San Juan, Puerto Rico

Antonia Novello Memorial is the newest hospital in San Juan, catering mainly to residents of the adjoining Serena Retirement Community. Many of the patients are transplants from the mainland suffering from respiratory disorders. From his adjustable bed, Jonathan Levitt offers his hand and apologizes for our meeting here. The aged former U.S. Secretary of Commerce coughs into his sleeve, waving away his nurse before we begin speaking.

People were shocked when I accepted the nomination. As far as anybody was concerned the war was already lost. The President had just ordered the military to fall back to the I-80 corridor in the Midwest, and everyday there was some new horror story about what the NDF and their militia buddies were doing. Why join an administration that only a quarter of the public still supported when the smart money was to flee to Europe, batten down the hatches and wait for better days. Plenty of our higher net-worth citizens were doing it, including most of my friends on Wall Street.



Cowards… some of us saw this country as more than a place to get rich. I might have been in the private sector when the President called me, but I’d been spent my life in public service ever since I was registering people to vote in 1988. I didn’t want to go to my grave knowing I could have done something to stop these neo-Nazi bastards from taking over the country my grandfather fled to nearly a century ago.

So when the President called me, in spite of our political differences at the time, I said yes.

The capital was in a state of abject panic. The Army was holding the line at the Rappahannock, but you’d think the city was hours from falling the way people acted. I guess I can’t blame them, the place had only just been retaken and everyday there were more refugees coming up the I-95. The President had already declared Martial Law, you couldn’t turn your head without seeing the National Guard, and security around Blair House¹ felt like an occupying army. But we had it easy compared to the rest of the country.

When the military pulled back that Spring, the point was to create defensible Green Zones that we could more easily pacify, consolidate our remaining forces, and then strike out when the enemy’s supplies ran low. Great plan, but that only solved the military’s problem. Tens of millions of refugees were streaming into those Green Zones, putting undo strain on an economy that was in the third year of Great Recession II. Compounding that mess with an internal supply chain crisis. Before the war, the Red States held most of our country’s farmland, our domestic sources of coal, oil and gas, and almost all of our refineries. The Green Zones not only had to struggle to make do without those resources, what we had was being stretched even thinner by the refugees.

There were over 1,400 camps at their peak, holding around 9 million DPs. Most weren’t much bigger than a few dozen tents in a parking lot, or an outgrowth of pre-existing homeless encampments, but every major city had at least one big refugee camp. They filled stadiums, parks, shopping malls, and all of them were not only drains on rapidly dwindling resources, but a public safety time bomb. Every day that went by without relief, those in the camps got hungrier and angrier. Petty theft and vandalism would inevitably rise, and those surrounding the camps in turn grew more resentful of the refugees. One good riot and the war would have another front! So before anything else, our administration had to empty these camps.

The President’s solution was direct. Department of Housing nationalized the financial institutions that actually owned the bulk of the country’s real-estate. All those homes and offices that had been standing vacant since the Crash were designated as emergency housing units by the Housing and Community Security Act, and the new National STAR² program was tasked with getting people into shelter. It was an instant success. Within a matter of weeks the refugee camps had been emptied, and cases of vagrancy actually fell below pre-war levels. That solved the immediate security risk to the Green Zones, but we still had to deal with the resource shortages.

Rationing as policy wasn’t a hard decision. Like I said, most of this country’s fossil fuel sources were based in the Red States, along with most agricultural land. But “doing more with less” isn’t something Americans readily accept. That’s why when we put forward our proposals for wartime rationing, we made sure it was presented as a temporary measure within the President’s broader economic recovery package.

The President ran on some pretty lofty promises to address the pre-war economic crisis. To some, including me, those promises read like a leftist fantasy. Congress had been begging the President to shelve her campaign pledges and focus entirely on the war effort by expanding oil and gas supplies wherever possible. I advised the President to put forward her plan to decarbonize the economy virtually unchanged.

Really? I would think, given your history…

Yeah yeah, during the election I campaigned against it. Called it, “a radical left-wing suicide pact,” anytime they had me on CNBC. But what choice did we have now? Even if we tore down all of ANWR and gave OPEC and the Turks whatever they wanted to give us as much oil and gas as we could get, we simply didn’t have the refining capacity to turn petroleum and natural gas into enough gasoline and jet fuel to run the war effort. The only hope for victory required a combination of strict rationing and a massive investment in renewable energy infrastructure, one unmatched in our country’s history.

Were the challenges getting Congressional support?

Not as many as you’d think. I complain a lot about some of the more feckless wimps in the government, the ones that were still trying to broker peace with the same people trying to kill them, but the truth is that the party was largely behind us. The President was a progressive, and the CPC³ firmly controlled the House caucus. The people still on the fence weren’t gonna say no to trillions of dollars in pork money, and there weren’t enough loyalist Republicans, sorry, National Union Party members, to mount a serious opposition. The Senate was a little more trouble. Since Senators serve for six year terms, and only a third of the chamber stands for re-election every two years, it was still controlled by the old guard.

[He smiles.]

But those were my people. Before the election, I was one of the biggest fundraisers in the party. Plenty of those schnooks owed me their careers, and those that didn’t would still take a meeting. I couldn’t threaten them like I could before the war, like everybody my personal wealth had been whittled to the bone, but I’d collected my share of IOUs… and let’s be honest, my status as an unapologetic capitalist didn’t hurt the sales pitch. “Only Nixon could go to China.”

But most of the Democrats were evacuated during the Second Capitol Riot. Was horse trading like that really necessary?

[He shrugs.]

It’s Washington.

Anyway, after a little wheeling and dealing, we got the holdouts in the Senate on board. In our first 100 days, Congress passed a dozen bills for wartime energy security. These funded new renewable energy projects, battery plants and transmission lines, and an overall modernization of the grid. Ironically, we also had to get rid of a lot of environmental protections designed to limit new energy projects so we could start building immediately. This was not to say that we just ignored the immediate energy shortage. With Congress’s blessing, the administration nationalized the oil and gas industry and overrode most of the pre-war bans on drilling to expand the domestic supply.

But you still imposed rationing.

Easily our most controversial policy. Before the war, the United States burned more oil, gas, and coal than any other nation on Earth. Three-quarters of that was on transportation and industry. Even with the reactivated drilling programs, environmental regs stripped to the bone, and everything we did to pull in foreign oil sources, we still had to ask Americans to give up what many saw as a fundamental aspect of American life: their cars.

Now, it wasn’t as if we took every private vehicle off the road. Remember before we even took office, the rebs were taking control of oil and gas pipelines to try and cripple the Blue States. By the time of my confirmation hearing, gas prices were as high as $19 a gallon in California. So, auto traffic had already fallen by 80% in the Green Zones, and commercial air travel was all but extinct. Ironically, rationing mostly took electric cars off the road, since most EVs relied on electricity generated from hydrocarbon plants at the time. Trucks were practically the only vehicles on the highways of the Green Zones in those early days, and we actually ended up subsidizing fuel costs for bus and rideshare services just to keep the workforce moving.

What about food?

[He shudders.]

Nothing is more terrifying than food shortages. You remember what it was like in those early days. Grocery stores and big-box chains mobbed by people, all fighting to hoard whatever they could. Shootings at retail locations got so bad that the Governor of New York seriously considered releasing the members of the NYPD that had turned traitor just to help the National Guard and the loyalist cops.

Our administration had to act swiftly, and decisively. We instituted a federalized food rationing system, initially under FEMA, to distribute basic essentials directly to people’s homes from centralized warehouses. All trucking and rail transport was nationalized, and a Federal food delivery service was established out of the rideshare programs state and local governments had already created.

All of that bought us time. I remember the Agriculture Secretary once told me, “Thank god for the 20th Amendment.”

[He chuckles, and falls into another coughing fit. He waves away his nurse.]

If we’d been sworn in in March instead of January, I don’t know if we could have pulled off the next phase of the rationing program before planting season began. The Green Zones held only 15% of the country’s farmland and most of that was dedicated to growing water-intensive cash crops in otherwise drought prone states. With most of the country’s basic calories in the Red States, these cash crops had to go. By Federal mandate, orchards and wineries would be torn down to make way for wheat, soy, and potatoes.

Next, we came for the ranches. The production of meat was a luxury that the Green Zones’ limited farmland simply couldn’t support. Did you know that it takes 4.5 acres of land for every cow? You can grow nearly 10 tonnes of wheat in the same space to make a quarter tonne of beef. The Agriculture Secretary ordered the seizure and slaughter of almost every beeve in the Green Zones, along with most pork and poultry. We didn’t let it go to waste, mind you, almost all of it would be canned or frozen and stored in those same warehouses I mentioned earlier. People would eventually hate us for it, but in that first year we had more meat than demand. It seemed to help make up for us taking away people’s avocados and pistachios.

The one upshot to our situation was that there weren’t enough farmers in our territory to mount a serious opposition. By the time the first planting season had ended, California’s Central Valley looked like pre-war Kansas. When the first crop reports came in April, we all breathed a sigh of relief. At the very least, our people wouldn’t starve or freeze.

Rationing took care of our survival economy, but shifting into full blown war-production was a whole other challenge. Our country, our world, had existed for the better part of a century on the backs of highly interdependent global supply chains. They’d taken some big hits before the war, but now they were broken. This required a program of industrial redevelopment unseen since the darkest days of the Second World War.

The first piece of that effort was recycling. While this was nothing new, the scale of our wartime program was unheard of. Pre-war America, and the Blue States in particular, had more material goods than virtually any society on Earth. Mountains of cars, planes, lawnmowers, home appliances, electronics, and clothes just in the junkyards equaled everything the Red States had. Add what we could get from private hands, either by eminent domaine, the Defense Production Act, or the “Cash for Clunkers” program, and we had a stockpile of industrial and military components nobody could hope to match.

In my department, we had to stand up an entire industry overnight to collect, inventory, disassemble, store, and ship parts to factories across the Green Zones. That more than tripled Commerce’s full time staff, and that’s before you factor in all the independent contractors, body shops, scrapyards, and of course the plants actually using the recycled materials. The amount of steel, aluminum, copper, chromium, magnesium and advanced alloys harvested from the scrap yards and bone yards just from the West Coast was so great that it overwhelmed the smelting capacity of the planet, especially given the state of things in China. Once the metal and plastic of America’s cars and planes were harvested and broken down, they went right back into making bullets, bombs, drones, guidance and fire control systems, along with civilian streetcars and high speed rail components.

It wasn’t without its challenges though. Sure, you had people stubbornly clinging to hot rods they couldn’t actually drive anymore, and I’m not gonna pretend the military was a pleasure to deal with when we came for some of their toys. But by far, the biggest source of opposition our administration faced in those days was from homeowners.

Homeowners?

The biggest challenge to building a wartime supply chain in this particular war was that people simply didn’t live close to where they worked. American car culture was very much a product of a society that placed a high premium own individual homeownership. Before the war, the United States had 85 million single-family homes, with one of the lowest average number of occupants per home, all spread out in countless miles of suburbs, with commercial and especially industrial zones far removed from residential zones. We anticipated this. The VP brought it up during the first meeting on fuel rationing. So, to make sure our wartime industries kept running, we needed to rapidly rezone and redevelop suburbia. This was the Community Redevelopment Act, the de facto successor to the HCSA.

The minute it was proposed, the HOAs, realtors, private and corporate landlords, and more private citizens than you can imagine flooded DC with petitions to strike it down. In early spring, with the war raging and the Green Zones barely holding it together, half a million of these people marched on DC. There was a real fear from the leadership on the Hill that they might actually storm the Capitol if the bill passed. For weeks my phone was blowing up with messages from my guys in the Senate, begging me to get the President to back down.

Did you consider it?

Consider it? This was the most radical version of her campaign platform I spent the election railing against. When she actually won the nomination, I rallied most of the people now threatening to pillory me to try and stop her at the convention.

[He laughs and falls into a long coughing fit. Before I can ask if he’d like to stop for the day, he raises his hand.]

I’m fine, I’m fine.

[He takes a deep, raspy breath.]

It was never gonna work. The party wasn’t without backroom deals, but they couldn’t overturn an election. I did it mostly as a favor to my friends, and I was pretty sure my political career would be over no matter what happened.

I made my money in the late 90s investing in developing economies, mostly in mainland China, and Pakistan. When she called me, she said, “Jonathan, the country needs someone who understood resource scarcity, and I need someone who knows how to build a new economy in a hostile climate.” I couldn’t believe it. And, given the situation we found ourselves in, I figured that our differences could be put aside for the sake of national survival. But the CRA, that nearly tore everything apart.

I met with her the night after it cleared the House. The Majority Leader was fending off a push from the New Dems and the NUP to try and reinstate the filibuster for this one bill. I told her, “Madam President, we can’t do this. We have to find another way.”

The President was looking out at the protestors and soldiers at the gates of Blair House. I don’t doubt that she appreciated the risk. She’d lived through two riots when she was a member of Congress after all.

She said to me, “Jonathan, this is the only way. We can’t fight a war at home with what we still have used this inefficiently. If we do, we’ll be retaking the Great Plains sometime in the 2060s.”

I couldn’t really argue with her logic. And after the CRA had passed, and no riots came of it, I knew she’d judged the political situation correctly. Nobody in Blue State Burbland was gonna take up arms against the Federal Government. These people had coasted through life, they weren’t about to expend effort, much less risk life and limb. They just camped out on the Mall, gradually returning home until all that was left were a handful of cranks.

Single-use zoning was all but federally prohibited by the CRA, and it pumped trillions of dollars into redeveloping the properties the government had seized to deal with the refugee crisis. I worked directly with the Defense Department and Manufacturers to build new microfactories at the heart of these spaces. The communities themselves were built along a “15 Minute Model,” in that it only took 15 minutes by feet, E-bike, or mass transit to get to wherever you needed to go. All told, around a dozen CRA “15-Minute Cities” were built in that first year, and filled to capacity almost immediately with around 1 million residents.

Why was the opposition so intense if the CRA redeveloped so few sites?

In that first year. The program had the long term goal of redeveloping a majority of the country along the 15-minute model. And there were other controversies. For example, construction of the sites was quite fuel intensive; we had to give builders additional rations of fuel to get these first projects online, in some cases using more fuel than local military installations. But the simple fact is people didn’t want to see the life they’d known come to an end. Even if most private homes remained in private hands, or were simply unimpacted by the initial rebuild effort, a lot of people saw this as a more real threat to their way of life than the war.

The two-story in suburbia was the most universal image of the American Dream. And while most people didn’t really see where the CRA would lead us, those that did thought it would be the end of the only America they ever knew. I suppose that was my initial hesitation as well.

The President wanted to remake America. That’s what she ran on, and for many of the rebs it’s what made her such a threat. I’m not suggesting that they were the same as loyalists scared to see a mixed-use apartment built next to their McMansions. It was just in that moment, it became very clear what I was actually fighting for.

I’d spent my life trying to advance one version of America, working with many of the same people who were now dedicated to destroying us. To survive, I had to help ensure the death of the America I always known so that a new one could be born.

¹ The official presidential guest house, and wartime executive residence.

² Support Team Assisted Response - largely unarmed emergency respondents and social workers.

³ Congressional Progressive Caucus.