixties and had a full head of silver hair. He was short and thin and looked like a CEO. He was a typical politician-looking guy.

  Winters was the boss of Frederickson. The undisputed boss. He liked that part. It made him smile every time he thought it because he had come out on top, just like he knew he would from the day he moved to this piss-ant town.

  He arrived in the early 1970s when he was fresh out of college. He had a job in the office of the local wood products plant and rose up the ladder quickly. He was active in civic affairs until the plant closed in 1989, when the spotted owl going on the endangered species list shut down logging in western Washington. By that time, he was the assistant manager out there and “Mr. Frederickson,” serving on every board and charity. He was the Grand Marshal of the Timber Days Parade for so long that people had forgotten who else had ever done that.

  With the plant closing and Winters being “Mr. Frederickson,” it was only natural that he would run for office. He ran unopposed for mayor of Frederickson in 1990.

  As mayor, when the spotted owl crisis hit, Winters got to dole out all the state and federal money for the closed plant. All the worker retraining money, all the displaced worker grants; all that money. Gobs and gobs of it just showed up from Washington DC and Olympia.

  It was largely up to Winters to decide who got the money and who didn’t. He settled a lot of old scores that way. He had a very long memory. One minor comment that could be taken either as a joke or an insult ten or twenty years before was all it took for Winters to use his “discretion” to steer favors away from one person and toward another. He loved it. It was like there was a giant scoreboard in his head. The scoreboard showed who acknowledged that he was the boss and who crossed him.

  Winters did a magnificent job of handing out the state and federal cash during the rough times of the early 90s. He easily won a spot on the county commission, which consisted of the three elected officials who ran the county. Now, with more territory, his reach was wider than just Frederickson. There were more permits that needed his approval, which came at a price. Not cash in brown paper bags. He was more sophisticated than that. Getting a subdivision or commercial building approved by him, or getting a county contract, or getting a cousin out of jail meant that you owed Ed Winters for the rest of your life. And he would call in the favor. At a minimum, if Winters helped someone then they would vote for whomever Winters said. They would donate to causes he told them to, most of which weren’t really charities but hired Winters and his friends as “consultants.” Winters might ask someone to invest in one of his real estate ventures. And they did.

  Winters spent the next twenty plus years building up an empire. Nothing happened in Frederickson or the county without him. Nothing. He viewed Frederickson as his town. He owned it. The people living there were like the little plastic human figures in a toy train set. The “townspeople” as he derisively called them. They were little people playing a part, and he ran the show. He loved that.

  In the early 2000s, a threat to his empire emerged: Mexicans. They started to move in, and they didn’t understand how things worked. They actually ran independent little businesses, without cutting him in. What were they thinking? This was giving others in town the idea that it was possible to do things without him. That had to stop.

  Winters started a campaign to shut down “unlicensed businesses.” The townspeople, who were not keen on these new brown-skinned people who talked funny, were happy to rally behind their leader…and make the town “safe” by having only licensed businesses. New ordinances were passed, imposing fines and even jail time for the heinous crime of operating a little grocery or used tire business without several licenses and approvals. The city attorney—a pathetic bootlicker who did whatever Winters said—started suing the Mexican businesses for licensing violations. The Mexicans thought they had left this kind of thing in Mexico, but quickly concluded they needed to play ball. Just like in Mexico.

  Soon the Mexicans came to Winters asking for relief. He told them how his “charities” and investment opportunities worked. He also told them how to register to vote. Washington State had a very strong “Motor Voter” law that allowed anyone applying for a driver’s license to register to vote. No proof of citizenship was required. Hell, no identification of any kind was required. Anyone could vote – several times in each election, for whomever they were told.

  Washington State went to an all vote-by-mail system instead of requiring people to physically go to the polls. This was to save voters the “extreme inconvenience” of going to a school or church every few years and taking ten minutes to vote in person. Of course, the politicians had a bigger reason to impose vote-by-mail. The county would mail a ballot to each name appearing on the voter registration list. It was not uncommon for one household to get two or more ballots per “person” because signing up with at least two names was encouraged. Multiple voter registrations was “how we do it” in Frederickson, the Mexicans were told.

  All this voter fraud was actually considered humanitarian and enlightened. Winters even got a grant from the state election office to register “underserved” voters in his county. The easier they made it for anyone to vote (several times), the more they were doing to encourage minority voting. And voting was always good; politicians would ask, “You’re not against voting, are you?”

  To “help minorities,” Winters ran a Mexican on the city council to show everyone how “diverse” Frederickson was. Everyone—white and Mexican—thanked Winters for his “leadership” on bringing the two communities together. Of course, the Mexican city council member did whatever Winters said. He got more and more Mexicans elected, and they stayed elected as long as they did exactly what they were told. All the while, everyone lauded Winters for fighting “racism” by bossing around brown-skinned people and taking advantage of them. He laughed at that.

  Now that he was firmly in control of everything, Winters was glad to have the Mexicans in town. He was very happy to have all the new Mexican “customers” for his much-needed services, like permit approvals. He was happy to have all those votes—not just for him, but for other candidates. He could make deals with state legislators and even the area’s U.S. Congressman to deliver votes in exchange for grants and government programs, that Winters got to administer. It was beautiful.

  The stupid townspeople, Winters marveled, never said anything. They never demanded clean government. They never questioned what he was doing. They did what they were told. They wanted free stuff. They had been convinced their whole lives, starting in elementary school, that the solution to a problem was more government. They were so used to corruption that they just assumed that was how it was. One time, when a new editor for the newspaper came in and started asking questions, the townspeople pretty much ran him out of town. It warmed Winters’ heart to see that. His townspeople loved him.

  As the economy started to tank, it became harder and harder to run the city and county. Businesses shut down in record numbers. A few years later, D2—or the “Second Great Depression”—as some called it, really got rolling. Frederickson looked like a ghost town with all the boarded up buildings.

  Tax money, Winters said to himself. That’s what was wrong. Boarded up buildings didn’t produce any tax money. At first, the “recession,” as it was initially called, was a blessing to Winters.

  That’s right: a blessing. There was all that stimulus money to dole out—and Winters was the guy who everyone came to for all that big, fat federal money. He made sure the number of city and county employees didn’t decrease during that time. He actually hired more government workers as a “local stimulus” project. It was all federal money, so who cared?

  Then, the federal money ran out. So did the state money. Winters was faced with deciding what to do. Increase fees for everything? There was no one left to pay the fees. Winters had to start firing government workers, which was hard at first. So many of those people had helped him get where he was, but he was where he wanted to be so w
ho cared? The townspeople, after all, were just little plastic figures playing a part in the train set Winters was running. It was actually much easier to fire them than he’d thought.

  He had to fire about half the police and essentially empty the jail, which had a predictable effect. He needed to have a volunteer security force. He had plenty of volunteers; they were all the people Winters had helped over the years and their sons. (Winters didn’t allow any Mexicans to volunteer for security. It was just understood that white people ran things.)

  The volunteers were very eager to help, and maybe get a cut of what was going on. They later became the “Blue Ribbon Boys” due to the blue cloth strip they wore on their left arms to signify who they were.

  As things were getting worse and worse with the economy, the state and Feds wanted to control everything. All that federal and state money came with strings attached. Winters constantly had to deal with all the officials in Olympia and DC; at least at first. But pretty soon, he noticed, Olympia, and especially DC, couldn’t keep track of it all. There weren’t enough bureaucrats to keep tabs on all the money flowing into even little Frederickson. Winters quickly realized he could essentially do what he wanted. He would just send in “everything’s fine here” reports to Olympia and DC. They were reports that probably went unread.

  When the “Crisis” hit on May Day, things got even better for Winters. There were plenty of government resources coming in during the “emergency.” And the little townspeople needed Winters even more.

  But, the best part about the Crisis was that this made Winters truly untouchable. No one from Olympia or DC would possibly have the time or resources to crack down on corruption like his. Even if they caught him, he’d just call a few of the many favors government officials owed him and he’d get a slap on the wrist. He decided to quit trying to hide what he was doing and figured that being out in the open about it reinforced that he was the boss. He was so powerful that he didn’t even need to hide it.