Full Black (11 page)

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R
alston wanted to know all about the plot Salomon thought he had uncovered to collapse the United States. “Give me the details on Project Green Ramp.”

“To understand it,” said the producer, “you have to grasp its underlying principle. It actually boils down to a simple question. If we were in a house and I thought it was burning, but you didn’t, would it be okay for me to lie or even use force, to get you out of the house?”

“Hell no.”

“Why not?”

“What if you’re wrong?”

Salomon smiled. “Bingo.”

“What do you mean, bingo?”

“Individualism in America is hard-wired into our DNA. We want to make our own decisions, even if it means making mistakes. We don’t want other people telling us what to do.

“There’s a group of people, though, who believe that you and I are too stupid to make our own decisions and that they should do it for us. Despite America being the greatest force for good in the history of the world, they see it as greedy and evil. They’ve been tearing it apart bit by bit for decades and have become desperate to finish the job. They believe they can and should use any means necessary to get across the goal line, no matter what the cost.”

“The ends justify the means,” said Ralston.

“Exactly,” Salomon replied.

“And getting across the goal line means collapsing the United States?”

“According to James Standing, the United States is the only remaining obstacle to a just and stable world.”

Ralston shook his head. “That’s beyond insane.”

“So is sending a Russian wet work team to kill three filmmakers. Standing is a full-on sociopath. Nothing about him makes sense. Despite being born and raised Jewish, he’s a rabid anti-Semite. Despite being a billionaire many times over, he’s a vehement anticapitalist. Despite having benefitted greatly from everything America has done to empower the individual, he is a vocal proponent of social engineering and the redistribution of wealth.

“One of the best descriptions of him I ever heard was that he was a malignant, messianic narcissist who, left unchecked, would bring about horrors beyond those performed by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot.”

“So who’s keeping a check on him?” asked Ralston.

“Nobody.”

“Come on.”

Salomon held his right hand up and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it can buy almost anything else. Even an entire political system.”

Ralston looked at him. “Now who’s insane?”

“I heard a comedian make a pretty good point recently. He said that all members of Congress should be required to wear NASCAR uniforms. You know, the kind with the patches? That way we’d know who was sponsoring each of them. I think he was kidding and we’d never be able to get them to do it, but it’s a great idea and would wake people up in this country instantly.”

“And Standing would be seen as the root of all evil? That’s hard to believe.”

“He has a very clear vision as to what he wants to have happen to America. Along with a handful of leaders of other key foundations, he developed a very simple plan to bring it about.

“He started by using his wealth to co-opt anyone who could have any impact on popular culture or public opinion. Newspapers, actors, journalists, publishers, politicians, business people, unions—you name it. The idea was to be able to control the media, as well as any other voices Americans trusted.

“They knew they needed to change the way Americans saw themselves. It’s ideological subversion, plain and simple. To get it to take hold, though, they needed to begin planting this new way of thinking in the most fertile minds they could get a hold of.”

“Which means kids,” said Ralston.

“Precisely,” Salomon replied. “That’s why Standing and the foundations aligned with him have been such heavy contributors to educational endowments. It’s the golden rule. He who controls the gold controls the rules, or in this case, the curricula.

“But it wasn’t enough to simply plant this new ideology. For it to blossom, it had to grow without being challenged. Hence the disappearance of civics classes and the portrayal of American history through the lens of imperialism and aggression. Instead of social studies, children were taught studies in social justice with America repeatedly shown as the bad guy.”

“How long has this been going on?” Ralston broke in.

“Decades,” replied Salomon. “The students subjected to Standing’s propaganda are now adults. They’re everywhere you look—business, the media, government, even teaching successive generations of kids in our schools.”

“Couldn’t they be deprogrammed?” asked Ralston. “I’m sure it’d be a monumental task, but—”

The movie producer shook his head. “They’re completely immune to anything that deviates from their ideological perception of reality and what they have been taught is the ‘real’ truth. The lens they look through life at has forever been altered. It’s both terrifying and brilliant in its totality.”

Ralston nodded. It was terrifying.

“On top of indoctrinating kids,” said Salomon, “Standing wanted to get as many people dependent upon the government as possible. Government handouts, even for corporations, are like heroin. Most people, once they’re hooked, remain hooked and don’t even realize it. They rationalize that they’re entitled to the handouts.

“And the politicians are just as addicted, except they’re addicted to power, and to increase their power, they need to keep doling out more and more handouts. It doesn’t matter if we can’t afford the handouts. They’ll keep borrowing and printing money, running the country deeper into debt in order to keep the heroin flowing. It’s a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle.

“In fact, one of the most apropos political observations I have ever read is that a democracy can exist only until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From the moment that realization takes hold, history shows that the majority of the people will always vote for the candidate promising the most goodies from the public treasury.

“History also shows us that once a democracy goes down this road, things never end well. Each and every single time, the democracy collapses. It always happens. It collapses over loose fiscal policy, and democracy is always followed by dictatorship. And guess what the dictator promises?”

“Utopia?” Ralston replied.

Salomon shook his head. “No. When democracy collapses, fear, violence, and uncertainty fill the void. In essence, it’s chaos, and that’s what the dictator preys upon. The people are so terrified that they will agree to trade anything, even the most precious possession they have—their liberty—in exchange for a return to order. But when order is restored, freedom is never seen by those citizens again.”

“So that’s Standing’s goal,” said Ralston. “But how does he intend to get there? How the hell could he force America to collapse?”

“That’s the tricky part,” Salomon replied. “Historically, when democracies have collapsed it’s because they were already unstable to begin with, like us. Then, some sort of crisis, or a group of crises come together in such a way that they push the democracy over the brink. They can come in any form. Often, it’s some sort of black swan event.”

“Like the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan,” stated Ralston.

“That’s a perfect example. The 9/11 attacks were another. Basically, a black swan is something that no one would have ever expected to materialize, which ends up causing massive unforeseen consequences, and after the fact is rationalized as something everyone should have seen coming.”

“So Green Ramp is about choreographing a black swan event?”

“That’s what we think,” Salomon replied.

Ralston shook his head. “Standing manipulates America right up onto the ledge and then shoves. He ought to be tried for treason.”

“Now you know why I wanted to make this film. He needs to be exposed.”

“What he needs is to be swinging from the end of a rope. That’s the price you pay for treason.”

“Not anymore,” Salomon said. “Not in today’s America. We don’t try people for treason, much less put them to death for it. It’s looked upon as an archaic reaction to what should be handled, if at all, as a criminal matter. If we began hanging traitors, we’d lose a good many of our politicians, business and union leaders, even teachers.”

Considering some of the crimes that had been committed in the past twenty years in America, Ralston didn’t exactly think that would be a bad thing. “Do you have any idea what kind of black swan event they were looking at creating?”

“Unfortunately, no. It’s not the kind of thing they put on their website. And it might not be just one black swan, it could be a whole wedge of them.”

“But it’ll probably have something to do with the economy, right? Some sort of new financial crisis?”

The film producer shrugged. “Considering his expertise, that makes sense, but there are other possibilities. He’s stirred revolutions in other countries by creating crises of confidence in government. He’ll rig an election and then leak that the election was rigged. But even that might be too pedestrian when it comes to what he has planned for the United States. With his money and demented worldview, anything is possible.

“Remember, no matter what, James Standing feels that the ends justify the means.”

“Do you have any idea exactly what his ends are? What is it he has in mind? Some sort of global governance?” asked Ralston.

“Standing is a globalist, all right,” replied Salomon. “And he definitely believes he can help usher in some sort of utopia, but there’s one final step that would have to be undertaken, and that’s the most frightening thing of all about him.”

“What is it?”

“Remember what I said about him being worse than Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot if left unchecked?”

Ralston nodded.

“We found an interview he gave on the sidelines of the economic forum in Davos, Switzerland. It was some small European paper and maybe he didn’t think it would get any pickup, but he allowed his proverbial mask to slip. In the twentieth century, he said, the world saw the loss of about 225 million people due to war, genocide, and disaster. According to him, the only way mankind can survive the twenty-first century is if the world population is cut by at least five billion. And that will only happen if every industrialized nation is forced into collapse, starting with the United States.”

CHAPTER 16

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J
ulia Winston crossed her legs in just such a way that James Standing couldn’t help but wonder if she was doing it purposely for him. It wouldn’t have been the first time a female reporter had done that. It didn’t make any difference that he was old enough to be her grandfather. Henry Kissinger had been wrong. Power wasn’t the ultimate aphrodisiac, money and power were and Standing had more than most could even imagine.

Winston was wearing an A-line skirt, the kind that clung tightly to her upper thighs and showed off her tiny waist. She wore an inexpensive yet chic collared shirt, probably from Brooks Brothers or, God forbid, Banana Republic. Her jewelry consisted of what appeared to be a small pair of diamond stud earrings, but that might have been fake. The only place she seemed to have spent any real money was on her shoes.

Smart girl, thought Standing. While most men wouldn’t have made it past her tits, any of the women in the field she was competing with would have checked out her shoes. The difference between bitch and classy bitch with women always came down to the shoes.

Standing did in fact judge women on their looks and how they dressed, but the make-or-break for him was in the brains department. He didn’t have time for unintelligent people. He was too busy and life was too short. Though New York City was filled with gorgeous women, there were few who could keep up with him intellectually. After his penis, there was no greater erogenous zone than his brain. If a woman couldn’t stimulate both, he wasn’t interested.

The attractive Financial Times journalist sitting across from him, though, seemed more than capable of doing both, so he decided to take the provocative way in which she had crossed her legs as just that.

“Let’s talk currencies,” Winston said as she chewed the top of her pencil and flipped through the pages of the steno pad balanced expertly atop her stockinged knee.

They were seated on low-slung couches in the plush sitting area of his office in Midtown Manhattan. Floor-to-ceiling windows offered a dramatic view of the Empire State Building, and the sheets of polished marble that covered the floors, as well as the walls, gave one the feeling that they had stepped inside some sort of modern Pantheon. It was an aura of grandeur, and it had been created entirely on purpose.

Standing studied the woman. Who used pencils anymore? he wondered. He liked it. It was a nice touch that made her stand out, made her different. He liked different.

He also liked how she chewed on the eraser. He was beginning to wonder more and more if she was entertaining the thought of going to bed with him.