Let Them Eat Tea

by Coleman Maskell

Chapter 17 - Politics as Usual

  "Child labor sounds bad," Nick allows, picking up the purring cat that had been rubbing itself against his leg. It curls up on his lap and he strokes it gently. It's big and white and fluffy, with fur as soft as mink. "But a child's right to work, that's another matter entirely," he spins it. "Teaches them values. Work ethic. Self-reliance." The cat purrs.

  "Butch and Bobby do farm chores, right, Eugene?" he asks his cousin. A group is convened for political discussions at Nick's cousin's farmhouse near the little town of Wright's Corner. They're discussing planks for the platform. Nick's cousin Eugene nods.

  "So there you go," Nick continues. "We're going to afford city kids the same rights as farm kids already have naturally."

  "Tell you what," Shep adds. "If those little inner city hoodlums would spend more time working they'd have less time to make trouble."

  "Drug dealing is work. Thieving is work of a sort," Charlie interjects. "It all takes planning and effort. The new laws would steer them into more socially productive work, that's all. They're already working. Just working at the wrong things."

  "It would help us compete with China and South America, I'll tell you that," Sheppard offers. "Kids work a lot cheaper than adults. And they sure don't try to start unions."

  Several men chuckle.

  "An American kid is born with the same right to work as a kid in China? That's our angle? I don't know," a lady from Minneapolis says.

  "You listen to me," President Sheppard turns on the dissenter, stiffening and straightening as he leans forward in the oversize armchair, an intense expression on his rugged face. "Those Chinese are eating us alive. They've got factories the size of small cities. Factories with a quarter of a million workers, and half of those are children. Half of them! Children who work for next to nothing and don't complain."

  "Places like Wolf Com," a quiet voice nearby volunteers.

  Sheppard seizes the suggestion. "Wolf Communications. That's right. Wolfcom," he continues. "They got that big old place in what's it called, Long Who? Over two HUNDRED thousand workers. That's the entire population of Fort Wayne, right there."

  "Size of Des Moines," a representative from Iowa murmurs, raising his hand briefly as if casting a vote.

  "Boise," an Idaho congressman adds, raising his hand for a second as well, as if someone had called for a show of hands.

  Murmured city names bounce around the room, like a sound making its way across surround sound speakers. Orlando, Scottsdale, Norfolk, Madison, Sioux Falls are named. Baton Rouge. Kansas City and Topeka. Spokane.

  "Some say it's bigger," the Senator from Michigan eggs them on enthusiastically. "FOUR hundred thousand. Size of Cleveland."

  "Tulsa," someone from Oklahoma volunteers.

  "Miami," an elderly congresswoman from Florida adds. "That's the population of Miami."

  The same man who had named Kansas City now names Wichita. Omaha, Honolulu, and Minneapolis follow from different voices spread out around the room. New Orleans is mentioned.

  "One factory in China is that big. One," the man from Michigan says, shaking his head, eyes on the crowd.

  Sheppard waits for the murmurs to die down before continuing. He's on a roll, on a sea of approval.

  "Place is built like a prison, too," Sheppard goes on. "Tell you what it is, it's like an entire town wholly owned by Wolf Com, including every man, woman, and child in it. You think Wolf Com has union problems? It wouldn't even cross a kid's mind to start a union! Those kids work 12 hours a day, I'll tell you what. America can't compete with places like that with these unions on our back. Occupational safety? Never heard of it in China. Those places are built like prison cities, pure and simple. And the kids are happy to have the jobs. A lot of ours would be too. Wages would plummet, and the unions would fall apart. There's always a fresh supply of kids to serve as strike breakers."

  "Can't put anything like that into the campaign ads, of course," Nick moderates, and several men nod.

  "No, it has to be about values and self-reliance," Sheppard agrees, cooling down. "Wish I could have gotten this stuff into my campaign back eight years ago. Public wasn't ready for it then. I think they are now. After a guy has been out of work for a long time, if his kid gets offered a job, he might be inclined to let the kid take it."

  Nick agrees. "Teach our children the value of work," he suggests. "Or maybe this: Allow our children the freedom to work on an equal footing with all Americans. Don't treat our kids as second class citizens. Call it Youth Rights."

  "How do we answer people who say kids should be in school?" someone asks.

  "They aren't exactly learning much in a lot of those schools," Sheppard responds. "Heck, half of them are dropouts."

  "Education starts with learning the value of self reliance," Nick suggests. "Like that kitten over there," he laughs, pointing to a tiny fluffy white fur ball that has managed to climb halfway up a curtain and leap to a table, where he's started to nibble on some pate canapés.

  Former dissenters shrug. No further arguments are presented against the idea, and extending Right to Work to cover children makes it in as a campaign platform item: Youth Rights.

  "We can promote on the job training programs to teach reading and writing," Charlie throws in another idea.

  "Yeah, that might work," Nick agrees. "What do we discuss next? Medicare?"

  "I think we might be ready to tackle Medicare now," Marie speaks up. "It's really the last of the public medical programs left. We have to get rid of it. One idea is we could gradually raise the eligibility age."

  "Or extend Medicare," Charlie suggests. "Add veterinary care for the old people's cats."

  The suggestion is so off the wall that half the people present laugh.

  "Think about it. Having a pet lowers the blood pressure. The purring sound of a cat has a therapeutic effect. It's holistic medicine of a sort. Then we promote pet ownership as a substitute for expensive medical procedures."

  "Promoting cat ownership is good," Nick allows, stroking the cat sprawled across his lap, "but I don't think we can tie it in with Medicare."

  "How about instead of raising the eligibility age, we introduce a cutoff point? A right to die after, say, fourscore years and ten," Marie suggests.

  "We could do both, limit it at both ends," Nick admits, "but you know, I'd rather see expensive procedures excluded. No transplants, no dialysis. Or put in a high co-pay for procedures, so most people won't be able to afford any of it."

  "Put cats in hospitals," Charlie brainstorms. "We could have a program to put a cat mascot into every hospital. Remember that case where a rat in a hospital in India chewed off an old guy's part and he died? Horrible case. Guard against that sort of thing happening here by putting cats into hospitals. They'd be like security guards against rats, and the purring would have a therapeutic effect that would shorten recovery times. Remember we save a bundle every time we reduce the hospital recovery stay."

  "I like it," Nick says, nodding. "Put cats in the hospices and managed care facilities, and those halfway house places (what do they call those?), where they put the patients to recover for a few weeks after they leave the hospital."

  "Yeah, that's good," Marie agrees. "I don't know about the hospitals really, but those other places, that's good. That would work."

  "How do we spin it?" Nick throws out a question. "Natural healing?"

  No one present offers an alternative.

  Sheppard nods. Others either nod or shrug.

  The idea of putting cats into managed care facilities makes it into the platform as the Natural Healing plank.

  "What else do we want to do on Medicare, seriously?" Nick redirects the discussion. "Age limits? Procedure limits?"

  "We can do all of them," Marie says. "Or lifetime limits, like we have for welfare and unemployment insurance. We already have no more than two years on general welfare
in a lifetime, and no more than a year at once on unemployment insurance. How about we add, no more than twenty years on Medicare? That would encourage people to sign up later, without actually raising the eligibility age. So we wouldn't have to answer eligibility age attacks."

  "That's a good idea, Marie," Charlie congratulates her on her original thinking.

  "Coming from a genius like you, that's a good compliment," she answers him, sincerely flattered by his acknowledgement.

  "It's really good thinking, Marie. You've come up with a great idea. Lifetime limits. And besides limiting the number of years of eligibility, we could have lifetime spending caps," he suggests, building on her concept.

  "So, freedom to decide for yourself?" Nick plays at spinning it for a general audience. "Who decides when you're too old to work? Who tells you that you're so old you need Medicare? Some government bureaucrat? Or do you want to decide for yourself? Take control of your life like you always have. Don't let some kids in Washington tell you you're old. You tell them. You decide when you're ready."

  More nods than shrugs greet the phrasing.

  "And you decide how to spend your health care dollars," Nick continues. "Don't want some expensive procedure you probably don't need? Now you can say no.

  Don't see why you should stay in hospital for a week after your operation, doing namby pamby physical therapy? Neither do we. Maybe you don't think you need an annual physical? It's your call. Your body -- your call. You've been paying your hard-earned money into government Medicare insurance for a lot of years. Don't you think you should decide how, and when, to spend it? We agree with you. Vote for your right to decide for yourself."

  "I like it," Sheppard agrees. "I think we can sell it."

  "It's sort of an Elderly right to work, when you think about it," Nick points out. "So it fits in well. No matter what your age, if you're an American citizen, you have a right to work without government interference. Start as young as you want, work as long as you want. Self-reliance shouldn't have term limits."

  Sheppard laughs.

  Almost everyone nods. The Right to Decide makes it in.

  "So we've got Youth Rights, the Right to Decide, and Natural Healing," Nick sums up the position so far. "Besides the basic Right to Work, Amendment 37. That's our basic domestic policy so far. Do we want to do anything to increase the privatization of police and fire departments, or let that go for now? What about foreign policy? Do we want to do anything about foreign wars? We could take another look at privatizing the armed services."

  "I don't know," Shep says, shaking his head. "That Agua Negra thing got a lot of bad press a few years back. And there's been a lot said about the big profits and low risk for our friends at big H. I don't know if we can sell privatization right now. It's spreading our resources a bit thin to bother with it. Unless Hal is offering you some pretty big campaign contributions, I wouldn't risk it."

  Nick nods and moves on. "Privatized prisons are doing pretty well. Here's an idea I've been playing with. Convicts as soldiers."

  "How about bringing back debtor's prisons?" Marie suggests. "Get rid of the bankruptcy laws, get rid of all the bank and credit card fee restrictions and interest limits. A lot of people get over their heads in debt. We sentence them to debtor's prison, but we offer to let them work off the debts with military service."

  "Debtor's army? I don't know. Bring back the drug laws and get us a crack head army, if you ask me . . . " someone suggests.

  "Here's an idea," the senator from Michigan chimes in laconically. "We can just rebrand crack as a medication for battle fatigue and dispense it to soldiers for free. Sort of an employment benefit. That'd get enlistments up."

  And so the discussion continues far into the night.