The Return of Elliott Eastman (23 page)

Chapter Sixty

The President was seated on a raised dais at the back of the stage. The Vice President was seated beside him. Two enormous American flags were draped to either side of them and carved in marble above their heads were the words; ‘In God We Trust.’

The Sergeant-at-Arms announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

Applause filled the cavernous room as the President stood and approached the rostrum.

“Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I have asked you here this evening for a very specific purpose. I believe very deeply in the legislation that has recently been the subject of so much controversy, not only here, but in the press as well. I believe this legislation has been given very shoddy treatment in the committees of both Houses and was abused to an even greater degree in the committee conferences. I have invited three very distinguished speakers to lend some clarity to the content of this legislation. I hope you will hear them out and reserve judgment until that time. They are General Robert Gates, a decorated war veteran and former Secretary of Defense, Treasury Secretary Anthony Lascala, a Nobel laureate with a Masters Degree in Economics from Notre Dame, and lastly the former Senator from Colorado, war hero and recipient of the Purple Heart, who many of you know as the ‘Master Sergeant’, Elliott Eastman. Please give these men a grand welcome.”

Applause again exploded around the room.

The Sergeant-at-Arms for the Senate, Terrence W. Garner approached the podium and introduced the first speaker; “Ladies and gentlemen, our first speaker, General Robert Gates.”

Former General Gates stepped to the podium. The mass of faces in the main hall and in the galleries up above waited expectantly, cameras flashed by the hundreds, and applause rumbled throughout the building.

“Thank you Mr. President, Vice President and gentlepersons. The President has asked me to join you today. As I drove here I thought about where this great nation is and the course it is taking, the course that will lead to where we will be in the future. The future is defined by the past. I read an article recently about a group of eight or nine Afghan boys who were asked by their parents to go out and collect firewood. There were three brothers and several cousins all between the ages of nine and fourteen. I can imagine the grumbling as the children filed out the door of the hut. Apparently the sticks they were collecting looked vaguely like rifles. One of our gunships opened fire on them and blew them to smithereens. The article showed the weeping parents attempting to clutch to their breasts what remained of them. One was headless. I can only imagine what thoughts must be running through the mother’s head. If only she had asked them ten minutes later to collect firewood, our gunship might have missed them.”

General Gates paused for a moment, took a deep breath and continued.

“It reminded me of a cover of TIME magazine I remember seeing from 1965. I was growing up and quite impressionable at the time and the image stayed with me. The cover of TIME showed a little Vietnamese girl whose clothing had been burned away by napalm. She’s running down the street naked and crying in pain. She’s screaming and running for her life. Running for her life, ladies and gentlemen, running from the great and glorious American Army; America, the author of peace and tranquility and democratic principles around the world.”

“That was sixty years ago. I ask you what is different between those little boys gathering wood last week and this little girl so many years ago. There is no difference; they are dead on the points of American guns. They didn’t know why America was there. They didn’t understand the nebulous reasons we find for war. This is not World War II, where America stepped forward and saved the world from true monsters such as Hitler and Mussolini. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia along with Iraq and Afghanistan don’t have enormous armies, nor navies or air forces. Those little boys had sticks and that little girl, she had nothing, not even the clothes on her back. These countries don’t have missiles which can reach our shores. Let’s be honest with each other. These countries offer nothing in the way of a threat to our country. I ask you, is it not time we think about what we are doing abroad? Communism is dead. There are scattered bands of Taliban and Al-Qaeda in far off places, armed in 19
^th
century fashion and posing little threat to our homeland. We are impoverishing our people and trying to run the affairs of other countries. Do we need all those bases around the world? Do we need to continue fooling ourselves into believing we are the policemen of the world? Do we need to follow down the same old tired path of empire until we are bankrupt and simply can no longer support this ridiculous effort? War is the engine of last resort. Isn’t it time for something new in our approach to the world? Isn’t it time we no longer play the role of bully in the world, shouldering our way into other countries at the behest of our corporate strongmen? Let’s take a moderate path. As you know, I have been to war and I have sat where you sit now. If I felt our great nation was under attack, I would be the first to step forward to defend it.”

Again General Gates paused.

“Ladies and gentlemen, that’s what I am doing right now. I come here to fight for our great nation. The biggest threat to our future is the continuing growth of our vast debt. SB 1190 is a real way to win that war. Cuts in defense spending, especially these useless military bases overseas in Germany, Japan and England, and a reduction in our military footprint around the world is part and parcel of what we need to do to grab the future and mold it into what this country deserves.

“One aircraft carrier battle group and one nuclear sub is more than enough to deal with the miniscule threats we face in the Middle East. So I ask that as you debate this bill, think of that little girl so long ago and those young boys so recently and think about what the future looks like for you and your children if we don’t act, and act sensibly now. Thank you very much.”

The Sergeant-at-Arms introduced the next speaker.

“Please welcome the distinguished Secretary of the Treasury, Anthony Lascala.”

Anthony stood and approached the podium.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I too thank you for your time and thank you for inviting me to speak to this august body on a matter of concern to all of us; the national debt which stands at over 18 trillion dollars. This is an unimaginable and unsustainable number. It is a number that no nation on earth has had to bear. It is a number that threatens our very existence. It is a number that as the interest payments grow will swallow all government revenue. These are facts. This is truth. Each of you can run the numbers yourself, although you will need a very large calculator.”

A ripple of laughter coursed through the room.

“There was a point in time when this number would have left previous generations aghast and asking how on earth we managed to reach this point. We got here the same way we will get out of it; in incremental steps. It is a number that is too high to be paid down in any significant way by raising taxes. The burden is simply too great for our taxpayers to bear. It is too enormous to be done by cuts alone. It will impoverish future generations. At one time I fretted there was simply no way out of this nightmarish situation. I didn’t see one. Great nations have been rent asunder by the very problems we now face. But as with the nature of this historically unsustainable number comes an improbable answer. An answer that is truly American in its breadth, scope and ingenuity. An answer that will restore America not to the same pedestal of great nations that have preceded it, but to a rung above them as is befitting our great American spirit and enterprise.

“The idea of a financial transaction tax has been around for some time. The esteemed economist John Maynard Keynes supported it in 1936 as a way to combat the ill of the Great Depression. It was floated as a bill in 2004, but died in the Senate. If only we had enacted it then, but the numbers have changed dramatically since 2004. By way of example, in 2004 the sum of all positions of Options and Futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange amounted to $53 trillion. By 2008 they had grown to $81 trillion and today they stand at $115 trillion annually. With trading days per year at just over 200, that’s over $750 billion dollars per day. Do you remember the anguish and vitriol accompanying the $780 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program almost a decade ago? The CME moves that much money every day, but that is just a drop in the bucket.

“The Over-the-Counter market which deals with investment banks, hedge funds, and commercial banks and deals in swaps, forward rate agreements, forward contracts, credit derivatives and foreign currency swaps has grown enormously as well. The sum of all trades in 2004 was $220 trillion; in 2009 it was $515 trillion and today stands at $723 trillion. And again, with the number of trading days at just over 200 that’s 4.6 trillion trades a day. The New York stock exchange counts 1.8 million daily transactions while the NASDAQ counts 3.2 billion trades per day, and please remember, there are two sides to every trade. So the flat fee aspect on all trades as structured in SB 1190 will amount to approximately 1.5 trillion to 2.5 trillion dollars each year, and that my friends is a very, very conservative number. We can extinguish our national debt in a matter of 4.5 short years, certainly no more than 6.5 years.”

A hushed intake of breath gushed from the room followed quickly by a complete and utter silence.

Anthony lowered his voice to a more conspiratorial tone and said, “I’m going to speak very candidly now. In my position as Treasury Secretary I see much of what goes on in these industries. In short, it is gambling on an unbelievable scale. These fund managers and their companies pose a far greater systemic risk than Lehman Brothers could have with their wildest trading schemes. And usually these types of risk end badly. There were banking panics in 1819, 1825, and again in 1837 with many bank failures and a five year depression. Again banking panics struck in 1847, 1857, 1866, 1873 with a four year depression, 1884, 1890 and 1893. I don’t want to bore you, but there were banking panics in 1907, and the Great Depression after that and of course the financial meltdown in 2008 that we are still suffering from, but I think you’re starting to get the picture.

“Banks and the entire financial industry, time and again has injured the nation and millions of individuals. I look with great favor upon a small fee on their massive profits to help alleviate our dire debt situation and would argue further that the financial industry needs to be heavily regulated so their bad bets don’t endanger us all.

“In conclusion, and at first blush this may sound a little odd, I would like to acknowledge and thank all those financiers the world over, past and present, who had a hand in creating the behemoth that is our national and world wide financial system. I know they have been vilified over the years for many past indiscretions; however it has grown so huge, especially over the past few years, that it is now suited perfectly to fit our needs. In what amounts to a pin prick of cash each day from this beast, we can face down financial Armageddon with a brand new weapon and, I believe, in a few short years we will have paid down our debts to zero. We will fund Social Security and provide a true golden era for our retirees and relieve future generations of the burden they now face. We will be here to witness the rebirth of a nation. Ladies and Gentlemen, please join together for the sake of your parents’ generation, your generation and that of your children and create a world far better than we could have hoped for by making SB 1190 a reality. Thank you very much.”

A thunderous ovation thanked Treasury Secretary Lascala as he turned from the rostrum.

Elliott felt deeply moved by the speech. He studied the faces of the congress people and those of the audience in the gallery and found he was surprised at what he saw. There was joy in the faces of the members of Congress. Perhaps, he thought, they really are good people. As often happens, people are deeply swayed by those around them. A mob mentality sets in, where what once might have been unthinkable slowly becomes widely accepted. Seventy years ago a vote for a large sum of money to be sent to a major supporter under the guise of some lofty sounding title would have been grounds for an instantaneous ethics committee investigation, but it had slowly become a standard operating procedure called earmarking. Today earmarks were second nature.

‘Perhaps,’ he thought, ‘these congress people, who had busy lives themselves, had been misled by a nefarious few in congress and self serving lobbyists into believing the bill would indeed have an adverse impact on the nation. The truth could be easily twisted. Perhaps the vast majority of congress had not heard much of the debate in committee about the details included in this momentous bill and were simply not aware of the ramifications of SB 1190, but Tony Lascala’s speech had reached them. The idea of such a vast new source of revenue brought joy to their faces. They did indeed love this country and were just now realizing the ugly and brutal cuts on the elderly, the middle class and those most in need were no longer required. Suddenly, there was a bright light showing them the way.’

These thoughts made what Elliott was about to do all the more onerous, but it still needed to be said. Every last one of these congress people had placed earmarks in the bill. It was a task long overdue. Elliott heard his name called and stood up. Once again thunderous applause deafened those in the room.

Elliott approached the podium with a minor degree of difficulty, leaning heavily on his cane. Cameras flashed like a mass of shooting stars, and the complete alphabet soup of news companies with shoulder-held units and some tri-pod mounted units followed his every move.

“Thank you Mr. President, Vice president, Mr. Speaker and Chair, members of Congress and those in the galleries. It is my pleasure to be here today. I have been asked to speak regarding our defense department budget and our state of readiness, but no one can do that better than General Robert Gates has just done, so with your permission I’d like to speak a little bit about our place in history. And, I might add, I hope I don’t put you to sleep.”