by John Ringo
This is referred to as famine. It hadn't happened to the U.S. in a century or more. And even then it was, to an extent, localized. 2020 was the first widespread famine the U.S. ever had. In 2019 it was still localized until the example of Lamoille became fucking national policy!
But I digress . . . Again.
There was still a certain amount of fuel. Most people had run their fuel out but there was still some. And there was always the leather-personnel-carrier. (Shoes.)
People started wandering. The tofu-eaters started looking for food, any food. The grasshoppers were turning into locusts and starting to fly.
There was food. Grain stores from the previous year were at near record highs. Even the winter wheat harvest hadn't been awful, despite the weather. And there were, alas, fewer mouths to feed. By June there was some movement on emergency distribution.
And then there was the Big Grab.
But we'll get back to that.
Okay, last bit on "organic" farming.
It's bad for the environment. It's sucky efficiency. Trying to go to it as the only way that farming was done caused the famines of 2019 and 2020. And then there's the whole pest thing.
Sure, there are more worms but, hell, it's healthier for you! Right? Well, there's the part about hormones and their effect on H5N1 but that's sort of specious. Let's talk about real health and safety issues.
What do they use for fertilizer? Shit. Okay, dress it up in any pretty language you want, "manure," "fully natural plant food," whatever. It's shit. It's what came out of your anus and you flushed down the toilet. It might come from cows or horses or whatever. It's all shit.
Don't get me wrong. It's a pretty good fertilizer. Especially horse shit. Very balanced. Also less smelly than the cow shit. (Which means, by the way, less nitrogen.)
But it's shit. It's made up of e coli bacteria. And the good organic farmers not only use it to prep their fields, they spray it (using a tractor and a manure sprayer) at times during the growing season. Because while it's pretty good fertilizer, it's not as good as the industrial type.
Yes, that's right folks. That organically grown food you just ate at some point was sprayed with shit. In many cases, it's "debiologicaled" shit. That is, it's been heated to the point that the germs should be dead. Doesn't always work out that way. And that kind is more expensive. Anything that's not cooked—lettuce, celery, green onions—generally got "debiologicaled." And sometimes it wasn't quite debioed as people would prefer.
Look, bottomline: Of the ten major e coli outbreaks of base food materials in the five years before the Plague, one was associated with industrial farming. One. The other nine were products that were "all natural."
Way more people died of "all natural" food that was contaminated with some "all natural" toxin than people who stuck to that icky "evil" food.
Back to trying to avoid famine.
Chapter Eight
Let Them Eat Cake
Food distribution centers had been set up in some areas. But they, by and large, had not gotten to small towns like Morrisville, VT, or Blackjack, GA. Never really did. Those areas were supposed to be producing the food, not drawing on it.
Initial movement during the Plague had been out of the cities. As the summer (what there was of it) kicked in, the movement was back. There wasn't any food in the countryside. Oh, there was, just not what most people recognized as such (yet). And the locusts wanted the government to feed them. Which it did. I wasn't on that detail but I've heard the stories.
Food distribution was very much on the classic methods used in Africa during famines. People got in long lines and were given some basic food materials. Semolina (cream of wheat for those of you who don't know the name, couscous for the hoity toity) was a base distribution as was cornmeal and beans. Why those? You could put it in a pot and boil it up and eat it. That simple.
"How can I boil it? I don't have a pot!" "I've got a pot, where's a stove?"
The answer is "find a pot, cut down a tree, boil the fucking water."
Believe it or not, there were still "environmental activists" being interviewed on the news who were complaining about the ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE that was being done from this sort of distribution. Trees were being cut down. (There used to be these things called "greenbelts" around subdivisions. I kid you not.) Fires were adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. There were even lawsuits seeking injunctions against fires used for cooking food.
Due to the way that the population had ebbed and flowed, most of the food distribution centers that were getting heavy traffic tended to be in the outer edges of cities. Central areas had some commerce as well, but people were clustering out of cities and, well, there were "issues" in the cities. Which wasn't good for the economy. Cities were and are the mitochondria of the economic animal.
But that's where most of the people who were coming to the food distribution centers were. And they included the "random associations" from suburbs. Side note again.
According to orders, the only people who got food were those that came to distribution centers. The Bitch again. I'll get into her hate affair with her crisis management specialists, including the head of FEMA, later. But that was the Rule.
Very few local officers paid attention to it. The majority of the distribution was going through the Army and what remained of the National Guard and reserves. The NG had had widespread desertions when they were called up. Go take care of others or stay with your family? About 20% chose the latter. There were also screw-ups with their vaccination program. They ended up at about half strength.
Oh, why weren't there more widespread desertions in the Army? There is no better place to be in an emergency (generally, we still haven't gotten to me, right?) than the Army. The Army always gets fed. Rations may be short, but it gets fed. And it generally takes care of dependents.
Dependents near bases went to the units when things got bad. They got some medical care, unit family support groups gathered in "less than random" associations and, well, supported each other. The troops were away. Rear area detachment personnel weren't going to turn away their wives when said wives turned up with kids in tow, hacking and coughing. (And in some conditions girlfriends or even "close personal friends" of the same sex. You can turn a blind eye to all sorts of shit in an emergency.) But even the dependents, those that lived on or near base, mostly got innoculated. And while power might be out in the local town, it stayed up on bases. There was food, water, shelter, medical care and clothing. As things started to get humming again there were even jobs.
There's a reason for this. See the difference between the National Guard and the Regulars. The Regulars stayed on the job in droves, less than five percent desertions, no matter how nasty those jobs were. (Body clearance in Miami was high on the list according to a buddy in the 82nd. He's challenged by a couple of officers in my unit who were involved in breaking up the food riots in DC. Clearing already dead people in hundred degree heat or killing American citizens? Tough call. I didn't get to find out, fortunately. Sort of. But, truth to tell, I actually enjoyed Detroit. Sometimes you can do good works in very bad ways.)
The point being that most of the work at the grunt level was not being done by FEMA, which never had many bodies, or even by the National Guard, which should have had many more bodies, but by Regular Army units. They'd been flown back starting in April when it was clear things were going to hell in a handbasket. At first the generals stuck with the pre-disaster plan until they got ordered to follow the Bitch Plan under Emergency Powers.
Okay, okay, damn. Sooo much to cover.
There was a Plan. Like all emergency plans the Post Catastrophic Disaster Emergency Rebuilding Plan left out, well, the Emergency. But it was a plan. It was a plan nobody wanted to implement but it was a Plan. It amounted to nationwide triage.
Triage is a word that comes from the old French word "trier" meaning "to pick or sort." Triage on a battlefield (where the word originated in the Napoleonic Wars) came down to three choic
es: Those that don't need help right now, those that can survive if they get help right now and those that are probably going to die whether they get help or not. Three choices. You send the bulk of your resources, doctors in this case, to the cases who had to have help right now, but that were probably going to live if they got that help. The lightly wounded could wait until later. And for those for whom there was no help, you sent no help. You put them together hopefully somewhere far enough away from the rest that their groans and screams wouldn't bother anyone and you Let Them Die.
It was an ugly, ugly, ugly plan. Basically, the Powers That Be, notably the military and FEMA, would determine zones that were recoverable fast. Energy would be concentrated on those zones first. As they got back on their feet, they would be used to springboard movement into zones that were just so totally fucked up they hadn't been recoverable. Lightly wounded (not many of them, NYC comes to mind) would be more or less on their own.
So now we turn once again to the Bitch. Tum-tum-ta-dum-tum, Hail to the Chief and all that.
She's been going quietly insane in my opinion. The news media did not agree. The Democrat Congress did not agree.
Everyone else in the world fucking agreed.
In March, in the midst of the worst of the Plague, the Congress had passed the Biological Crisis Emergency Act, effectively surrendering power to the President "for the duration of the biological and economic emergency."
Biological and economic.
What is the definition of an economic emergency? Okay, the world's economic turbine coming apart like an explosion is one definition. But what constitutes the end of the emergency? According to the news media, blips in the stock market pre-Plague were "emergencies." A quarter point rise in the unemployment index was "an emergency."
Okay, okay, fifty percent unemployment, as far as anyone could determine, (and, remember, thirty percent population drop) was an emergency. But at what point did it stop becoming an emergency?
Fortunately, they put a sunset date of one year from its signing for it to end but there was a proviso for an automatic renewal with a simple majority. And there was no stated limits. It suspended just about every right a person could have. Notably, habeas corpus and property rights.
Okay, there were "issues." There were a lot of dead people and stuff that was lying around that could be used. Factories that had been owned by families, the local members of which were dead and the distant ones unreachable. Or, hell, the corporation had just shut its doors and was in receivership. Farms that were lying fallow due to the Plague. Fine, whatever. There's a term called "eminent domain" for those. Basically, if there wasn't an immediately recognized heir or owner the government could and should take it over. Then sell it to someone who can run it.
The Emergency Powers Act cut through that. It also meant that there were no legal roadblocks to forced immunization. (Not that the Bitch ever got around to that.) And there were areas where social order had broken down completely. They were supposed to be placed in the category of "let them die" but . . . There's the Bitch deciding what is Right and What Should Be Done. Despite experts who were advising her that SHE HAD CHOSEN for their EXPERTISE.
Bush had been lambasted for his response to Katrina and New Orleans. Incorrectly IMO; the people who really cocked up were the local authorities. Look at Mississippi if you can find the information. There were entire counties that were wiped out. The storm surge that hit the Mississippi coast was higher than the tsunami that had hit Indonesia. There were bodies on top of a Walmart. They just picked up and did what they could. They called for Federal assistance right away, they followed their pre-disaster plans.
But the bottomline was Bush got hammered. And one of the things he got hammered on, justifiably, was his choice of head of FEMA.
I won't get into the hundreds of thousands of words I've read on that particular issue. Bottomline was that Michael Brown was not the guy to lead the agency. For so many different reasons it's scary.
But FEMA's actual response was as near textbook as you could get. Mostly because Brown realized he was totally out of his depth and let his people handle it.
The problem being, nobody really understood disaster response in the media. And they fucking hated Bush. Even Fox didn't really like him.
Look, in a local major disaster like that, FEMA wasn't even supposed to be up and running for seventy-two hours. Three days. That was after they were requested by local authorities.
But on day two, hell with the skies barely clearing, people were asking "Where is FEMA?"
FEMA doesn't actually have all that many full-time employees. Disasters, by their very definition, don't occur all the fucking time. So most of its response specialists are contractors who do other things, or are retired and hang out, waiting for the next response.
They had to be called in. People had to go in and find areas to set up. It takes time.
Even then, they don't do most of the work. They coordinate the work. More contractors, and military, and local government do the actual work. Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Asking "where is FEMA" in a disaster is like asking "Why aren't the managers here?" The managers are important, don't get me wrong. But they don't get the bodies cleared.
So Bush was roundly criticized for responding in damned near textbook manner. Despite Michael Brown.
Warrick, though, knew it was a major political point. So even during her campaign, she found a person that she said was to be her head of FEMA in the event of her inevitable election.
Brody Barnes was a former Army colonel. He'd started as a tanker but then got into specialized areas of what's called "civil affairs," that is dealing with problems of a local populace.
He'd been an unnoticed but major reason that the rebuilding in Iraq, which went way better than the media ever could realize, went as well as it did. His main degree was industrial management so he wasn't an engineer but a guy who understood how to get very disparate parts of a complicated system to start working together.
He retired at twenty years and got a job almost immediately as assistant director of the California Emergency Management Agency. The director was a politically appointed position. A year after Brody joined, the director "voluntarily" resigned and Brody was appointed by the Republican governor. Like similar positions in the federal government, it required the consent of the very liberal California Senate. He passed the vote with acclaim. He was definitely a rising star.
By the time the election of 2016 rolled around he'd dealt with multiple major brushfire outbreaks, three minor earthquakes, mudslide seasons aplenty and one fairly major earthquake. He also looked good on TV. Square-jawed, soft-spoken, dry sense of humor, good soundbites.
He accepted the nod as a potential FEMA head and spoke widely in favor of Warrick. He liked her domestic policies. When asked about her military policies he politely declined to comment. Not his area. Ask someone else.
He was appointed head of FEMA one month after Warrick went into office. He was head of FEMA when the Plague hit.
He was one of the people with testicles trying to get Warrick to stick to some sort of plan. Wasn't happening.
You see, he had been a convenient tool to aid a close election. But he wasn't one of Warrick's inner advisors. Not that Warrick listened to them much. She knew what was Right and so on and so forth.
Warrick had Her Plan. And everybody else was going to follow the Warrick Plan.
The first part of the Warrick Plan was the distribution Plan. Pancake.
The second part of the Warrick Plan had to do with the economy. Okay, Wall Street fucking tanked. It made Black Friday look like a minor blip. The Dow was riding high at nearly 16,000 points before the first word of H5N1. By the time trading was "semipermanently suspended" it was below 5,000.
Well, if corporations couldn't handle a minor matter like a plague that had wiped out their workforce and their customers and their distribution systems and the economic underpinnings that they depended on for sust
enance, they would just be nationalized.
How, exactly, she expected that to help was never quite clear. They were to be nationalized. The Government, in its infinite wisdom, would take over their facilities and get them back in running order.
Banks closed. The one smart thing she did was stop all foreclosures from banks. The stupid thing she did was continue to permit tax seizures. The idea of tax seizures is that the government grabs the goods of a person or company who refuses to pay taxes. Then they sell them.
There were effectively no buyers. Oh, there were some. That money in the stock market had gone somewhere. Mostly it had gone into the first people to bail out. They were sitting on money in various places. Some of it evaporated. When banks closed, if you had more than the federally protected maximum in it, it disappeared. Not exactly but it was tied up in loans that, for the time being, couldn't be recovered and might never be. But the truly rich were covered on many fronts and held onto portions of their assets. And they then used them to buy up properties at firehouse prices. Some of them were in eminent domain because there were no heirs. But the government was seizing a lot of stuff that was because people suddenly found themselves unable to pay taxes on it.
Farms, factories, equipment, there wasn't a huge market but there was a market. The problem being that just as basic necessities, food and clothing, were getting astronomically expensive, things like a dump truck were going for pennies on the dollar.
The next thing she did was declare a fixed price on commodities. Oh. My. God.
Look, in a free market economy stuff sells for what people are willing to pay. If the commodity, pork bellies for example, is in big supply and low demand, it sells for less. If the commodity is in big demand and low supply, it sells for more. Supply and demand.
Go back to the seizures. A loaf of sliced, wrapped, packaged bread in the few remaining open grocery stores, if you could find one, was going for ten dollars. Knew somebody who had paid $500 for a pound of coffee. You could buy an F-350 pickup truck in nearly mint condition for not much more. The supply of useless vehicles was high. The supply of food was low.